The Promise

 "Call on Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me." Psalm 50:15...."You cannot live zealously for Jesus while living as a victim of circumstances." Chris Tiegreen

I believe in a God who promises to deliver His people, and His people can find themselves in countless situations that require His deliverance. The question for us is, just what constitutes His deliverance? What does His deliverance entail? What are our expectations of it?

I think most of us, including myself, have almost always seen His deliverance as Him moving on our behalf to evacuate us out of an unwanted, usually dangerous situation. We want out of it, and that's human. "Lord, get me out of here," has been a prayer of almost all of us at one time or another. That's our first desire. Does it shock you to know that it is almost never His?

I have learned, and continue to learn, that though the Lord is completely faithful in His promise to deliver His people, His methods for doing so rarely seem to involve removing us from the circumstances we hate, fear, and want to escape immediately. For me, most of His works of deliverance have involved Him leaving me right where I was, but doing a work of deliverance nonetheless. That work was not seen on the outside, but on my inside. In my spirit, my heart, and my mind. He doesn't seek to deliver us out of something so much as to deliver us in it.

Being delivered in the midst of our circumstances is a concept we neither understand or desire, but it results in His doing a work in us that an evacuation of us from those circumstances could never accomplish. Too many of His people allow themselves to be imprisoned by their life situations. They feel that the only way they can be free is if God does something to change the "landscape" around them, whether it be in the form of difficult people, or hard places, or painful suffering. We want what is external to change. God wants us to change. He wants to so work that no circumstance, hard place, or time of suffering can chain His Spirit within us. This is what it is to be delivered in the dark place, yet not out of it. Here we discover the truth of His Word, "He that is free in Me is free indeed."

It is human to want to be removed from the midst of the hard place. It is Christlike to remain in that place, yielded to Him, and trust Him to work within us His purposes for us. To be delivered not out of that place, but into the place of Christlikeness. He delivers by breaking all the power of fear, despair, and hopelessness, that seeks to destroy us in that place. It is in that work of deliverance that we find the truth of the promise. To take us out of a situation doesn't break the power of those above things. They remain to assault us another day in another situation. Their is broken when He delivers us from their power without changing the situation we face. That is the promise, and it is your promise and mine. He will deliver.

Blessings,

Pastor O