**Today is a special guest devotion from Huntley Paton. He and his wife Dawn joined the church last year.**
It’s funny how a certain line of scripture you didn’t really notice before can jump right out and grab you.
Such was the case for me recently as I was reading the Old Testament. This sentence fragment from Judges 5:6 stopped me cold: “… the highways were abandoned, and travelers kept to the byways.”
I have read that line before, perhaps many times, but now I couldn’t move past it. Suddenly, I felt the chill I should have felt in past readings. This, I realized, was what it was like to live in a lawless time of fear and chaos.
It wasn’t hard to understand why the scripture spoke to me so profoundly this time around: We are not in the pickle the Israelites were in then, but it feels like that is what’s coming, doesn’t it? Between the pandemic and social unrest, the roads are quieter than they once were. We are hesitant to leave our homes, for fear of getting sick or becoming the victim of chaos. The safe play is to stay at home, out of sight.
There comes a point where common sense and caution becomes fear. We forget that we are in God’s hands. We forget that He is utterly sovereign over every event, every person, every molecule. We fear when we should be trusting.
My wife and I both got sick with Covid-19 in May. Dawn got it at the nursing home where she works as an occupational therapist. I had to move into the guest room and keep my distance even as I tried to care for her. No matter – I got sick on the same day she was getting better. Between us, our household was a Covid hot zone for most of May, and even though the virus is gone, my lungs still have not recovered from the insult. For Dawn, it remains a daily trauma, as she provides love and care in a workplace that has suffered more than 30 deaths. It’s depressing. It’s scary. And with recession, rioting and unrest constantly coming at us in the headlines, it’s easy to flirt with despair.
But our earthly circumstances are nothing compared to the security we have in Christ. The Puritan Jeremiah Burroughs (1599-1646), in his classic “Rare Jewel of Christian Contentment,” wrote that we must rest in Christ, not our comforts. “To be content as a result of some external thing is like warming a man’s clothes by the fire,” he wrote. “But to be content through an inward disposition of the soul is like the warmth that a man’s clothes have from the natural heat of his body.”
Christ is our creator and sustainer. He is at work, invincibly, through all of human history. No matter what the world gives us, it is nothing without Christ, and no matter what the world does to us, it is nothing compared to the mercy and security we enjoy in Him.
David knew a lot about strife and fear, more so than any of us. Yet in Psalm 3:5-6, he wrote: “I lay down and slept; I woke again, for the Lord sustained me. I will not be afraid of many thousands of people who have set themselves against me all around.”
Christ has given us all the good things we enjoy. He has given us each other, our brothers and sisters in Christ. Most importantly, He has given us Himself. That is enough, today and for eternity.
With Christ's love,
Huntley Paton