Grip Strength

“Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.” — Hebrews 10:23 (NIV)

We put our faith in things all the time. Often things we really shouldn’t place that much faith in.

We trust the weather app when it says there is a zero percent chance of rain, right up until we are standing in the grocery store parking lot getting absolutely drenched.

We trust our GPS until it sends us through what appears to be someone’s private driveway.

We trust plans, jobs, bank accounts, timelines, institutions, and our own ability to figure things out.

We trust people, too. Good people. People who genuinely love us and want what is best for us.

And sometimes, all of those things let us down...Not necessarily because they are bad. People are human. Plans change. Bodies get tired. Circumstances shift. Money disappears faster than seems mathematically possible. The people we love can disappoint us even while loving us deeply, and we can do exactly the same thing to them.

Everything we place our faith in on this earth carries some possibility of failing us because everything on this earth is limited.

God is not.

Hebrews 10:23 tells us, “Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.”

The writer of Hebrews does not tell us to hold tightly to our hope because we are really good at holding on (we aren’t, have you checked your “hope grip strength” lately?). He does not tell us to hold fast because our circumstances will always make sense, because we will never have doubts, or because we can predict how God is going to work everything out.

We hold fast because He who promised is faithful.

Faithfulness is not simply something God occasionally demonstrates. It is who He is.

Scripture tells us, “if we are faithless, he remains faithful, for he cannot disown himself” (2 Timothy 2:13, NIV).

God cannot suddenly become unreliable. He cannot wake up one morning and decide He has changed His mind about His character. He cannot make a promise and later realize He overcommitted. He cannot be faithful on Monday and questionable by Thursday.

He cannot disown Himself.

That means our faith is only as secure as the One in whom we have placed it—and we have placed ours in a God who cannot be anything other than faithful.

This is even more beautiful when we read Hebrews 10:23 in context. Just a few verses earlier, we are told that “we have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus” and that Christ has opened for us “a new and living way” into the presence of God (Hebrews 10:19–20, NIV).

Before Jesus, the Most Holy Place represented a degree of access to God that ordinary people simply did not have. But through Christ, the curtain has been opened. Jesus has made the way. His sacrifice has cleansed us, and our great High Priest now stands over the house of God.

So Hebrews gives us three invitations: draw near, hold unswervingly, and consider one another (Hebrews 10:22–24).

Notice where all of those invitations begin: not with what we have accomplished, but with what Christ has accomplished.

We can draw near because Jesus made a way. We can hold on because God is faithful. We can encourage one another toward love and good deeds because our hope is secure in Christ.

This matters because sometimes “have faith” can begin to sound like one more thing we need to be good at. If I could just believe harder. If I could stop worrying. If I could manufacture enough confidence. If I could get my faith together, surely I would finally feel secure.

But biblical faith is not confidence in the strength of our own believing. It is confidence in the character of the One we believe.

Abraham understood this. Romans tells us that when God’s promise looked humanly impossible, Abraham “was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what he had promised” (Romans 4:20–21, NIV).

His confidence was not ultimately in the likelihood of the outcome. It was in the God who had spoken.

That is important to remember when the circumstances in front of us do not look particularly promising, which is often in this life. When the prayer has gone unanswered longer than we expected. When the plan fell apart. When someone we trusted disappointed us. When God seems quieter than we would prefer. When we know what Scripture says but cannot see how any of it could possibly fit the situation sitting directly in front of us.

We are not being asked to pretend those circumstances are easy. We are being invited to remember that circumstances do not determine God’s character.

“God is not human, that he should lie, not a human being, that he should change his mind” (Numbers 23:19, NIV).

And again, “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love” (Deuteronomy 7:9, NIV).

He is the faithful God.

Not the usually faithful God. Not the faithful God when we understand what He is doing. Not the faithful God when the answer comes quickly enough to keep us comfortable.

The faithful God.

And the greatest evidence we have of that faithfulness is Jesus Himself. God did not merely tell us He would rescue His people; He entered history and didit. Christ lived the life we could not live, died the death we deserved, rose from the grave, and now intercedes for His people. The cross is not only the means of our salvation; it is permanent evidence that God’s promises can be trusted.

So when Hebrews tells us to “hold unswervingly,” we are not desperately clinging to a fragile hope and crossing our fingers that it holds our weight.

We are holding onto the One who is already holding us.

Our grip may feel weak some days. Our circumstances may change. People may disappoint us. Plans may unravel. We may have questions we cannot answer and prayers whose endings we cannot yet see.

But none of those things have the authority to change who God is.

So draw near. Hold fast. Keep hoping. Not because you have managed to become exceptionally good at faith, but because he who promised is faithful. The power our hope isn't found in the strength of our grip, but in the faithfulness of the One we're holding onto.

bytaylormcgee