The Righteous Right Hand : Paul Choi
Isaiah 41:10 (ESV)
10 fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.
I used to be able to make grand promises in faith to God.
In summary, these prayers sounded similar to the following:
“God, I thank you for an amazing reminder of your Word this Sunday. Lord, I feel so on fire for you right now… so much that this week I promise to keep all of your commandments. Not even the devil can bring me down.”
But bring me down the devil did.
Despite the genuine zeal and heart of love behind this poor soul, this statement set up an expectation - not on God, but on my performance. Subconsciously, I was trying to earn His love for me by showing Him I had what it took to obey. I wanted to prove it to God but more importantly to myself, that my faith was strong and genuine and thus, worthy of His love. Unsurprisingly, I failed shortly after these bold proclamations… many times. Defeat after defeat, this made me doubt my love for God and His love for me. With each failure heavier than the last, and each doubt greater than the latter, the lies of the enemy became progressively louder.
“How could such a holy God love someone like you who can’t keep such simple promises? Do you really love God? Is it possible that such a God would love someone like you?”
I wish I could say I was successfully able to fend off these obvious lies, but in the reality of these moments, I deeply trusted the artificial feelings of mine and a dark cloud of worthlessness formed above as droplets of shame rained down on me. Although I knew from the start that this gospel was good, it now was too good to be true. It was ironic how an honest act of faith would end up cannibalizing itself - why? Because I was basing it on the wrong thing. It became about me and my works instead of Him and His finished work on the cross.
Walking through this valley, when I cried out in repentance through the song “Heart of Worship,” the lyric “it’s all about You” struck a heartstring and I was both lifted up out of the burden of my performance and placed on eagle’s wings where the Spirit was. Once again, I was standing right next to His Righteous Right Hand.
Then He reminded me.
He is steadfast when my emotions are volatile and my flesh is weak. He said I will strengthen you.
He is loving beyond what I could do or what I could not do. He said I will help you.
He is almighty, enough to take my failure and turn it into something good. He showed me humility in that I cannot earn His love. Not even the smallest fraction of it.
He said to me: “I will uphold you with My Righteous Right Hand.”
When I removed “me” from the equation and replaced it with Him, it opened the locked door to the cage of my own doing. Refocusing my lens into making it about Him and loving who He is, only then was I able to envision what following Jesus was supposed to look like. It says in Psalms 73:26 “My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.” As His word correctly predicted: I failed, but there is hope. The correct way is to rely solely and utterly on His strength.
C.S. Lewis states in his book Screwtape Letters, that the enemy views a certain type of reliance on Jesus as dangerous. I put my name in the text below for a clearer picture.
“The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient (Paul Choi) is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of ‘grace’ for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly temptation! This is very bad.”
Now I ask for my daily bread - for God to uphold me with His Righteous Right Hand for just this day, for just this hour, and for just this minute. For now, I know and will be reminded every day - that I have no strength of my own that would suffice for the daily trial.
The One who is seated at the right hand of God the Father almighty - The Righteous Right Hand, is who upholds me and lends me His strength to follow Him.
The Hand has a name.
His Name is Jesus - and He lives in you.