Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

The eternal God is your refuge,
    and underneath are the everlasting arms.
He will drive out your enemies before you,
    saying, ‘Destroy them!’

• Deuteronomy 33:27

“I want to be all Yours! I invite You to wean me from other dependencies. You have shown me that my security rests in You alone-not in other people, not in my circumstances.
“Trying to depend only on You sometimes feels like walking on a tightrope. Yet I don’t need to be afraid of falling because Your everlasting arms are a safety net underneath me.
“Please help me to keep looking ahead to You, Jesus. I know that You’re always before me, beckoning me on-one step at a time. As I spend quiet time with You, I can almost hear You whispering, ‘Follow Me, beloved.’”

• Sarah Young, Jesus Listens (devotion for 2 January)

God is our refuge and our strength.

But then, the promise in the Scripture above is conditional.  The people of Israel did not keep God as the only thing that they worshipped.

I have a little heartburn with Ms. Young’s third paragraph.  “Looking ahead to Jesus” is not the same as keeping our eyes on Jesus.

When I had a job, I might get two or three weeks of vacation on January the first.  I looked ahead toward that vacation, but I did not focus solely on that vacation.  There were many days that the vacation time that I had earned never entered my mind.

The idea about God being “before me” might mean a soldier being the “point” on a military patrol.  Yes, I have safety in that the point man will possibly trip the trip wire before I do or get shot or step on a land mine.

Jesus is by my side.  The Holy Spirit indwells within me.  They can see beyond time and space.  They know what is coming, and I trust their protection.  By my side and within are more intimate than “before me.”  I have heard of patrols in Vietnam where they went the same route they took the day before and the patrol was torn apart by booby traps.  But the same patrol had “gone before them” down the same trail, but there was no intimate contact with the one providing refuge.

With God as our refuge, we have the latest intelligence report, up to less than a nanosecond delay.

And one of the things I hear Jesus tell me is, “I think you might not want to take that particular trail.”  Yes, God is my refuge, but sometimes you have to use wisdom as to when you should leave and when you should hunker down.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.