PRAISING GOD (PART 6)

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In Christ, Mark

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The scriptures. May God bless the reading of His holy word.

“You brought your people Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with great terror.”

Jeremiah 32:21

This ends today’s reading from God's holy word. Thanks be to God.

Have you ever been delivered?

I’m not talking about the day that you emerged from your mother’s womb and entered creation.

Not that kind of deliverance.

No, I’m talking about a time when you felt liberated after escaping a situation that hindered your freedom in some way.

We can be delivered from financial hardship. I remember that time well. Over time and because of certain circumstances, I incurred a lot of debt. After some intervention from my father who was willing to co-sign a consolidation loan for me, I started to travel the long road back to being debt-free. It took me almost five years but I can tell you it was a great feeling when I made that final payment which finally delivered me from the financial repression I had been under.

In other instances, we can be delivered from an affliction. I still recall the day my neighbor told me he had cancer. Even though he wanted to be optimistic, I could see in his face that he was unsure about his future and what lay ahead. Surgery removed most of the cancer but a long road to recovery was in front of him, a road wrought with chemotherapy treatments intended to shrink the tumor that remained until it was no longer a concern.

And so my neighbor started to travel the road of appointments that would serve the purpose of destroying the disease that had invaded him and after more than a year, he stood up in my Sunday School class and, with tears in his eyes, declared that he was cancer-free. It had been a long, uncertain journey but he had made it. Deliverance had happened in his life.

Deliverance from difficulties can happen in others ways.

It can come when an abused person is able to break the bondage of mistreatment and escape a violent, cruel relationship  

It can happen when someone overcomes addictions to drugs or alcohol or sex or eating.

It occurs when someone who has endured persecution for the cause of the Gospel is set free and released like a recent pastor held captive in Iran from the summer of 2012 until just a few weeks ago in January 2016.

Through these examples and more, we see that we serve a God who is our Great Deliverer. Jeremiah certainly praised Him for that as we see in today’s scripture verse:

“You brought your people Israel out of Egypt with signs and wonders, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm and with great terror.”  Jeremiah 32:21

The odds against the people of Israel ever breaking free from the grip of Egypt’s Pharaoh were slim and none. As determined as they were, they lacked the weaponry and fighting skills to stand a chance in battle. But they had one thing going for them and it was a very BIG one thing.

For as we know, God was with them and for them. He selected and appointed a leader, a man named Moses, from among them and then empowered him to lead the people to freedom, armed with the very power of God to do so. That power went on full display when the great sea standing between the Israelites and liberation was split open to create dry land for them to cross on. No person had the power to do that. Only God, their Great Deliverer, could make it happen and that’s what He did by a “mighty hand and an outstretched arm”. Imagine the face of the Pharaoh and his army when they suddenly watched an immense body of water suddenly divide with walls of water standing up on either side of the newly emerging corridor. Surely, they had never seen anything like it but then again, they had never seen signs and wonders like God was doing from any of their false gods they worshipped.

In sum, God delivered His people from Egypt and brought them to safety before setting them on a course to the land He had promised them.

In Jeremiah’s time, God would deliver His people from the hands of the Babylonians after seventy years of exile, allowing them to return to their homeland to rebuild their homes, their lives, and their relationship with Him.

Today, God is still in the deliverance business and get this: He is offering deliverance to everyone who needs it. And we ALL need it.

That’s right, we are all in bondage to sin, all of us. No one is free from the affliction and no one has hope outside of the salvation offer God has given, the offer that is the catalyst for His deliverance in our lives.

All we have to do to be set free is to believe and trust in Jesus as Savior, acknowledging that we can’t save ourselves from sin and thus can only avoid destruction by being saved from someone else. Jesus, who paid the price for our sins already on Calvary’s cross, intercedes for all those who confess Him as Savior and leads the way to God’s pardon through justification (Through Jesus, we appear before the Father as if we had never sinned, cleansed white as snow by Jesus’ atoning blood).

Friends, God has been, is, and will always be our Great Deliverer.

Jeremiah found it a reason to praise Him and we should too.

Amen.

In Christ,

Mark
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