Daily Devotional – April 16, 2020

Faith Baptist Church

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And, did you know that a human who is confined eats like a panda?

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That's why we call this thing a pandemic, a pandemic.

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So you homeschool students, you can impress your teacher with that little tidbit of truth, whether that teacher is your mom, dad, or a teacher at a school somewhere.

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By the way, many of you are working from home these days, and that presents some challenges in and of itself,

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I'm sure. But here's a question to ask your company's human resources director.

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So if you're working away on your computer at home, doing your job, and all of a sudden your chair collapses under you, and you hurt your wrist, and you therefore can't do your work.

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Do you get workman's comp for that? Just wondering about that.

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Well, I came across this quote the other day, and I thought it was some good food for thought. And this is serious, so this is good stuff.

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So, get this, fear doesn't stop death, it stops life.

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And worrying does not take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away today's peace.

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Fear doesn't stop death, it stops life. And worrying doesn't take away tomorrow's troubles, it takes away today's peace.

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So think on that one. Well, let me go back to these couple of passages from the

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Psalms that I looked at the last few days and talk about the idea of God delivering his people. Psalm 69, 14, deliver me out of the mire and let me not sink.

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Let me be delivered from them that hate me and out of the deep waters. And Psalm 23, 4, yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

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I will fear no evil for you are with me. Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.

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So the last couple of days we've been considering whether we should expect God to deliver us from a disaster or from a disease like COVID -19.

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Some Christians seem to think that if we just have enough faith, God will deliver us and we'll never experience any of the problems or the disease or whatever from COVID -19.

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But is that so? Is that what God tells us in his word? I do believe that God does deliver his people, but he does so in at least three ways.

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And as I mentioned, there can be some overlap in these three things and there can be some degree of synonymous nature to them.

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But here's a way I think we can distinguish the way God delivers. Sometimes God delivers from, other times

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God delivers out of, and thirdly, God delivers through.

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Now we've already looked at some examples of God delivering his people from harmful things, or even as the psalmist prays, let me be delivered from them that hate me.

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And frankly, this may be the most common form of deliverance if we take into consideration all of the ways

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God does this and we don't even know it. We can be surrounded by danger and God in his grace delivers us from that danger.

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We didn't even know it was there. But we also recognize that sometimes

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God delivers his people out of dangerous, miserable, or otherwise harmful situations.

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Again, the psalmist prayed, deliver me out of the mire, out of the deep water.

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This I believe is far more rare. I think this is more of a miraculous kind of deliverance.

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Let's think about Jonah, thrown overboard in the sea, and he's going to drown, except that God delivered him out of that drowning water by way of a great fish.

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Well then there's a third major way that God delivers his people, and that is through the crisis.

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So in this case, you're personally going to experience the pain, the hardship, the heartache, the agony of the crisis, but God in his grace brings you out on the other side.

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He brings you through that, and I think this is probably our most common conscious experience of God's deliverance.

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We go through things and God delivers us through them, and oftentimes we discover that the process itself has benefited us greatly.

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Think of what the psalmist said in Psalm 119, verse 71, where he said,

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It is good for me that I was afflicted, that I might learn your statutes.

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So once again, in this example, or in this kind of deliverance, we can look at the Hebrew people for some illustrations.

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After God delivered them from some of the plagues and then delivered them out of Egypt, out of that house of bondage, he delivered them through the wilderness, and that experience of going through the wilderness wasn't a pleasant little hike on a crisp spring morning.

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Remember, God's people experienced thirst. They experienced hunger. They experienced opposition.

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They had some internal strife and so much more. They even had to deal with day in and day out, packing up the camp, moving the camp, setting up camp every time that cloud moved.

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They had to pack and move, settle in until the cloud moved again.

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But yet on the verge of entering the promised land, they could look back and see how

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God delivered them through this experience of the wilderness. God gave them water to drink when they were thirsty.

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God gave them food to eat when they were hungry. God gave them clear evidence of who were the leaders that they should be following so that that dealt with the opposition and ended the strife.

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God gave them victory over hostile opponents. On top of all that,

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Moses could say to the people, remember, look back.

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Look at your clothes. Your clothes never wore out. Look at your shoes. Your shoes never wore out the whole time you went through the wilderness.

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We can see the same kind of deliverance in the New Testament, can't we? Again, think about the apostle Paul, his first, that first lengthy prison experience.

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He went through the prison experience. He was arrested in Jerusalem. He was mistreated, physically mistreated, beaten, falsely accused.

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He was kept in prison, even though there were no substantive charges that justified his imprisonment.

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And eventually he had to appeal to go to Caesar to be tried before Caesar. And so he experiences a couple of years under house arrest while he's waiting for that trial.

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And the whole time he's aware of the possibility of being executed.

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And there he is. And yet God delivered him through it all.

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He came out of that experience and went on to minister and serve in many different ways and for many years.

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But don't forget that journey to Rome itself, remember? He left Caesarea and he had to get into a ship.

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And that ship was to take him to Rome. But en route to Rome, the ship experienced that gale force wind of the

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Mediterranean nor 'easter. And that storm resulted in a life -threatening shipwreck.

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Everyone on that ship should have perished in the shipwreck. And they could have, were it not for the grace of God.

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And the thing of it is, Paul experienced every detail, every hardship in that storm and in that ship experience.

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Yet God delivered him through it. And so it may be with COVID -19 or with some other disease or hardship that comes your way.

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You may face the same level of pain and difficulty, distress, heartache, maybe grief that somebody who's an atheistic pagan experiences.

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Yet your God graciously will deliver you through what he doesn't deliver you from or out of.

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Don't forget Psalm 23, verse 4. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,

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I will fear no evil. Why? For you are with me, your rod and your staff.

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They comfort me. So God may deliver you from, he may deliver you out of, or he may deliver you through difficult circumstances.

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Let's give God thanks and praise for his deliverance. We thank you, our

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God, for your grace and your kindness to your people. We thank you that we can trust you and find you faithful to meet the needs even through challenging difficult circumstances.

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We can trust you to deliver your own. We thank you that sometimes you deliver us from hurt and harmful things.

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Sometimes you miraculously deliver us out of those things. And thank you,

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Father, that we can count on you to deliver us through them. May we learn what you would have us to learn.

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May we profit from those things that you take us through and deliver us through. This we pray in Jesus' name.

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Amen. All right, well, I trust the Lord will give you a good rest of your