Need a Rest?

08/04/2005

Does anyone need a rest?
Is anyone tired out there?
Is anyone looking for a place of refuge?

This world and all it contains…wow, can it get complicated! Who can we talk to that is not struggling with something in their lives? There aren’t many people who are just skating through this life…instead; most of us seem to be on thin ice that could crack at any moment!

Where is that Promised Land the Lord led His people to? Has it escaped us? Are we forever doomed to wander in the wilderness? I don’t believe that’s what God wants for any of us! He wants so much more, otherwise, why would He put a Psalm like number 91 in His Word? Why would it even be necessary? If we think God is not concerned about our daily trials, maybe we should prayerfully take a closer look at Psalm 91 and all that it contains. We may come away from this time spent with a very different perspective on God’s care and concern for each day of our lives.

“Those who live in the shelter of the Most High will find rest in the shadow of the Almighty.” Psalm 91:1 (NLT)

When we think of a shelter, what does it look like? A place we can crawl into, a place that will protect us from the rain, the wind, the hot sun…whatever it is that is “plaguing” us, it will guard us against it. When the elements that are coming against us are different types of weather, they are easy to understand. The sun makes us sweat and burns our skin. It causes us to thirst. The rain drenches us if we don’t take cover. The wind can be very cold and cause us great discomfort. When these things “come against us,” we know instinctively to take cover! Are we so wise about the things that come against us that we can’t actually see?

What about that boss that we can’t seem to please with our efforts?
What about children who turn a cold shoulder to us looking for their own independence?
What about when we feel unloved, unwanted and underappreciated by those around us?
What about when the doctor’s diagnosis comes and it is not good?

You may say, “We can see these things. There’s my boss, there’s my child, there’s my family, or look at these troubles I’m facing! The bills are piling high, the roof is leaking, the car is in the shop for repairs or I’m not feeling well!” Yes, we can see the reasons for many of our struggles, but what we can’t see is what’s taking place deep inside of us as our peace and joy go missing in the trials. They disappear in the darkness that’s created by the enemy and then what does become very visible is our misery and discontent. The enemy brings that into full view as swiftly as he can and he longs for us to dwell there as much as possible because he knows if we will, we will start to question the love of God and whether His promises are really true in our own lives.

We start to “live” out in the wind, the rain, and the blazing sun, accepting it as just our lot in life, when God is saying, “Take shelter My child! Find rest in My shadow! Come to Me! I’m here for you, no matter what!” We have to learn to live in God’s shelter, to rest in His care, to go to that place inside the heart of each believer that belongs to God alone.

“This I declare of the Lord: He alone is my refuge, my place of safety; he is my God, and I am trusting him. For he will rescue you from every trap and protect you from the fatal plague.” (V. 2-3)

We don’t often deal with “fatal plagues” in this day and age…or do we? What is fatal to our emotional well being, to our spiritual strength? Could it be the fatal plague of hopelessness, or how about the fatal plagues of feeling so alone, unloved or misunderstood? I think we have people that are dying all around us and many may not even notice their distress except for two very opposing forces…our enemy Satan, and our Father God.

God is calling us to come into His shelter, to find rest in His shadow, to feel safe with Him and trust Him to help us. He knows that traps are being set every day of our lives by our adversary, Satan, and God wants to rescue us from them as quickly as possible and protect us from that fatality! God is not unaware of what plagues us! He is VERY aware of the difficulties we face here on earth

“He will shield you with his wings. He will shelter you with his feathers. His faithful promises are your armor and protection.” (V. 4)

What does that protection really look like?
How do we find it?
Why does it so often elude us?

Perhaps we’re not looking in the right place? We get scared, we see what’s out there, and we start running for our lives! We get busy trying to make things right! We look for an escape hatch anywhere we can and dive through it much too quickly! We search for happiness in our circumstances instead of searching for joy in our heart! But God says:

“Do not be afraid of the terrors of the night, nor fear the dangers of the day, nor dread the plague that stalks in darkness, nor the disaster that strikes at midday. Though a thousand fall at your side, though ten thousand are dying around you, these evils will not touch you.” (Verses 5-7)

Notice God is not saying we are imagining our troubles. He is saying they are very real! There are terrors, dangers, dread, plagues, darkness and disasters! We’re not crazy! Life is tough! I can certainly relate to the terrors of the night…when I am tired, the enemy knows just what buttons to push to get my mind racing. As I try to get some sleep, he starts to fill my mind with all the things that I might fear, the mistakes I have made, the missing that I feel…if I do not run for shelter in the promises of God, I will be led off on whatever “rabbit trail” of destruction the enemy chooses. That’s why God provides a way of escape so that we are able to endure it. God is not oblivious to the torture tactics of our enemy. He is well aware of what’s going on and He longs to help us.

