Laid Out To Look Up
“How long, O Lord? For this time is so very hard!”
This opening prayer expresses well the sentiment, I believe, felt by so many Christians at this time. We ought not to be surprised that we are going through rough and tough times, for our beloved Lord Jesus tells us, “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I myself have overcome the world.”
My blog reader, are Jesus’ words not true and fitting throughout our lives, but especially at this time when the COVID-19 pandemic is raging wildly through our country and the whole world? Is it not true that time and again you have tribulations by whatever names you may call them? Problems? Troubles? Headaches? Heartaches? Pains in the neck?
Let us not stop to consider only the pandemic we see happening in the world around us. Let us also stop to reflect upon all the tribulations and troubles and hardships and heartaches that otherwise come into our lives. They are many and varied. To mention some possibilities: Illnesses. Diseases. Allergies. Permanent disabilities. Surgeries. Deaths of loved ones. Grief. Loneliness. Accidents. Blizzards. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Floods. Wars. Persecutions. Broken marriages, families and homes. Lost Jobs. Financial setbacks.
In conversations that I have with individuals, in emails that I receive from other individuals, I am repeatedly and routinely hearing about the tribulations that others are having and going through. In this world they are experiencing exactly what Jesus says his Christian people would go through – tribulations! When I hear of these things, in my heart I do what Paul urged us all to do, “Weep with those who weep!”
A lot of weeping is going on. Right now, front and center, in everyone’s mind is the coronavirus pandemic. I cannot quote the latest statistics, because by the time I finish writing this blog, those statistics would be old and outdated. The numbers of confirmed cases and deaths are increasing by the minute. We Americans are now being told that in our country there could be one million plus cases of the coronavirus with a mortality rate skyrocketing as high as one to two hundred thousand deaths! That is a staggering amount! Its numbers really hit home when one stops to realize that in comparison about 250,000 soldiers were killed in battle during World War II!
To the best of my knowledge as of right now no one in my family has been infected with the coronavirus. But across our United States, and throughout the world, the number of confirmed cases is growing rapidly. A lot of weeping is being done especially over the thousands of deaths of family members. Since the coronavirus pandemic is adversely affecting millions of people’s health and wealth, as I discussed in my blog Making Spiritual Sense Of The Coronavirus, many are crying over their ill health and lost wealth. The country is also lamenting the loss of a lot of businesses that have been forced to close down and the jobs that have disappeared along with them in an effort to contain the virus by quarantining the people.
Such a quarantine due to the pandemic is probably a new experience for many people today. I can remember back to such a quarantine almost seventy-five years ago when I was a young boy. There was a lot of weeping going on then also. At that time the polio epidemic was striking down people, especially children. Public gathering places, such as the swimming pools, beaches, parks and playgrounds, were closed. Every day we turned on the radio to listen to the latest news about how many more people had contracted polio and how many more had died as a result of it. That was a frightening time of life. We children were quarantined to our houses and dared not step out of our yard. We were segregated completely from all other children.
In my previous blog Making Spiritual Sense Of The Coronavirus I shed light on one reason for God’s allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to come upon us. In this blog I want to share with you another reason. I summed up that reason in this blog’s title: Laid Out To Look Up.
There are times when God lays us out to get us to look up. It is one way that God can tap a person on the shoulder to get his attention and tell him, “Hey! Do you remember me?! I am the Lord your God!” I well remember fellow pastors remarking, “Sometimes the only way God can get a person to look up is by laying him out flat on his back!” Do not misunderstand me. I am not insinuating that all of you blog readers have drifted so far from God that God has to lay you out to get your attention. I am simply saying that at times God may put us through a very trying time to humble us, so we really get down on our knees to pray to him as we should at all times.
Times of crisis are often good motivators to pray. Our soldiers’ experiences out on the battlefields in World War II brought about the adage, “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” When the bullets were whizzing past their ears and the artillery shells were bursting over their heads, every soldier in his foxhole was down, praying to God to get him through it alive and in one piece! There were no atheists then. Hard times are still good motivators. In the case of some, I fear, that is about the only time they are moved to pray. The rest of the time God is far from their minds.
