Thus Far the Lord Has Helped Us

Pastor James Cole

Tuesday morning, right around seven or eight AM, when the coffee is... uh, it is sitting in your cup, and you are staring at your email inbox or stepping into the office. There is often this quiet, heavy, um, heavy weight, isn't there? That faint dread that somehow, uh, somehow the mistakes of last month, or the season of burnout you barely scraped through last year, are going to walk right through the door with you today. You wonder if, if, if old failures are going to dictate today's story.

Pastor James Cole

I was reading in First Samuel chapter seven recently, and there is a detail in verse twelve that, well, it stopped me in my tracks. The prophet Samuel takes a stone, a large stone, and he sets it up between two places, Mizpah and Shen. And he names this monument Ebenezer, which, uh, which literally comes from two Hebrew words, eben, meaning stone, and ezer, meaning help. So, Samuel called the monument Ebenezer, which means stone of help. And he stands there in front of the people and declares, Thus far the Lord has helped us.

Pastor James Cole

Now, on the surface, that sounds like a lovely, peaceful victory story. God turned back an attacking army, and Samuel built an altar, a memorial, to say thank you. But if you rewind the story just twenty years, back to First Samuel chapter four, you find something, well, something astonishing. Twenty years earlier, Israel fought a battle on that exact same patch of dirt. And it was a catastrophe. Thirty thousand soldiers fell in a single day. The Ark of the Covenant was captured by enemies. It was the single most embarrassing, heartbreaking, shame filled defeat in their history. And do you know what that place was called back then? It was called Ebenezer.

Pastor James Cole

Think about that for a second. Samuel did not go to a brand new, clean, sacred mountain to build a memorial to God's goodness. He walked right back to the site of their absolute worst failure. The place where everybody had panicked, where everything fell apart, where the ground was marked by grief and shame. He went back to the old graveyard of their hopes, and he put down a stone, and he said, no, we are renaming this spot. This is no longer the place where we were broken. This is the place where God helped us.

Pastor James Cole

I think many of us have our own Ebenezer sites, don't we? A specific job that ended in embarrassment. A marriage that collapsed. A season where you burnt out so completely that you felt like a failure to everyone you loved. And the enemy loves to drag us back to those mental sites on a Tuesday morning, whispering that our past defines our future. But God, uh, God loves to build monuments of grace right over our deepest scars. He does not sweep our painful history under the rug. He reclaims it.

Pastor James Cole

Look at those words Samuel spoke: Thus far the Lord has helped us. In Hebrew, that little phrase is Ad henah. It means, uh, it means till now, or up to this precise minute. It is such an honest, mid journey confession. Samuel does not stand there demanding guarantees about next year. He does not pretend that tomorrow will be easy or that no more armies will ever gather on the horizon. He simply pauses right in the middle of the story and says, up to this moment, right here, right now, God has brought us through.

Pastor James Cole

We live in a culture that is, frankly, obsessed with controlling the next month, the next quarter, the next five years. We lie awake at three in the morning trying to solve problems that have not even happened yet. But Samuel's practice is, uh, it is so radically different. It is a present moment practice of marking today's grace. It is looking at the clock on your dashboard on a Tuesday morning and saying, I do not know how the rest of this week will unfold, but thus far, up to this exact breath, God has been my help.

Pastor James Cole

So let me invite you into something very simple today. If you are carrying anxiety into your workday, find a small stone. Pick one up from your driveway on your morning walk, or keep a small, smooth pebble on your desk, right next to your keyboard, or in your pocket. Whenever your mind starts spiraling into tomorrow's worries or yesterday's regrets, just touch that stone. Let it be your tangible Ad henah. Let it remind you that the God who sustained you through past heartbreaks is standing with you on this ordinary Tuesday.

Pastor James Cole

Let me pray for you before you step into the rest of your day. Heavenly Father, for the person listening right now who feels weary, who feels like the weight of past mistakes is hovering over their desk or their home today, I pray for your peace. Thank you for bringing them safely to this Tuesday morning. Thank you that your mercy has held them thus far. We hand over the unknown future, the unpaid bills, the difficult conversations, and the quiet anxieties into your hands. Reclaim our old places of shame, Lord, and build your stones of help in our lives today. In Jesus' name, Amen.