“I know, O LORD, that Your judgments are right, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me. Let, I pray, Your merciful kindness be for my comfort, according to Your word to Your servant.”
—Psalm 119:75-76
TOO OFTEN believers forget that they are not their own, but belong to their faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. Think how often God sends something into our lives that disrupts our plans or brings us great sorrow and we respond by saying, “This is absolutely wrong!” You see, our sinful, rebellious heart always wants to be the center of the universe. We think everything must go exactly our way, according to our plan, and if it doesn’t then we loudly proclaim that it’s wrong. But the believer must repent of this sinful thinking and submit to the truth that Jesus is Lord and King; He is ruling all things in heaven and on earth according to His glorious plan. And because He is righteous and faithful, He sends trials, heartaches, pain, sickness, cancer, and death into our lives for the purpose of maturing, correcting, molding, conforming, and teaching the believer to trust in His mercy and to live by His Word.
WE READ IN Deuteronomy 8:2-3, “And you shall remember that the LORD your God led you all the way these forty years in the wilderness, to humble you and test you, to know what was in your heart, whether you would keep His commandments or not. So He humbled you, allowed you to hunger, and fed you with manna which you did not know nor did your fathers know, that He might make you know that man shall not live by bread alone; but man lives by every word that proceeds from the mouth of the LORD.” And so, the psalmist declares, “I know, O Lord that in faithfulness You have afflicted me.”
WHEN WE BELIEVE this truth, it will lead us in times of affliction to pray as the psalmist prays in our text, “Let, I pray, Your merciful kindness be for my comfort, according to Your word to Your servant.” That is a prayer from the psalmist in the midst of trial and affliction. Have you ever thought about the fact that God sends trials and afflictions into our lives to teach us to pray as the psalmist? Where would our prayer life be without trials and affliction? You see, afflictions work on our heart and cause us to come before God in humble adoration repeating the words of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thy will be done!” Afflictions cause the child of God to say as Job, “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away – blessed be the name of the Lord!” And so, our text teaches us to value God’s mercy and love for us in Jesus Christ. But so often we over look these blessings and instead we value highly the earthly things and a life of ease. However, Scripture says that the earthly things God gives are not the great possession; the great possession is union with Christ and through this union we know the loving kindness of our God.
AND WHEN WE know God’s loving kindness then we know that whatever He sends upon us in this troubled life comes to us from His love. If a person doesn’t know God’s loving kindness, then when suffering comes, he becomes bitter and resentful. And so the psalmist prays that the merciful kindness of God might be His comfort to teach him that all the sorrows, afflictions, and trials in this life are not meant to destroy him, but are working together for his good, and we know this through the cross of Jesus Christ. God has given His Son to bear our sin and guilt through His death, and so we are assured by the Word of God that ALL things, even our suffering, pain and death, must work together for our salvation.
MAY THE WORDS of our text be heard coming from the mouth of every child of God who comes under the crucible of affliction, and may we learn to comfort our weary hearts in our faithful Savior, Jesus Christ. “I know, O LORD, that Your judgments are right, and that in faithfulness You have afflicted me. Let, I pray, Your merciful kindness be for my comfort, according to Your word to Your servant.”
Friday Devotional: August 23, 2024
In Christ,
Pastor S. Henry