Is It Well?

By: Bevan Greiner
FAMCI Ministries

Not long ago, I was working at my desk when I received a phone call from our mechanic to inform me that the repair bill for our car was going to be $830.00! I thanked him for calling and then sat there stunned and, I must confess, quite downtrodden.

That was an amount I was not prepared to hear. It was an amount I was really not prepared to pay. Then, as if on cue, I heard music coming from the room next to my office...our son’s room. He was playing his guitar and singing “It is Well With My Soul”. Start to finish.

My son was ministering to his dad and he didn’t even know it. As that familiar hymn gently penetrated the wall between us, and fell on my ears, it filled my heart with all that I needed to hear and be reminded of at that moment. My thoughts were no longer focused on my discouraging circumstance but rather on all that I have in Christ, and all that I have to look forward to in Him. And I found joy and peace in that moment. Oh, I still had to pay that bill that day! But, that just didn’t seem carry the weight it had just moments earlier. All was “well with my soul”!

This was but a tiny trial I was facing. And yet, through all of history, God has imparted His supernatural peace to His trusting children in their most difficult trials. The very song that my son was singing that day was born out of such a trial when its author had lost his four children in an ocean liner accident and yet through tears of trust Horatio Spafford was able to pen those victorious words to “It Is Well”.

This gift of Divine peace is also evidenced all throughout Scripture. One such account was that of the Shunammite woman in 2 Kings 4. She too had experienced perhaps the greatest grief a woman and mother could experience when her only son had suddenly died. The birth of this son had been a miracle in her life, promised her by the prophet Elisha. After the son had grown to be a young man, he died while out in the fields with his father. When her son was brought to her, she laid him on a bed and went out to seek Elisha. When Elisha saw her coming in the distance, he said to his servant:

“Run now, I pray thee, to meet her, and say unto her, Is it well with thee? Is it well with thy husband? Is it well with the child? And she answered; ‘It is well.’” 2Kings 4:26

“It is well!” What supernatural words had come from the lips of the Shunammite woman! Her child, the beloved son, was dead upon the bed in her home. Yet, instead of a wail of sorrow and deepest anguish, there was a joyous, “It is well.” These were words of faith and trust which she was amazingly able to utter in her deepest affliction. Surely, for her to speak those words, her confidence had to be in something other than her circumstances…for they were grim! She had to have been placing her confidence in God. For only He, in our most devastating circumstances, can bring ‘peace like a river’! Gloriously, God not only granted her peace, but through Elisha, He restored life to her young son. And friend, God will grant us peace and restore, renew and refresh our spirits every time we fully trust Him in and through every circumstance in life.

Is it well with your soul today, dear one? I pray the words “It Is Well” will constantly be on our lips knowing that as we cling to Christ, God’s grace and peace will always be sufficient!