Here are a couple of biblical examples of what I am saying about crises motivating people to turn to God for help. One day Jesus and his disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee in a boat. Being exhausted, Jesus fell asleep on a cushion. A fierce storm suddenly arose, as the Sea of Galilee was known for. The waves were washing over the boat. The disciples, a number of whom were fishermen well acquainted with being out on the lake, were scared their boat would be swamped and they would be drowned. The danger prompted them to immediately turn to Jesus, wake him up, and beg him to save them. He did so by calming the storm. No crisis is too big for him to handle. (ref. Matthew 8:23-27)
The apostle Paul had many brushes with death. Beatings. Floggings. Arrests and imprisonments. Shipwrecks. And there was the riot of the silversmiths in Ephesus. (Acts 19:21-41) Paul described in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 the experience through which he and his fellow workers went. He said that they were distressed and oppressed far above their human ability to deal with the crisis of the riot. They despaired of their very lives. The sentence of death hung over their heads. They considered themselves as good as dead men. The danger drove them to the point of giving up all hope of getting out of that danger themselves. By faith they turned to God, fully relying on him to raise them from the dead.
Yes, at times we are laid out to look up. At this time when we find ourselves going through one kind of a crisis or another, whether it is due to the coronavirus or something else, it is time to look up to God in prayer. The Holy Spirit tells us in James 5:16, “The prayer of a righteous person is able to do much when it is at work.” The prayer of a Christian believer in Jesus is powerful. (This is not true for false Christians who are hypocrites and Christians in name only.)
We Christian believers, therefore, should be quick, not hesitant, to employ prayer to ask for help to remedy our problems. That is a problem that we have, however. We do not pray as often as we should. As Martin Luther said, God is more ready to hear and answer our prayers than we are to pray them. The Holy Spirit tells us, “Pray constantly.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:7, 8: “Keep asking, and it will be given to you; keep seeking, and you will find; keep knocking, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and to everyone who knocks it will be opened.”
The preceding words of Jesus not only tell us that we can pray with the confidence that our prayers will be heard, his words also tell us to be persistent in our prayers. We are to keep praying, more than just once. Jesus also teaches us in his Parable Of The Persistent Widow (ref. Luke 18:1-8) to always pray persistently without losing heart What should give us even more motivation and confidence to pray about the needs confronting us is that Jesus tells us our Father in heaven knows what we need (ref. Matthew 6:32), even before we ask him! (ref. Matthew 6:8)
When we are laid out, let us look up to our heavenly Father with a prayer on our lips. As for what prayer we pray, that is up to us. I like to start my day with a time of prayer and devotion. I often begin with this prayer:
By your grace and kindness, my Lord, I am here once again this morning. Unto you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; In you, my God, I trust! Thank you for this new day of your grace and mercy in Christ Jesus, my Lord and Savior. What do you have in store for me this day? Amen.
After that initial, opening prayer, I continue with the rest of my morning petitions. I pray unwritten prayers, usually, but not always, in silence, that flow from my heart in my own spur-of-the-moment-words about whatever the matters are that are on my mind and weighing on my heart. When I have concluded my prayers, I spend some amount of time reading the Lord’s Word from the Bible.
As for you, my reader, what prayer(s) are you most comfortable praying? You do pray, do you not? Praying is a natural fruit of faith of the Christian. If you do not pray, you have some kind of a spiritual problem that needs to be fixed in a hurry. Some of you may like to open your topical prayer book and turn to the subject matter that is on your mind at the moment. Others of you may read a meditation that ends with a prayer for the day. But those meditational prayers are not likely to touch on the matters of your life at the moment. They, then, are not carried to the Lord in prayer. You still need to pray over them on your own.
Given the context of this blog about being laid out in our troubles and tribulations, so that we look up, we could pray the model prayer that Jesus taught us to pray – the Lord’s Prayer. The fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” gets right to the heart of such matters as I am discussing with you in this blog. With this Fourth Petition we are asking our heavenly Father to provide us with everything we need for our bodily life and welfare. Would you, my blog reader, like to start ticking off some of those things? How about the food you need to eat? The necessities of life. Health. Gainful employment. A good government to oversee the affairs of your country for the good of you citizens, and to provide police protection, peace and safety, so you can live your life, work, and raise your family. All these things and more you can ask for in these few words, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
After we have poured out our heart to our heavenly Father to help us through our tribulations and needs, we can lay back at ease, knowing our Father will work everything out for us. I think the most outstanding example in the Bible of just relaxing and laying back because God is in control and at work in our behalf is the apostle Peter laying sound asleep in prison. (ref. Acts 12:1-6) It was the night before King Herod was going to bring Peter out before the Jewish crowds to be mocked and executed with a sword. Peter was bound with two chains between two military guards. Two more guards were watching over the locked-up prison. And Peter just laid there chained-up between the two guards, s-o-o-u-u-n-n-d asleep, like he did not have a single care or worry in the world. Do you think that you could lay back so calm, unconcerned about everything the night before you were to be dragged out to be mocked by the crowds and executed with a sword? I don’t think I could. But Peter did! What an example of letting go and letting God take care of things for us, as we are urged to do in Psalm 46:10, the Hebrew text.
