Refuge (contd)
Meditation 9: Our constant Protector
Psalm 121:3 May he not let your foot slip-- he who watches over you will not slumber; 4 indeed, he who watches over Israel will neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The LORD watches over you-- the LORD is your shade at your right hand; 6 the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The LORD will keep you from all harm-- he will watch over your life; 8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Good morning dear Father, Thank You for being here available for me to spend this time with You. Please, dear Lord, open Your servant’s eyes to some rays of Your glory that will grip my soul and fill me with joy. Let me see You and know You more. Enlighten the eyes of my heart, glorious Father, and give me the Spirit of wisdom and revelation that I may know You better. Out of Your glorious riches, strengthen me with power by Your Spirit in my inner being that Christ may dwell in my heart by faith.
Meet with me in this room this hour, dear Lord. Teach my heart to seek hard after You today – earnestly, with all my heart and all my soul.
Warm my heart with the truth of Your promised protection. Teach me, dear Lord, and help me to understand this psalm.
What is wonderful about this attribute:
This psalm speaks of constant, continual protection. How does that fit with the fact that we suffer trials and severe hardship – and death? Verse seven sounds almost like it promises there will be no trouble at all, but clearly there is in verse one or he wouldn’t be looking for help.
Evidently this protection is like the protection Jesus promised in Luke 21:16-18, where He said we would be betrayed by family and friends, hated, persecuted and even put to death, but not a hair of our heads will perish.
As a Christian you will go through all the perils of day and night just like everyone else – maybe even more so, but in walking through them you will find the Lord walking with you sheltering you from any real harm. You might experience painful trouble, hardship, persecution, famine, nakedness, danger, and sword; you may face death all day long; you will face death, demons, and every other hostile power in creation; but none of it will be able to separate you from the love of Christ.
God delivered David in various different ways; sometimes quietly through providence, sometimes indirectly through people, and sometimes obviously through sheer supernatural power. God’s tools for protecting and saving us are just as wide and varied as are our trials. For every new struggle we face God has ten new creative ways of saving us. And most of those ways are not obvious.
When He works through people it seems to us like it is those people who are the authors, rather than the mere tools of our deliverance. When He uses quiet providence it seems like luck or chance are the authors of our deliverance – or that there was no deliverance because there was no actual threat.
Dear Father in heaven, You move heaven and earth in Your mighty providence to fulfill Your great and precious promises to Your servant. Forgive me, dear God, when I have attributed that to luck and not to You. Forgive me for acting as though You don’t even exist when You do Your most marvelous (but quiet) providential acts. Teach me to love Your deliverance. The advantage of the worrier is he can at least see the hundred perils a day that You deliver him from. You have been so gracious in protecting me that instead of appreciating Your protection I have tended to just assume there is no real danger out there. Open my eyes to see what it is You are protecting me from.
Thank You, dear God, for those times when You do let me see – times of fear and terror. They are painful to endure, but if it weren’t for them I would never have any idea what Your protection and deliverance is like. Teach me not to ever waste any of my fears. Let me use them all to train my heart to delight in Your protection and deliverance.
What effect would it have on your heart if you were to consciously experience God’s watchcare today?
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Experiencing this attribute:
For this promise to really have an effect on your heart it is necessary to have an awareness and consciousness of the dangers from which you are being protected. When we think of dangers, we think mostly of all the painful trials from which we are not exempt. But those are not the real threats.
They are only the context of the real threats. The real threats are those forces that would snatch you from His hand, that would push you into sin, that would draw you away from God’s presence and that would turn your heart cold against the Lord. Those threats that would override His salvation and drag you into hell. Those threats that would turn your heart against Him so that you would hate Him instead of loving Him and despise His Word instead of finding it sweet to your taste, and experience His laws as burdensome instead of delightful, and prefer some false treasure to the true treasure, and became blind to the truth about God – unable to perceive His glory; enslaved completely to unbreakable shackles of sin buried in a dungeon so deep that there is no escape. That is the real danger, and from all that you have access to protection and shelter.
Open my eyes to those, the real dangers. Let me think nothing of the trials that are not real dangers. They are only tools in Your hand that You use as protective armor for me.
They can only benefit me; they can never cause my foot to slip.
What comfort would be in our hearts if we could think continually about this! To be aware of the threats and then to be comforted by the Lord’s 24/7 vigilant watch care over us. You can sleep only because He never sleeps. If He rested or was distracted for even one second, one of the eternally deadly missiles of the enemy would certainly destroy you utterly.
Think: Whenever you feel fear let that remind you to ask “Is this something that can do any real harm?” If so, you are protected from it, and if not, what’s to fear?
Promise to trust today:
Psalm 121:7 The LORD will keep you from all harm-- he will watch over your life; 8 the LORD will watch over your coming and going both now and forevermore.
Write your own prayer:
