Our Refuge and Strength

Lord God, our Refuge, and our Strength.  You are ever present to help us if we would only learn to trust you.  Father God, you have become my Father, as your Son, my brother and the most beloved friend took from me my sin and gave me His righteousness, love and Spirit. Thank you Jesus, Savior, Friend, and Refuge of Hope.  As we approach you, Lord, through our Friend and Spirit, give us a greater sense of you being our trust, our strength, our hope.  Lord Jesus, you said how difficult it was for a rich man to enter your kingdom, may we count things of this world that may bring us a sense of peace and security as of being nothing when looking to and finding these things in you.  Whether in stress or seeming peace may we look to you more so and more frequently as our peace, our strength and security.  Constantly looking to you, breathing in the peace you have given many of us and are so willing to give to us all.  Lord, Spirit, Helper, help us, we ask, to become better practiced at looking to you, breathing in your true peace, whether we be in states of war, peace, anxiety, or calm.  Give us the sense to look past these to the peace and strength you have for us which surpasses mere human peace, strength and security.

“Behold, this is the man who didn’t make God his strength,
but trusted in the abundance of his riches,
and strengthened himself in his wickedness.”
But as for me, I am like a green olive tree in God’s house.
I trust in God’s loving kindness forever and ever.  —from Ps. 52

Lord, we are looking and many of us are finding more and more that you are full of loving kindness so much more so than we knew a few short years ago.  We are coming to see that we have been planted like a green olive tree in God’s house.  Some us praying and looking to you, who do not know this so much, give us the patience to find you thus so.  The Sun seemed to rise ever so slowly for me, but the Sun has risen and I now feel and know His warmth and shining on me.  I am confident Lord, in you doing the same thing for those praying and agreeing with me and others in seeking you, with confident expectation.  Lord bless, protect, and shine on and lift faces to yourself, to receive from you your peace.  We ask this in the name of peace, the One who has made and can make peace between you and us. Lord Jesus, Friend Jesus, our only strength, and refuge.

A Peaceful Truth

In my past I saw Jesus more as a standard or law to live up to.  I saw Him as being disappointed with and condemning of me.  I tried to be more righteous, to be good enough.  I knew I could not earn my salvation totally.  I knew Jesus had to make up the difference.  Yet, I put too much on my self to win Jesus’s help, to clean and reform myself partway, in the hopes that Jesus would see my efforts and come to help.  What a stressful and impossible form of Christianity.

God drew me truly to Jesus.  A true trust in Jesus, for God to do all from start to finish through mercy, love, and faith given me by Him.  Trusting His righteousness and mercy not my own.

I want to look at psalm 85.  Continuing the idea of thinking and meditating on God’s goodness, character, mercy, and love.  Filling our minds with these beautiful and peaceful thoughts of Him.

You have forgiven the iniquity of your people.  You have covered all their sin.  Selah.  Psalm 85:2 

One of the first things we must, and I mean “we must” learn well is: Through Jesus, His mercy, His love, His blood, His work, our sins are forgiven.  He covers all our sin.  Not just the sin we have seemed to attain victory over.  He covers all our sin.  This is the mercy of God, to me, this is the most important and most; love to God, and peace to us, producing thought there is.  Through His mercy and love, He covers our sin.  He covers our remaining sin, that sin we cannot attain complete freedom from.  He breaks the chains of sin by covering our sin and crediting us with righteousness, righteousness we are not even close to actually living out day to day.

This is where our faith in God can really become established and settled into Him, and out of ourselves.  If we do not come to a settled faith here, finding much greater peace in Him, we will always be in a performance type of Christianity.  Our faith and trust in God will only be as strong as our last performance. We will become those who begin to compare our performance with the performance of others.  Since most all of us will give ourselves much more slack than we give others, you can see where this will lead us.

God wants us to have an honest, desperate, and stubborn faith in Him.  He many times puts us in situations where peace can be found no where else, we must run to Him.  He desires us to cling tightly to Jesus, to His word, to His words of promise and peace to us.  To be finding peace and comfort in His psalms written for us, in verses like Psalm 85:2, to be finding beautiful, peace producing verses such as those scattered through out the book of Isaiah, to be searching for and finding comfort and peace in His word.

The seed sown in good ground:

That in the good ground, these are such as in an honest and good heart, having heard the word, hold it tightly, and produce fruit with patience. Luke 8:15