Do You Feel Safe?

Psalm 23:4, 118:5-6

Message No. 0755 | Twitter @GodandUs | www.wisdom-speaks.ca

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Hello readers! There’s a noticeably universal reaction when people’s safety is being seriously challenged. This reaction is triggered both by emotion and by reflex. However, in Psalm 23, David is an outlier as he shows no such reaction even in the face of death. What makes David so different from the rest of the population? This is what we will examine together this week.

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People are profiled based on non-verbal signs all the time. For example, if you are going into a country different from yours, and you are invited for a visa application interview, the interviewer will be watching your body movement, eye contact, and other non-verbal signs, just to see if they can catch your motivation for applying for the visa. Many people are being refused visas based on these signs. Also, even when you have a visa, if when you travel and you are passing through customs or immigration, you look worried, are fidgety or nervous or avoiding eye contacts, you are likely to be pulled over to secondary and asked further questions to determine your admissibility into the country. Many people have been sent back home just based on the characteristics they exhibited at the port of entry.

If you are in a safety-challenged situation, the way you behave is what really gives you up as to whether you are afraid or not. Some people will be sweating, some will miss their steps and even fall, some will be so scared they will be shaking, and even when they open their mouths to speak, their lips will be vibrating, showing how afraid they are of the situation they are about to go into. In Judges chapter 7 when God told Gideon to go into battle against the Midianites, there were 32,000 people enlisted to fight with Gideon. But the Lord, who sees both outside and inside, knew that most of those people were afraid and nervous. Therefore, He instructed Gideon to announce to the people that those who were afraid must depart at once from the battlefield. Amazingly, 22,000 people departed. Gideon may not have taken notice of these fearful people (they were too many, of course), but the Lord saw them.

The subject this week is, do you feel safe? Are you threatened by your environment or by the circumstances you face? Well, to start with, to say that a man can never be afraid might be extreme. Even the biggest of men of God can be afraid. In 1 Kings chapter 19, Elijah ran away from Jezebel even after his greatest victory over the prophets of Baal on mount Carmel. He was afraid that the evil lady, whose 450 prophets he had killed, would find him and kill him in revenge. How ironic! So, if an Elijah (a commander of fire) could run away from a lady, what makes David so different? The question lies in David’s experience with his God and Defender over many years, including empowering him so much that he tore the jaws of wild animals with his bare hands. This is why he could state very confidently in Psalm 23 verse 4:

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; For You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.

To some people, walking alone at night is frightening enough, let alone walking alone at night near a graveyard or in some dangerously isolated places. The hairs on People’s heads begin to stand straight as the fear becomes real. But why are we so fearful in situations like this? What happens to our claim that God is on our side, and He who is in us is greater than he who is in the world, and other recitations of this type. Is it all just talk?

The challenge for us is to really examine our proclaimed faith in God. Do we really mean it or is it all just bravado? When I am faced with frightening situations, my brain usually begins to comb through situations of the same nature in the past when God had come to my rescue. This does not completely erase the nervousness, but it helps to recall that God did it in the past, and why should He fail now, as the song writer wrote?

In a world where we experience constantly challenging situations, be it at home, abroad, in the work place, on a trip, in relationships and the health conditions of the people we love, we need our spiritual antennas to always shoot up and bring to our remembrance what God did for us in similar situations in the past, and with this, we need to develop the boldness that He will do it again. In situations that feel so scary and while others are running helter-skelter, not knowing what to do or how to react, we should not recede into fear or feel unsafe, rather, we need to stay calm and be the steady hands that bring solutions to our families and to the problems the world around us cannot solve. Can we do that?

What to Do?

Fear does not solve any problem, instead, it only compounds the situation. Let us lay off every fear and play back to God the deliverance that He had wrought for us in similar situations in the past. Even if God had never done it before, He can do it now, let alone if He did it in the past, it only shows that He can do it again. Don’t be afraid. Your God is in control.