So he said to them, “When you pray, say, Father, reveal who you are. Set the world right. Keep us alive with three square meals. Keep us forgiven with you and forgiving others. Keep us safe from ourselves and the devil.”
Luke 11:2-4 (The Message)
Only the very inexperienced are surprised when something breaks, fails to function, or goes wrong. The older you get the more you realize that sooner or later everything in the world wears out, clogs up, rusts, becomes diseased, withers, rots, dies or becomes useless. This is the disastrous result of sin. Sin covers creation like dew. Nothing escapes. Everything is affected.
When you think about the world covered with the curse of sin, you almost want to yell out, ” Get me out of here!” God will, in due time, get us out of this vale of tears. But in the meantime we should cherish our life as priceless. Our life is God’s gift. Eternal life is his greater gift. True, we are still in an evil world, but we will overcome. “He who overcomes will inherit all this, and I will be his God and he will be my son” ( Rev. 21:17)
When we trudge through this sin-cursed world we pray, “Lord deliver us from evil.” We don’t expect to be engulfed in a pink cloud and be spared all the agonies, disappoints and heartaches of life. Evil is a part of life. When we pray, “deliver us from evil,” we pray that God in His good pleasure might turn some of that evil into good as he turned the hatred of Joseph’s eleven brothers into the good of raising Joseph to the position of leadership in Egypt, or as the Lord strengthened Job through affliction.
My favorite comfort passage at the bedside of a downhearted Christian is 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.”
God can and does turn the evil of life into great blessings for his children, so we can trust him in our present situation of life. These are hard and uncertain times, but God is greater than any circumstances we might face.
“Greater is he that is in me, than he than is in the world”
Christian Blessings
I Love you all,
Pastor John
Thank for your encouraging words through the Pastor’s pen 🙏. Lois W.