From Distress to Deliverance!
by David Silvester
Throughout life we face the kind of situations which cause us concern, and even distress. We wonder how on earth we’re going to manage. In Matthew’s Gospel we read of Jesus giving the disciples authority to go and do the kind of things they’d seen Him do (Matthew 10:1). And in Luke 10 we read of their excitement as they came back and told Him what had happened as they’d carried out His instructions.
I wonder how many times we’ve been doing some kind of work for Jesus, but we’ve got into all sorts of difficulties. Those are the times when we should have been calling out to Him for help!
In Matthew 14 we read of Jesus calling Peter to get out of a boat and walk to Him on the water. Which he did! But when he took his eyes off Jesus and saw the way a raging wind was disturbing the water around him, he began to sink. That’s when he called out, “Lord, save me!”
That’s when Peter experienced the power of Jesus to lift him out of his distress into a wonderful deliverance. We may wonder what the other disciples learned from that situation. And what may people around us learn when they see us experience God’s help in our times of distress?
We may not be called to walk on water like Peter, but we may be called to do other things that lead into testing situations. We wonder how we’re going to get out of difficulty. That’s when we’re encouraged to ‘cast our burden on the LORD and He will sustain us’ (Psalm 55:22).
We may go through life with an attitude like the words of the song, ‘I did it my way’, instead of turning to our loving and caring God for help. This prompts a question. Do we really trust that our God will help us in our times of difficulty?
‘Trust in the LORD with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths’ (Proverbs 3:5-6). When we can truly say that we follow these instructions, then we’ll know what it is to experience God’s faithful and loving care for us in every testing situation. We’ll find that it’s not ourselves doing the work, but that He’s doing it through us.
Prayer: Dear Lord God, thank You for the many times You’ve come to my aid, when I got into difficulties as I served You. I ask You to forgive me for the times I failed to cast the burden upon You, and things haven’t turned out according to Your will. I thank You for Your grace and tolerance at such times. Amen.
David Silvester is married and has a son, two daughters and eight grandchildren. He trained as a production engineer. He then moved on to become a lecturer of engineering craft skills before being called of God in his early fifties to become a pastor of a Baptist church. He says that,"having previously experienced an amazing healing on a day others expected me to die, it came as no surprise that God directed me and my wife, Margaret, to become involved with Ellel Ministries."
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