More important, more needed, more crucial than even our prayers to God for his aid in our tribulations is the necessity for us to look up to God with our confession of sins and prayer for his forgiveness for Jesus’ sake. Our sins are so many. Our sins are so grievous. Our sins are so damning. We desperately need God’s forgiveness, lest we perish in hell with the devil and the damned for eternity. As grievous as our present coronavirus crisis is, and as agonizing as the other crises we may experience in our lifetime, they cannot begin to compare to the crisis and agony our Savior Jesus accepted and endured as our Substitute under God’s law to save us. Listen to how he said he felt on Tuesday of Holy Week, only two days before his betrayal, arrest, trials, beatings, scourging, and crucifixion began, “Now my soul is utterly troubled. And yet what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? Rather, for this reason I just came to this hour.” (John 12:27) His soul was utterly troubled, troubled to the very point of death, because of what lay before him in his Passion to save our souls for eternity. God laid on him the sins of us all. And he was laid out to suffer death on a cross, a death so terrible in suffering and pain we cannot imagine it. Through it all Jesus kept looking up.: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? . . . Into your hands I commend my spirit.” In this way Jesus overcame the world with all its tribulations and troubles that come upon us. In this way he saved us from our sins, Satan and eternal suffering in the fires of hell. In this way he made heaven our home where we are assured about ourselves that:
14. These are the ones who are coming out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
15 “For this reason they are before the throne of God,
And serve him day and night in his temple,
And he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them;
16 “They will hunger no more,
Nor will they thirst any more,
Nor will the sun beat[1] down upon them,
Nor any burning heat,
17 “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will shepherd them,
And will lead them to streams of living water;
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:14-17)
In the future whatever our crises and trials may yet prove to be, we stand before God forgiven, saved, and heirs of heaven. This is the important thing above all. May it always comfort us.
Remember, too, my good blog reader, when you are laid out to look up! That is exactly what God wants you to do whether your crisis is a coronavirus or something else. For in Psalm 50:15 God tells you, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”
Amen.
God’s blessings,
Rev. JC
This opening prayer expresses well the sentiment, I believe, felt by so many Christians at this time. We ought not to be surprised that we are going through rough and tough times, for our beloved Lord Jesus tells us, “In the world you have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I myself have overcome the world.”
My blog reader, are Jesus’ words not true and fitting throughout our lives, but especially at this time when the COVID-19 pandemic is raging wildly through our country and the whole world? Is it not true that time and again you have tribulations by whatever names you may call them? Problems? Troubles? Headaches? Heartaches? Pains in the neck?
Let us not stop to consider only the pandemic we see happening in the world around us. Let us also stop to reflect upon all the tribulations and troubles and hardships and heartaches that otherwise come into our lives. They are many and varied. To mention some possibilities: Illnesses. Diseases. Allergies. Permanent disabilities. Surgeries. Deaths of loved ones. Grief. Loneliness. Accidents. Blizzards. Tornadoes. Hurricanes. Floods. Wars. Persecutions. Broken marriages, families and homes. Lost Jobs. Financial setbacks.
In conversations that I have with individuals, in emails that I receive from other individuals, I am repeatedly and routinely hearing about the tribulations that others are having and going through. In this world they are experiencing exactly what Jesus says his Christian people would go through – tribulations! When I hear of these things, in my heart I do what Paul urged us all to do, “Weep with those who weep!”
A lot of weeping is going on. Right now, front and center, in everyone’s mind is the coronavirus pandemic. I cannot quote the latest statistics, because by the time I finish writing this blog, those statistics would be old and outdated. The numbers of confirmed cases and deaths are increasing by the minute. We Americans are now being told that in our country there could be one million plus cases of the coronavirus with a mortality rate skyrocketing as high as one to two hundred thousand deaths! That is a staggering amount! Its numbers really hit home when one stops to realize that in comparison about 250,000 soldiers were killed in battle during World War II!
To the best of my knowledge as of right now no one in my family has been infected with the coronavirus. But across our United States, and throughout the world, the number of confirmed cases is growing rapidly. A lot of weeping is being done especially over the thousands of deaths of family members. Since the coronavirus pandemic is adversely affecting millions of people’s health and wealth, as I discussed in my blog Making Spiritual Sense Of The Coronavirus, many are crying over their ill health and lost wealth. The country is also lamenting the loss of a lot of businesses that have been forced to close down and the jobs that have disappeared along with them in an effort to contain the virus by quarantining the people.
