You Are In His Hands
There will be times in your life of great joy and fulfillment, and there will be times of deep need. There will be days when you feel like the Lord is closer than a breath, and there will be days when you can barely believe you will hear his voice again.
Yet we trust in him because we put our hope in the God who holds all our times in his hands.
Psalm 31:14-15 ESV says, “But I trust in you, O Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors!”
Prayers for help can be an odd thing for the believer, but I think that has a lot to do with the church context we were raised in. I know that many churches have been emphasizing God’s goodness and grace without proclaiming the cost of following Jesus. They seem to show off the benefits of following the Lord while minimizing the burden of laying your life down. Among these hidden costs is the reality that in following God, all other short-term sources of hope have to be abandoned.
I think Psalm 73 is probably the best wake-up call chapter in the whole book. The Psalmist contemplates the apparent glamor of wickedness, saying, “Behold, these are the wicked; always at ease, they increase in riches.” Unburdened by the call to holiness and surrender, the wicked are free to soothe themselves with whatever gains they can find.
The righteous are left life David, who is crying out in Psalm 31:9-10: “Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.”
What hope is there for the righteous? Clearly, the promise of God’s hope is not equivalent to a life of endless ease and comfort. Following God in righteousness means we will always be going against the grain of self-preservation and comfort. It means that we are going to find ourselves often laying down our swords and shields and lifting our hands to God for help while others go on fighting.
Surrender requires us to stop and be vulnerable, but that is the exact place where God meets us with his grace. And we only have to look a few chapters back to see the reward of trusting in God’s promise of protection.
The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear?
The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?Psalm 27:1 ESV
Our ultimate hope is that God, our stronghold, will deliver us. Though moments of burden and suffering will come, we know are given the power to live in the light without fear. Until the day of our eternal reward, we are given the invitation to worship God at every turn. In the face of adversity and in the joy of blessing, we can say, “You are my God.” We can live in hope and peace, knowing that God sustains us.
Amen.
