TUESDAY February 11th
Psalm 18:2
‘The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, my God, my rock, in whom I take refuge, my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.’
In John 14:1, Jesus said to the disciples. ‘Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me’, (or ‘You believe in God, believe also in me’).
Jesus is ensuring that the disciples understood clearly that he was equal with God, as John 1:1 has already reminded us ‘In the beginning was the Word . . . and the Word was God.’ Therefore he wants them and of course all who come to faith in him, such as you and I to understand that we can trust Jesus, and linking this thought to the verses we looked at previously from the Psalms, indicating who the Lord is and what he has become to each one of us, it means that in Jesus and through Jesus we find all we need to sustain us through this life, and not only in life but also in death, for as we see from Psalm 23 as we walk through the valley of the shadow of death the Lord will be with us.
We have such a wonderful Saviour!
Now, some of the thoughts that I will share from these verses will have already been touched upon in this series of devotions, but it does us good to be constantly reminded, for each day, our circumstances can change in the blink of an eye, but we have this wonderful assurance that Jesus doesn’t change. What he was yesterday, he still is today, and will be tomorrow and he always will be, and therefore we can trust him explicitly.
The Lord is my . . .’, I wonder which one springs to the forefront of your mind, because it means something extra special to you. You have perhaps been through an experience, and it was at that time that you felt the nearness of Jesus towards you in one of those ways, such as maybe your rock in a time of trouble.
We all know him in every one of these ways but I think first of ‘my deliverer’.
We were in a horrible pit, we were helpless and hopeless, but Jesus came to deliver us, to rescue us, to lift us up from out of the horrible pit and to place our feet upon a solid rock, a firm foundation. The word pit can be used to describe where we were as sinners such as we see it in Psalm 103:4 ‘who redeems your life from the pit’, but can also be a reference to where all sinners will go, for example in Psalm 28:1, David in crying out to the Lord says this, ‘To you, O LORD, I call; my rock, be not deaf to me, lest, if you be silent to me, I become like those who go down to the pit.’
The Lord is my . . ., well, the Lord is our deliverer, he has lifted us from the pit, and he will keep us from going to the pit of Hell and as a result because we know him as our Lord, we have this assurance as we read from Psalm 23 that we will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.’