Such a quarantine due to the pandemic is probably a new experience for many people today. I can remember back to such a quarantine almost seventy-five years ago when I was a young boy. There was a lot of weeping going on then also. At that time the polio epidemic was striking down people, especially children. Public gathering places, such as the swimming pools, beaches, parks and playgrounds, were closed. Every day we turned on the radio to listen to the latest news about how many more people had contracted polio and how many more had died as a result of it. That was a frightening time of life. We children were quarantined to our houses and dared not step out of our yard. We were segregated completely from all other children.
In my previous blog Making Spiritual Sense Of The Coronavirus I shed light on one reason for God’s allowing the COVID-19 pandemic to come upon us. In this blog I want to share with you another reason. I summed up that reason in this blog’s title: Laid Out To Look Up.
There are times when God lays us out to get us to look up. It is one way that God can tap a person on the shoulder to get his attention and tell him, “Hey! Do you remember me?! I am the Lord your God!” I well remember fellow pastors remarking, “Sometimes the only way God can get a person to look up is by laying him out flat on his back!” Do not misunderstand me. I am not insinuating that all of you blog readers have drifted so far from God that God has to lay you out to get your attention. I am simply saying that at times God may put us through a very trying time to humble us, so we really get down on our knees to pray to him as we should at all times.
Times of crisis are often good motivators to pray. Our soldiers’ experiences out on the battlefields in World War II brought about the adage, “There are no atheists in the foxhole.” When the bullets were whizzing past their ears and the artillery shells were bursting over their heads, every soldier in his foxhole was down, praying to God to get him through it alive and in one piece! There were no atheists then. Hard times are still good motivators. In the case of some, I fear, that is about the only time they are moved to pray. The rest of the time God is far from their minds.
Here are a couple of biblical examples of what I am saying about crises motivating people to turn to God for help. One day Jesus and his disciples were crossing the Sea of Galilee in a boat. Being exhausted, Jesus fell asleep on a cushion. A fierce storm suddenly arose, as the Sea of Galilee was known for. The waves were washing over the boat. The disciples, a number of whom were fishermen well acquainted with being out on the lake, were scared their boat would be swamped and they would be drowned. The danger prompted them to immediately turn to Jesus, wake him up, and beg him to save them. He did so by calming the storm. No crisis is too big for him to handle. (ref. Matthew 8:23-27)
The apostle Paul had many brushes with death. Beatings. Floggings. Arrests and imprisonments. Shipwrecks. And there was the riot of the silversmiths in Ephesus. (Acts 19:21-41) Paul described in 2 Corinthians 1:8-10 the experience through which he and his fellow workers went. He said that they were distressed and oppressed far above their human ability to deal with the crisis of the riot. They despaired of their very lives. The sentence of death hung over their heads. They considered themselves as good as dead men. The danger drove them to the point of giving up all hope of getting out of that danger themselves. By faith they turned to God, fully relying on him to raise them from the dead.
Yes, at times we are laid out to look up. At this time when we find ourselves going through one kind of a crisis or another, whether it is due to the coronavirus or something else, it is time to look up to God in prayer. The Holy Spirit tells us in James 5:16, “The prayer of a righteous person is able to do much when it is at work.” The prayer of a Christian believer in Jesus is powerful. (This is not true for false Christians who are hypocrites and Christians in name only.)
We Christian believers, therefore, should be quick, not hesitant, to employ prayer to ask for help to remedy our problems. That is a problem that we have, however. We do not pray as often as we should. As Martin Luther said, God is more ready to hear and answer our prayers than we are to pray them. The Holy Spirit tells us, “Pray constantly.” (1 Thessalonians 5:17) Jesus tells us in Matthew 7:7, 8: “Keep asking, and it will be given to you; keep seeking, and you will find; keep knocking, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and to everyone who knocks it will be opened.”
The preceding words of Jesus not only tell us that we can pray with the confidence that our prayers will be heard, his words also tell us to be persistent in our prayers. We are to keep praying, more than just once. Jesus also teaches us in his Parable Of The Persistent Widow (ref. Luke 18:1-8) to always pray persistently without losing heart What should give us even more motivation and confidence to pray about the needs confronting us is that Jesus tells us our Father in heaven knows what we need (ref. Matthew 6:32), even before we ask him! (ref. Matthew 6:8)
When we are laid out, let us look up to our heavenly Father with a prayer on our lips. As for what prayer we pray, that is up to us. I like to start my day with a time of prayer and devotion. I often begin with this prayer:
By your grace and kindness, my Lord, I am here once again this morning. Unto you, O Lord, I lift up my soul; In you, my God, I trust! Thank you for this new day of your grace and mercy in Christ Jesus, my Lord and Savior. What do you have in store for me this day? Amen.
