The Distressed Rescuer
Verse for Today: Monday, October 03, 2011
Isaiah 63:9a – In their distress He too was distressed, and the angel of His presence saved them.
It is amazing to realize that our Lord feels all pain and distress that we go through. Those who hurt us are in effect touching Him. As He shares in our pain and distress, our Lord sympathizes with us in all our life experiences. Why he feels our distresses is because we are His special concern. He is our head and we are His body. He is one with us and He lives in us. Because He is so much a part of us and we are a part of Him that all our experiences become His. He travels with us and engages with us in all our affairs. He carries us on His shoulders when we are unable to walk. He walks slowly so that we can walk with Him when we are tired and weak and are unable to walk fast. He knows our needs and deals with us accordingly. When we stop to rest, He stops with us and gives us rest. He never drags us along the way and makes us run fast. When we go astray, He comes in search of us and brings us back to Himself. His dealings with us are always with compassion and love. Of course, if we have gone astray, we will have to suffer the consequences of such disobedience. But even in that, He gives us His grace and teaches us lessons to keep ourselves on His track. His goodness and mercy always follow us during our sojourn. He is our shade in the heat of this wilderness journey. He wipes our tears and comforts us with words of encouragement from His Word. All of these ministries are performed by our Lord for us because He loves us so much. So when we go through distressing experiences in life, we can always go to Him and tell Him all about our difficulties. He will take us through the waters of the Red Sea and Jordan and the waves of the Sea of Galilee. He will encompass around us when we are in the fiery furnaces that this world puts us in so that the flames will not swallow us up.
Dear friend, are you in distress because of the peculiar situations that you are going through now? Do you feel that you are slowly getting swallowed up by the waves and the flames created by your situations? Remember, your Lord is with you in all your experiences. He feels the pressure you experience. Your pain becomes His pain. All your adverse experiences are felt by Him. When He knows fully well what you are going through, He comes to take the pressure, pain and pestilence from you and put it on Himself so that you will be relieved of its negative impact. He stands between you and your situations so that the pain inflicted by your situation will fall on Him. He is the Lord who cries with those who cry and feels the pinch of poverty, sickness, loneliness, rejection, despising and mockery that His children go through. He fills you with His Spirit so that His joy will fill your heart and thus your distress gets evicted from you. This was the joy Joseph had even when he went through the experience of the pit, false accusation and imprisonment. Peter, Paul and Silas went through such experiences and found the sympathetic and supportive presence of the Lord in all their circumstances. The Lord makes these circumstances times of great learning experiences for us about Him and His grace. He pours in abundance of grace for His children to go through all situations that He allows in the lives of His children to help them handle their situations. It also strengthens us in our faith and trust in Him. He deputes His angels to rescue us from our difficult situations in mysterious ways which are beyond our comprehension. The peace that He gives us in our difficult circumstances is beyond all understanding. Today we need to remind ourselves of the fact that our Lord takes our experiences on Him and gives us His grace to deal with it so that we will grow in faith in Him.
Isaiah 63:9b – In His love and mercy, He redeemed them; He lifted them up and carried them all the days of old.
Thought for Today
Our mutual fellowship with the Lord in sufferings intensifies our intimacy with each other.
Our mutual fellowship with the Lord in sufferings intensifies our intimacy with each other.
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