“But you will see it with your eyes; you will see how the wicked are punished. If you make the Lord your refuge, if you make the Most High your shelter, no evil will conquer you; no plague will come near your dwelling.” (Verses 8-10)

How is that we might say? Come visit me in my “dwelling,” and I’ll show you exactly what I’m dealing with here! And therein lies our problem. We look at our dwelling as where we live, where we work, where we play, when in actuality, our dwelling is deep inside of us, in the center of our being, in the place in our heart that is reserved for God alone. The enemy can affect everything around us. He can make our circumstances miserable, so much so that it may look like our whole world is falling apart, but there’s one thing he cannot touch, the place inside of us that is filled with the Spirit of God. If we will go there, we will discover the peace and joy we all long for. That is our place of safety.

But how do we get there? Very simply, we have to choose to spend time in prayer. This passage of Scripture (V. 8-10) uses the word if in the New Living Translation. It seems once again it is our choice. God will not force even His peace upon us. He says, “If we make Him our refuge, if we make Him our shelter…” Prayer is the only way to make our way to that place inside where we will meet with God and find rest for our souls, minute by minute! “God never gives strength for tomorrow, or for the next hour, but only for the strain of the minute.” (O. Chambers August 2nd, My Utmost For His Highest.)

If we will pray, then God’s promise is:

“For he orders his angels to protect you wherever you go. They will hold you with their hands to keep you from striking your foot on a stone. You will trample down lions and poisonous snakes; you will crush fierce lions and serpents under your feet!
(Verses 11-13)

It doesn’t sound much like the world we live in though, does it? It’s not every day we come across lions and poisonous snakes! Or do we? What part of our life is devouring us each day? What venomous situations do we find ourselves in that poisons our souls to the good things of God? How do we protect ourselves from these attacks? Do we go out into each day protected in the shelter of the Most High, or are we trying to survive out there alone with our own wisdom, with our own view of things, or with our own tactics against the enemy as he tries to devour us?

I once sat with a man who had just lost his son two days before. He said, “I guess it’s day by day,” and I said, “No, it’s minute by minute.” When times are extremely tough, when the circumstances strangle the breath right out of us, we learn that one day a week in church, one hour devoted to God, will not see us through. We learn that if we are not living each minute acutely aware of where our refuge is when the circumstances of life are more difficult than we ever could have imagined, we will not make it! The evil will overwhelm us and we will see God as having failed us.

In the midst of the trouble, we may be asking, “Why? Why? Why? This just makes no sense at all God. Where are You?” But what I heard Beth Moore say just yesterday in her lesson on “Living Beyond Yourself,” in dealing with difficulties was, “There is a promise on the other side waiting to be fulfilled.” She said, “Faith Fights!”

As it said in Psalm 91:4, “His faithful promises are your armor and protection.”

So instead of asking “Why,” we probably should be asking, “What promises of God will I see fulfilled in this situation?” Are they waiting there just on the other side of “pressing through,” as Beth Moore explained? We will see God’s strength fill us and help us to stand firm when we start to experience how His armor and protection deflects the fiery arrows of the enemy. Satan longs to fill us with fear, to keep us trapped and frozen in our pain and not living in the promises of God. Why do you think that is? I would imagine Satan knows very well the ways of God and he knows that once we really get a hold of exactly who God is, Satan’s control over us will be greatly diminished. Once we learn that we really do have a choice, misery or joy, no matter what the circumstances, most every weapon in the enemy’s arsenal becomes useless.

I could have asked, “Why,” so many times when Phil left this earth for heaven. There were definitely times when I did, and I wondered, and I watched to see if there really was a good reason for this heartache in our lives. I knew we would probably never see all the reasons for it, but “Please God! Show me something that explains Your plan in this!”

What I mostly found God’s plan was and continues to be is that there were promises waiting on the other side to be fulfilled, just as Beth Moore explained in her video. If I had not pressed through, if I had given up along the way and died spiritually and emotionally, which was very tempting, then I would have missed seeing the promises of God in this situation. The easiest ones to explain are the promises of healing and restoration, of Hope and Joy that comes from knowing God so much better than I probably ever would have without such pain and suffering. I saw the enemy’s arsenal diminish greatly when I discovered the shelter of the Most High during the most vicious attacks in my life.

Is it worth it, you might ask?… I take a deep breath in just writing out that question, but on this day I would have to answer, “Yes.” Do I mean to say that it was worth the life of our son to find God as I know Him now? To see His promises fulfilled in my life? The only way I can answer that with another, “Yes,” is to know the love of God so deep in my soul that I can trust Him with everything that is most precious to me, especially my children. To arrive at that place takes so much prayer that it goes beyond words! It’s finding that place inside where everything is all right, even when everything on the outside appears so very wrong!

“The Lord says, ‘I will rescue those who love me. I will protect those who trust in my name. When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue them and honor them.’” (Verses 14-15)

These are promises God has made to all of us. This is how deeply He wants us to know Him. I hate to say this, but in my life, I don’t know if I would have known these promises to be true if God had not given us our youngest son to love, to share life with and to say good-bye to.

How can I love and trust a God who would do such a thing? How can I not? If we don’t love and trust God through these trials, what do we have left? Devastation? Destruction? Emptiness? A longing that will never be fulfilled? We can’t live like that! That’s not living at all. We must choose to live in the promises of God today--the promised I will’s in verses 14-15. Take a look at them one more time:

I will rescue…
I will protect…
I will answer…
I will be with them…
I will...honor them…

These are God’s promises and God does not disappoint! These come from our very Creator, the One who knows our every need, the One who loves us beyond a love we can even understand…if we can learn to live in these promises, what a miracle life we would enjoy!!

In coming through to the other side of the biggest devastation of my life, I have found the promises of Psalm 91 to be true in my own life. It has come at a great cost, but one that is bearable because the final and absolute promise of God is still to be fulfilled in my life…Jesus is coming back and I will see my son again on that day. To truly believe that promise, I have to believe God. To believe God, I have to learn to trust Him. I have to learn to love Him because He first loved me. If I don’t believe His promise of protection for each day I live, how do I even begin to believe His promise of an eternal life? I can believe in it because it says so in His Word, but I can’t rest in it, as I should.

That rest is what God is offering to all of us! He knows we need it! He sees our troubles! He longs to shelter us so that evil will not touch us even though we are surrounded by it in this world, but we won’t know that rest until we know God intimately! And, for most of us, we cannot know God intimately until we find ourselves in a position that is above and beyond what we think we can control in our lives. I believe we are sometimes given more than we can handle because God wants us to know, to learn, that He can handle it! How else will we learn to rest in Him?

There were many things that I seemed to be able to control in my life, but the day came when there was something I could not… an illness like leukemia that is not 100% curable as yet, and a loss resulting from that illness that was beyond what my heart could endure. It’s in times like those that we have to learn to rest…

The last verse of Psalm 91 says:
“I will satisfy them with a long life and give them my salvation.” (Verse 16)

We all want satisfaction, to be satisfied with our life, to be content, happy, peaceful and be filled with Hope for the things we cannot yet see on this earth and beyond…there is only one way to ever truly find that, and that is in the Promises of the very God who created us! Most times we will not look to those promises, as we should, until we have run out of every other resource available to see us through. Until the day comes when we find ourselves on our knees, hoping beyond hope that there is something more than what we see each day. It’s there that we will find God’s promises…we’ll begin to experience the shelter of the Most High, the comfort in the shadow of His wings, a place of safety, Someone we can trust, protection from the elements of life, angels that surround us, and a love and peace that will satisfy us as nothing else on this earth will.

Let me share a story with you…about three weeks before Phil died, I was out driving my car and I was at my wits end. I remember pulling into a large empty parking lot somewhere in town and shutting off the engine. I then begin to cry and cry and cry…I remember thinking that if a police car pulled up next to me they were going to think I was a lunatic, or maybe even suicidal, but I was not. I was just in a very dark moment of my life and needed a good cry. About two weeks later we were in church on a Sunday morning. At the end of the service, we got up to leave and Phil started to cry. He could not stop, and we were not even sure what was going on. We did our best to help him out to the car and upon arriving home we helped him into his bedroom. He could not tell us what was wrong so we left him alone so he could work through his own emotions. Eventually, he did stop crying and we even went out for ice cream later that day. But as we were leaving the house for ice cream, Phil stepped down off the front porch and his leg gave way because he had grown so weak. He fell sideways into the bushes, scraping up his arm, but was otherwise unhurt. We sat him down on the porch, cleaned his wounds, bandaged him up and then went on to have our ice cream.