After that initial, opening prayer, I continue with the rest of my morning petitions. I pray unwritten prayers, usually, but not always, in silence, that flow from my heart in my own spur-of-the-moment-words about whatever the matters are that are on my mind and weighing on my heart. When I have concluded my prayers, I spend some amount of time reading the Lord’s Word from the Bible.
As for you, my reader, what prayer(s) are you most comfortable praying? You do pray, do you not? Praying is a natural fruit of faith of the Christian. If you do not pray, you have some kind of a spiritual problem that needs to be fixed in a hurry. Some of you may like to open your topical prayer book and turn to the subject matter that is on your mind at the moment. Others of you may read a meditation that ends with a prayer for the day. But those meditational prayers are not likely to touch on the matters of your life at the moment. They, then, are not carried to the Lord in prayer. You still need to pray over them on your own.
Given the context of this blog about being laid out in our troubles and tribulations, so that we look up, we could pray the model prayer that Jesus taught us to pray – the Lord’s Prayer. The fourth Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” gets right to the heart of such matters as I am discussing with you in this blog. With this Fourth Petition we are asking our heavenly Father to provide us with everything we need for our bodily life and welfare. Would you, my blog reader, like to start ticking off some of those things? How about the food you need to eat? The necessities of life. Health. Gainful employment. A good government to oversee the affairs of your country for the good of you citizens, and to provide police protection, peace and safety, so you can live your life, work, and raise your family. All these things and more you can ask for in these few words, “Give us this day our daily bread.”
After we have poured out our heart to our heavenly Father to help us through our tribulations and needs, we can lay back at ease, knowing our Father will work everything out for us. I think the most outstanding example in the Bible of just relaxing and laying back because God is in control and at work in our behalf is the apostle Peter laying sound asleep in prison. (ref. Acts 12:1-6) It was the night before King Herod was going to bring Peter out before the Jewish crowds to be mocked and executed with a sword. Peter was bound with two chains between two military guards. Two more guards were watching over the locked-up prison. And Peter just laid there chained-up between the two guards, s-o-o-u-u-n-n-d asleep, like he did not have a single care or worry in the world. Do you think that you could lay back so calm, unconcerned about everything the night before you were to be dragged out to be mocked by the crowds and executed with a sword? I don’t think I could. But Peter did! What an example of letting go and letting God take care of things for us, as we are urged to do in Psalm 46:10, the Hebrew text.
More important, more needed, more crucial than even our prayers to God for his aid in our tribulations is the necessity for us to look up to God with our confession of sins and prayer for his forgiveness for Jesus’ sake. Our sins are so many. Our sins are so grievous. Our sins are so damning. We desperately need God’s forgiveness, lest we perish in hell with the devil and the damned for eternity. As grievous as our present coronavirus crisis is, and as agonizing as the other crises we may experience in our lifetime, they cannot begin to compare to the crisis and agony our Savior Jesus accepted and endured as our Substitute under God’s law to save us. Listen to how he said he felt on Tuesday of Holy Week, only two days before his betrayal, arrest, trials, beatings, scourging, and crucifixion began, “Now my soul is utterly troubled. And yet what shall I say? Father, save me from this hour? Rather, for this reason I just came to this hour.” (John 12:27) His soul was utterly troubled, troubled to the very point of death, because of what lay before him in his Passion to save our souls for eternity. God laid on him the sins of us all. And he was laid out to suffer death on a cross, a death so terrible in suffering and pain we cannot imagine it. Through it all Jesus kept looking up.: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? . . . Into your hands I commend my spirit.” In this way Jesus overcame the world with all its tribulations and troubles that come upon us. In this way he saved us from our sins, Satan and eternal suffering in the fires of hell. In this way he made heaven our home where we are assured about ourselves that:
14. These are the ones who are coming out of the great tribulation, and they washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.
15 “For this reason they are before the throne of God,
And serve him day and night in his temple,
And he who sits on the throne will spread his tent over them;
16 “They will hunger no more,
Nor will they thirst any more,
Nor will the sun beat[1] down upon them,
Nor any burning heat,
17 “For the Lamb at the center of the throne will shepherd them,
And will lead them to streams of living water;
And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (Revelation 7:14-17)
In the future whatever our crises and trials may yet prove to be, we stand before God forgiven, saved, and heirs of heaven. This is the important thing above all. May it always comfort us.
Remember, too, my good blog reader, when you are laid out to look up! That is exactly what God wants you to do whether your crisis is a coronavirus or something else. For in Psalm 50:15 God tells you, “Call upon me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you will honor me.”
Amen.
God’s blessings,
Rev. JC
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