AP

Psalm 66:10-12  For you, God, tested us; you refined us like silver.  You brought us into prison and laid burdens on our backs.  You let people ride over our heads; we went through fire and water, but you brought us to a place of abundance.

One of the reasons why I love reading the Psalms, and why I find them so helpful and encouraging in my daily walk with the Lord, is the way they lift my weary eyes from the problems of this world and point them to my Sovereign God’s bigger (and therefore more accurate) perspective.  Today’s verses do this in two ways.

Firstly, they remind me that God is sovereign, and therefore that everything that happen’s to me and the people I love is part of the outworking of his will and purpose in my life and theirs.  As hard as this fact might be for me to comprehend at times, I am reminded that it is always true: the burdens that are laid on me are not accidental, but are laid by him, and every one of them comes into the ‘all’ the Apostle Paul wrote about in Romans 8:28: “And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.”

It applies to the people who try (and often succeed) to get the better of me, and any ‘fire and flood’ I might have to endure.  It is all part of his closely controlled, but very necessary, refining process!  I can’t describe how comforting it is to know this, as Paul did, even though in my fallen nature I have to be reminded of it from God’s Word on a daily basis!

Secondly, God’s ‘Big Picture’ perspective reminds me that my relatively ‘short’ earthly pilgrimage (85 years compared with Eternity) pales into insignificance in the light of the ‘place of abundance’ that lies ahead of me beyond the grave.  “‘Forever with the Lord’, ‘Amen’, ‘so let it be’!  Life from the dead is in that word, ’tis immortality!  Here in this body, pent, absent from him I roam, yet nightly pitch my moving tent a day’s march nearer home. My Father’s house on high, home of my soul, how near; at times to faith’s foreseeing eye thy golden gates appear! Ah! Then my spirit faints to reach the land I love, the bright inheritance of saints, Jerusalem above. … … So when my latest breath shall rend the veil in twain, by death I shall escape from death, and life eternal gain.  Knowing as I am known, how shall I love that word, and oft repeat before the throne, ‘Forever with the Lord’!” (James Montgomery)

– Bruce Christian