Meditations

“Rejoice not over me, O my enemy, when I fall I shall rise; when I sit in darkness… the Lord will bring me out to the light and then my enemy will see, and shame shall cover the one who said to me, ‘Where is your God?’ ” (Micah 7:8-9) “I waited patiently for the Lord; He inclined His ear to me and heard my cry. He drew me up from the pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock.” (Psalm 40:1-2)

Nothing cripples a child worse than a “helicopter” parent that hovers over their every movement and decision. There simply is no learning going on until we face a trial on our own. Something as simple as a new, unopened, jar of pickles can teach the most stubborn child that they must depend on their parents for certain things that only adults can handle, but if they’ve never experienced the exasperation of having to admit that fact, they may well learn it someday from the wrong sources. “Are there times in the Christian life when God chooses to withhold His presence from us? He is, of course, always present and yet our sense of His presence may be blocked so that we feel covered by darkness. My favorite passage of Scripture regarding darkness and the feeling of being left alone is Micah 7:8-9. It teaches us what I call ‘gutsy guilt.’ ” (John Piper)

“As a Christian, we know that we ought to follow the command of Paul writing in Philippians to be joyful always (Phil 4:4). We know we ought to be happy in all circumstances but sometimes that’s just not happening. In those times, as David puts it, we wait patiently in the pit, expecting the Lord to appear in due course to put a new song in our heart. (Psalm 40:3) So we own this time of shortcoming, acknowledge it’s bad, but not to the point of hopeless despair. We look away from ourselves in the darkness and look to Christ. We preach the truth to ourselves that even when we can’t see God, we know He sees us. As a desperate Jewish fugitive scrawled on an underground cellar wall in Cologne during WWII, ‘I believe in the sun even when I cannot see it shining and I believe in God even when He is silent.’ He knows me. He is with me. We throw these truths in the devil’s face. We stick him with the sword of the Spirit!” (Piper, “Ask John,” 2/6/13) As Jesus correctly taught us, the best response to Satan’s whispers is always to order him to get behind us and brandish the Word of God. (Eph 6:10-11 and vs.17-18)

David