(Photo: GEI flyer)
Reverend Marissa Farrow preached a sermon at “Holy Women In Red,” an event hosted by legendary singer and First Lady Karen Clark Sheard of the Greater Emmanuel Institutional. The sermon, “The Grace To Stay On My Feet,” reminded women that the Lord has given them everything they need to keep standing.
Coming from the book of Habakkuk, Farrow noted how the prophet was seeking God for deliverance to a problem he was experiencing. In Habakkuk 1:2, the writer asked God, “How long, Lord, must I call for help, but you do not listen? Or cry out to you, ‘Violence!’ but you do not save?”
Farrow used this text to suggest that when we experience challenges in life, the frustration of our problems sometimes makes us forget about the goodness of God.
“It is far easier to see how things are or were than to rejoice in the fact that you’re alive today and in your right frame of mind regardless of how depleted you may be because God has been good to you.”
Many believers have been taught never to question God’s will, but Farrow suggests otherwise. “It is possible to ask Him a question, without questioning His character,” said Farrow. We are humans who often look for answers.
The gifted orator also highlighted how our situations make us exalt our problems more than we do God.
“In the midst of heaviness, we as believers tend to magnify the burden of our problem over the sanctity in our survival,” she stated. “[We have to] learn how to stand when things get difficult; and being a Christian means that we must embrace who God is even when we don’t like what God does because at the end of the day He’s still God.”
Farrow noticed that Habakkuk went from complaining to God, to rejoicing in God. She again quoted the eponymous book to trace this shift from complaining to rejoicing
“Though the fig tree does not bud and there are no grapes on the vines, though the olive crop fails and the fields produce no food, though there are no sheep in the pen and no cattle in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord, I will be joyful in God my Savior. The Sovereign Lord is my strength; he makes my feet like the feet of a deer, he enables me to tread on the heights,” reads Habakkuk 3:17-19.
God did not change Habakkuk’s problem, but God changed Habakkuk’s perspective about his problem. Similar to Habakkuk, Farrow suggests that God gives His people the grace to handle their situations.
The Lord gave Habakkuk, and us, the grace to rejoice and pray when life becomes difficult.
“Power is found in me being able to access Heaven in my prayer room; it is still prayer that creates my fortitude to stick with God.”
