2013-01-25
Good Morning Dear Ones,
Last week, I was led to write about the song, “Made Me Glad,” by Miriam Webster. It describes our God as “My Shield, my Strength, My Portion, Deliverer, My Shelter, Strong Tower, My very present Help in time of need.” We can never be short of amazed when we consider all the attributes our God has, as described in the Scriptures. Let’s look at some examples. PS 18: 1-2, “I will love You, O Lord, my Strength. The Lord is my Rock, and my Fortress, and my Deliverer, my God, my Strength, in Whom I will trust; my Buckler [round shield with arm straps], and the Horn [another word for King] of my Salvation, and my High Tower.” These words, probably authored by David, evoke a host of emotions that this human king was feeling at the time. Every one of these descriptions is accurate when applied to God. Consider what emotions they evoke in yourselves, as I am doing. Only a Rock, Fortress, Source of our strength, Deliverer etc. can be depended on at any and all times. No human fits that description. PS 62: 5, “Only God gives inner peace, and I depend on Him.”
The metaphor of a community in danger of attack by it’s enemies, protected by a Strong Tower, really forces us to consider our enemy, the devil. The latter is the source of evil. So, the Lord tells us some things we need to know, necessary reconnaissance at a time when we might be called into battle. 1 PET 5: 8, “Be self-controlled and alert. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, looking for someone to devour.” As a covenant-Partner, our God is the best Protector we could hope to have. Not only does He tell us to understand our enemy and his crafty, evil ways, but He gives us power, through Christ, to battle this devil to victory in Christ’s name! EPH 1: 18-20, “I pray also that the eyes of your heart may be enlightened in order that you may know the hope to which He has called you, the riches of His glorious inheritance in the saints and His incomparably great power for us who believe. That power is like the working of His mighty strength, which He exerted in Christ when He raised him from the dead and seated Him at His right hand in the heavenly realms.” The Strong Tower reminds us of the power, not only of prayer, but of about Christ-given ability to send the enemy packing.
We reach the point of discussing deliverance, a subject of great interest to people amidst any kind of challenges. Job waited a long time for it; he lost everything he had, including his health, first before it finally came. His friends, who for the most part passed immature, snap judgments, tried to explain Job’s predicament as rewards and punishments. God wanted all of this to happen, so that Job and his friends could truly appreciate Job’s deliverance. I’m reminded of a dear friend who suddenly lost her husband in their 50’s to a fatal heart attack. This couple was childless, and it was necessary for my friend to make some mighty tough adjustments. Had she not been a woman of faith, it would have been a thousand times more difficult. While she will always miss her husband’s company, she lives with the promise that if she endures in her faith, just a Job did, she will be delivered from the kind of grieving she is going through now. She has the hope that she will see Him again in heaven. PS 121: 8, “The Lord shall preserve your going out and your coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore.”
Our covenant-Partner delivers us from a myriad of different predicaments in which we find ourselves. Some of them may be emotional, some physical, and some spiritual. In the course of my own ministry, I have seen people come back from awful illnesses, even ones that have taken them to the brink of physical death, and recover. For over a year, our prayer chain prayed for a little girl who was age 7 when her heart failed due to an attack of Myocarditis. She was hospitalized immediately and put on a Berlin heart machine, which kept her alive during the 11 mos. she waited for a compatible donor heart to become available and be transplanted into her young body. By the time she emerged from the hospital, she was age 8, and today she is a healthy 9 yr. old, back to school and normal activities. Her faithful parents prayed with us the whole time, and God heard our prayers. PS 120: 1, “In my distress I cried to the Lord, and He heard me.”
Our Strong Tower is here for us, real and personal. He is our covenant-Partner, Who loves us enough to be renewing us every day in His own image, so that we might have a greater knowledge of Himself [COL 3: 10]. He does so much for us. Most especially, He delivered all of us who believe in His Son from spiritual death, by sending His Son to die on the cross for us [JN 3: 16; RO 3: 24-25]. We can understand more about this from 1 COR 15: 54, “When the perishable has been clothed with the imperishable, and the mortal with immortality, then the saying that is written [in IS 25: 8] will come true: ‘Death has been swallowed up in victory.’” And to think: this has been done for each and every believer in the Lord Jesus no matter where he is!
PRAYER: O Lord, we come before Your mighty throne to offer You thanks and praise forever, for Your fabulous and difficult sacrifice, that of Your only begotten Son Jesus Christ. As our covenant-Partner, we find ourselves without words that will effectively convey our gratitude and our reverence for You. We have a new grasp on the magnitude of Your sovereign power, Your righteous use of this power, and the love You have for us. This everlasting covenant that we are in with You is the very basis of our lives. God’s love for us is seen in His words in IS 54: 17 and IS 55: 3-4, “’No weapon forged against you will prevail, and you will refute every tongue that accuses you. This is the heritage of the servants of the Lord, and this is their vindication from Me,’ declares the Lord… ‘Give ear and come to Me; listen that you may live. I will make an everlasting covenant with you, My faithful love promised to David. See, I have made him a witness to the peoples, a ruler, a commander of the peoples.’” Our Lord Jesus is here for us in the ways which really make a difference. 1 JN 3: 26, 18, and 24, “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down His life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters…Dear Children, let us not love with words or speech but with actions in truth…The one who keeps God’s commands lives in Him, and He in them. And, this is how we know that He lives in us: We know it is by the Spirit He gave us.” The prayer we are offering is our way of acknowledging You, our Strong Tower and Dearest Abba. We offer You our reverent and obedient faith; we utter this prayer in the holy/mighty name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
NEXT WEEK: We will look at the story of prisoners of the Nazis, a married couple from Yugoslavia, Jozeca (29) and Jakob (64), while taking up the subject of persecution of God’s sons and daughters in Christ. Our Strong Tower was there for them just as He is for us. There has rarely been an age without some kind of persecution going on in the world. While we surely can’t understand why God has allowed such atrocities as the Holocaust or the mistreatment of people, which even happens in our own country in every case, we can still learn from it. At its very root is the evil one, whose sinfulness each of us has inherited. RO 6: 23, “For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Even the sad reality of the first phrase in this verse is balanced by the gift of God’s grace in the second phrase. Our Lord’s equity and ultimate justice is something in which we can place our faith, as long as we understand how this impacts our individual lives. We can accept that our God looks down from heaven and sees into our hearts [PS 33: 13]; He knows our true heart-attitude, thus He understands the status of our faith [HE 4: 13]. Our just God acts on that in ways which are righteous, compassionate, fair, and loving. What a job it must be to hear the prayers of every person who offers them, and to answer every prayer that is within His will [PS 116: 1]! But that’s what our God does, and we can be forever thankful for it. We need never face our trials alone, for He will never abandon us. PS 9: 9-10, “The Lord is a Refuge for the oppressed, a stronghold in times of trouble. Those who know Your name will trust in You, for You, Lord, have never forsaken those how seek You.” Yes, Dear Readers, that’s our Strong Tower. Praise and thanks be to Him!
Grace Be With You Always,
Lynn
JS 24: 15
© Lynn Johnson 2012. All Rights Reserved.
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