Shielded.

     Have you ever been depressed by the news?  Take just one look at the newspaper, and we can see the world is not a perfect place.  But it seems to keep getting worse.  Peoples riot, nations war, and in the midst of it all it seems as if the church is getting battered around, and sometimes we as Christians can't help but wonder what to do.  So we worry, and fume over earthly circumstances, complain about outrageous happenings, and feel inclined to brood over any number of things.  We can very quickly become inclined to despair.  There's nothing wrong with being upset over sin in the world.  We should never passively accept it as in the natural order of things.  But what we must be reminded of is simple.  God is, has always been, and always will be, in control, and He will not abandon His people.  He has the ultimate victory over the power of the enemy, and He has proven Himself faithful over the years.  He will always do so.  To show you what I mean, let's take the example of the Israelites.

     If anyone has had to put up with trouble and persecution over time, it's the Children of Israel.  I'm not just talking about the modern nation either.  In times past, the nation of Israel had extremely hostile neighbors determined to destroy it.  Eventually, it was destroyed, not because God failed to protect the Israelites, but because they failed to serve Him.  For years they had rebelled against His authority and His law by choosing other idols, and so He disciplined them by letting their nation be defeated by the pagan nations.  First the northern kingdom called Israel fell to the nation of Assyria.  We read about it in 2 Kings 17:6-18.

"In the ninth year of Hoshea, the king of Assyria captured Samaria, and he carried the Israelites away to Assyria and placed them in Halah, and on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.  And this occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and had feared other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and in the customs that the kings of Israel had practiced.  And the people of Israel did secretly against the Lord their God things that were not right. They built for themselves high places in all their towns, from watchtower to fortified city.  They set up for themselves pillars and Asherim on every high hill and under every green tree, and there they made offerings on all the high places, as the nations did whom the Lord carried away before them. And they did wicked things, provoking the Lord to anger, and they served idols, of which the Lord had said to them, “You shall not do this.” Yet the Lord warned Israel and Judah by every prophet and every seer, saying, “Turn from your evil ways and keep my commandments and my statutes, in accordance with all the Law that I commanded your fathers, and that I sent to you by my servants the prophets.” But they would not listen, but were stubborn, as their fathers had been, who did not believe in the Lord their God.  They despised his statutes and his covenant that he made with their fathers and the warnings that he gave them. They went after false idols and became false, and they followed the nations that were around them, concerning whom the Lord had commanded them that they should not do like them.  And they abandoned all the commandments of the Lord their God, and made for themselves metal images of two calves; and they made an Asherah and worshiped all the host of heaven and served Baal.  And they burned their sons and their daughters as offerings and used divination and omens and sold themselves to do evil in the sight of the Lord, provoking him to anger.  Therefore the Lord was very angry with Israel and removed them out of his sight. None was left but the tribe of Judah only." (ESV)

     Then the southern kingdom called Judah fell to Babylon in 2 Kings 25 and 2 Chronicles 36.  God pronounced His judgment with the due severity, for His covenant people had turned their backs on Him, and so was fulfilled His warning of Deuteronomy 30:17-18, which says "But if your heart turns away, and you will not hear, but are drawn away to worship other gods and serve them, I declare to you today, that you shall surely perish. You shall not live long in the land that you are going over the Jordan to enter and possess." (ESV)

     The utter humiliation of being destroyed and subjected under a foreign nation must have been unspeakably painful.  And it was their own fault.  But God did not leave them that way.  Even through the prophets He told them that they had a future and a hope.  Look at His words to the captives from Judah who were in Babylon.

"For thus says the Lord: After seventy years are completed at Babylon, I will visit you and perform My good word toward you, and cause you to return to this place.  For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the Lord, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope. Then you will call upon Me and go and pray to Me, and I will listen to you.  And you will seek Me and find Me, when you search for Me with all your heart.  I will be found by you, says the Lord, and I will bring you back from your captivity; I will gather you from all the nations and from all the places where I have driven you, says the Lord, and I will bring you to the place from which I cause you to be carried away captive."  (NKJV)

     Now remember, these were the same people who turned their backs on God and are now paying the price for their sin.  But sure enough, the people of Judah were able to return to their land, and in 1948 Israel became an independent nation again.  Granted, they still have trouble, but they continue to exist as a nation, for God has promised He will never leave them.  They are His chosen people.  The promises He has made to them will never expire.

"Happy are you, O Israel!
Who is like you, a people saved by the Lord,
The shield of your help
And the sword of your majesty!
Your enemies shall submit to you,
And you shall tread down their high places.”  (Deuteronomy 33:29 NKJV)

     God is faithful to His people.  As Christians, we can rely on the same protection He gives Israel.  For we are His covenant people as well, though not of necessarily of the Children of Israel, yet we are in a covenant with Him, and He has promised to be with us.  His Son Jesus reassures us, saying "And you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not troubled; for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.  For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. And there will be famines, pestilences, and earthquakes in various places.  All these are the beginning of sorrows.
 “Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and kill you, and you will be hated by all nations for My name’s sake.  And then many will be offended, will betray one another, and will hate one another.  Then many false prophets will rise up and deceive many. And because lawlessness will abound, the love of many will grow cold.  But he who endures to the end shall be saved.  And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come." (NKJV)  We live in a turbulent world, and we may face persecution, both blatant and subtle.  We will make mistakes, just as Israel and Judah did.  But the God Who is our strength has sovereignty over the universe, and He will be our protection.  We must fix our eyes on Him, study His Word, and trust in His grace and His might.  We can rely on the promise in Proverbs 30:5.  "Every word of God is pure; He is a shield to those who put their trust in Him." (NKJV)  Again, we look at Hebrews 13:5-6, where it says: "Let your conduct be without covetousness; be content with such things as you have. For He Himself has said, “I will never leave you nor forsake you.”  So we may boldly say:
“The Lord is my helper;
I will not fear.
What can man do to me?”