Later that night I went into Phil’s room and laid down on his bed next to him. I told him about what had happened to me two weeks before, how I could not stop crying either, but I then told him what I found when I had finished crying. I found Jesus buried deep inside of me underneath all the pain, and I felt a great peace. Phil seemed very attentive to what I was telling him and then said something like, “I did too! Even today when I fell off the porch, I didn’t even care.” He had found the same peace of Jesus deep inside after he’d poured out his heart also--a peace that is always there but can get buried under all the things the enemy does to try and destroy it. When I thought about it later, I knew that God had allowed me to go through that cleansing cry first so I could share what I had learned with Phil that night. Then he could better understand what he had gone through and how God comforts us in our darkest moments.

We cannot change many of our circumstances, or at least the ones we’d most like to change, but we can change the way we view them when we are looking at them out from underneath the shelter of the Most High. Phil was still sick and I was still a mom with great concern for her son, but we had both discovered a promise of God on the other side of the pain we were having to endure--the Promise of God’s Peace in the worst of times. When I think of that shared moment with Phil now, I see it as such a blessing…it was the rainbow that came after the flooding of tears…

When we choose to live in the shelter of the Most High minute by minute, we can see a world with God in complete control. We’ll see a world filled with His love and His care in the tiniest details of our lives. We’ll know that everything that happens has a purpose behind it, and although that purpose may not be fully revealed in our lifetime, we can trust that it is all part of the perfect design of a perfect God.

Some may say, that is a “Pollyanna” type of world you live in, it is not real. I would have to answer back, “You will never know how very real it is until you understand how very real God is in our lives!” We must choose this day whom we will serve…minute by minute. When the enemy lures us out into the open, to be his prey, we must refuse and use the mightiest weapon God has given to man—PRAYER!

We must go to that place, alone, and spend time. We must believe as Jesus did when he went into the hills to pray, that we will find our Father waiting there. When Jesus was drained, when He had had enough of the crowds and the sickness and the hypocrisy, He went to find Truth and support and encouragement to continue on. It was found in only one place, with His Father.

When Jesus came back down from the hills, from His times alone in prayer, He entered right back into the storms of life, as we all will. They don’t go away--the disciples boat was still rocking and rolling on the waves of the sea. Life had continued on, as it will on the outside of that quiet place with our Lord. Nothing in life may change as we would like it to, but something will have changed on the inside of us because we are discovering that place where the enemy cannot touch us! Jesus knew that place, that’s why He went to the hills alone to pray…we can know that place too!

In all my times of retreat during my deepest, darkest moments of mourning after Phil left this earth for heaven, I could not change a thing. I could not pray my son back with me, I could not fill his empty bedroom with his laughter, I could not fill my empty arms with his warmth, but I could rest in that place of comfort, in the Most Holy Place, and discover a joy and peace that still existed underneath all the pain and anguish that plagued me each minute of each day. For every minute I spent in the shelter of the Most High, it was a minute that assured my heart that God would see me through a devastation that seemed to have no end in sight. If I could find no other comfort anywhere in the world, I discovered I could find it there, and it is there that I still meet with God and continue to learn of His true love and care for me more and more each day. Little by little, He brought me through what I never thought was possible. I’m excited to see what else He has planned!

“It is good to give thanks to the Lord, to sing praises to the Most High. It is good to proclaim your unfailing love in the morning, your faithfulness in the evening, accompanied by the harp and the lute and the harmony of the lyre. You thrill me, Lord, with all you have done for me! I sing for joy because of what you have done.”
Psalm 92:1-4 (NLT)

In talking with my sister the other day, she said, “I wondered if you would ever really laugh again.” I wondered that myself. Now almost four years later, my laughter has returned in even greater proportions because through it all, I have found that God’s promises are true. Is there any greater joy than that? When we know that God’s promises are true, then we know that this is not all there is, that there is a greater plan even if we can’t see it, that there is an amazing Hope we can hold tightly to and a supernatural protection from all that the enemy will do to try and destroy us—ultimately, there is so much more waiting for us that we can start to look beyond our present trials and into the victory that we have been assured of in Jesus Christ.

We don’t have to get buried under the rubble of each day--what we are called to do is to search for God’s “foxhole,” the shelter of the Most High, and rest there as we watch His miracles unfold in our daily lives!

O Lord, what great miracles you do!
Psalm 92:5 (NLT)

Loving Him,
Diane