     So don't despair.  Even though it seems like the world is falling apart and trying to take the church down with it, God will not let the church be lost.  True, the world must end, but when it does, we will be saved. "Therefore we also, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which so easily ensnares us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus, the Author and Finisher of our faith, who for the joy that was set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:1-2 NKJV)  Truer words could not be written.  We do have hope.  His name is Jesus, and we need to make His light known throughout the world, and never allow the world to make us despair, because "You are of God, little children, and have overcome them, because He who is in you is greater than he who is in the world" (1 John 4:4 NKJV).  That's how we can have Childlike Faith in an Adult's World, through the power of Jesus.  After all, He's the one Who called us to have it in the first place!

(ESV is English Standard Version)

(NKJV is New King James Version)

Kitty-like persistence.

     If you own a cat, you know they can be pretty persistent in requesting what they want.  Once they decide on something, they're pretty clear in communicating their wishes.  But they don't always use sound, do they?  Sometimes they use body language.  I have a cat who is rather skittish.  She's afraid of almost everything that moves.  But she loves attention.  She came up to me recently and put her paws on my leg, and rubbed her head in my hand, and made it clear that she wanted to be petted.  When I had to do other things, she stayed with me, and did not leave for quite a while, even though I left her alone and stopped petting her.  She kept on asking for attention.  I think we can all learn something from my cat.  Here's what I mean.

     We all have a lot going on in our lives.  No one seems to have tons of extra time anymore.  So we all look for convenience.  When we order a pizza, we expect it to be ready when we want it ready, and get irked at waiting times longer than ten minutes (at least I do).  We need that YouTube video to load so we can move on to our next email.  Even our social lives get hurried.  Thus Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks supposedly grant us convenience in our friendships.  There's nothing wrong with added convenience.  But what if convenience becomes such a way of life that we can't wait, and we give up or take matters into our own hands if we have to wait too long?  Pizza Hut takes too long, so we go to Little Caesar's.  YouTube won't load, so we delete the email.

     In each of these cases, we receive and lose something.  We receive convenience, but we get an icky pizza.  We get to the next email, but we lose that cute video of our cousins.  All because we want it now.

     The biggest trouble occurs when we apply the convenience craze to God.  We expect something to arrive from God as soon as we ask for it.  If it doesn't we may wonder what's wrong, or try to find our own way to get what we want or need.  If we're not careful, we can end up substituting our own solutions because we didn't want to wait for God.  So we ask God to get us a nice new car, and when we have to wait more than a month, we go buy an affordable, but not very nice car.  We ask God to speak to us, but after nothing but silence for five minutes, we decide to move on to something else.    In each of these cases, we can end up losing out on what God has for us because we just can't wait.

     What we're forgetting is that God is smarter than we are, and always has a reason for the response He gives, or the supposed delays in those responses.  Someone could ask, "But why doesn't God get on it right away?  Am I not a high enough priority?"  The answer to the last question is of course not.  You are a very high priority to God, regardless of what condition you're in.  Sometimes we don't understand why God acts the way He does.  That's when we need to wait for Him, and trust Him to do what is best for us.  In a verse I've quoted before, we learn that God has different ways from ours.

“For My thoughts are not your thoughts,
Nor are your ways My ways,” says the Lord.
"For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways,
And My thoughts than your thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8-9 NKJV)

  As Romans 8:28 says, "And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose." (NKJV)  Take a look at Psalm 37.  This chapter tells us to wait on God a number of times.  Here are some examples:

"Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him;
Do not fret because of him who prospers in his way,
Because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass." (v.7)

"For evildoers shall be cut off;
But those who wait on the Lord,
They shall inherit the earth." (v.9)

"Wait on the Lord,
And keep His way,
And He shall exalt you to inherit the land;
When the wicked are cut off, you shall see it." (v.34)  (NKJV, emphasis added.)

     We need to wait on God.  Take the example of the Psalmist:

"I wait for the Lord, my soul waits,
And in His word I do hope."  (Psalm 130:5 NKJV)

     When we hit crisis, it's even more tempting to take things into our own hands.  But we just need to be patient and pray.  Each of us has to wait on God at one time or another.  And when we do, He will make it work out for good.  So don't try to rush God, because He knows what He's doing.  Just keep praying.  Don't give up.  Remember what Jesus said in Luke 11:9-10. “So I say to you, ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened." (NKJV)  Did you notice that He doesn't add a qualifying term of time?  He did not say, "he who seeks, finds in a week" or "everyone who asks, receives that instant".  God has perfect timing, so we can trust Him.  So keep asking, and you'll get an answer.  It may be no, but you will be answered.  Take the extra time to trust Him.  It's always worth it.

     So that's what my cat can teach us.  Even if you don't seem to be getting a response, keep communicating with God.  Stay in His presence and pray.  He's listening, and loves you more than anyone else can.






(NKJV Means New King James Version)