Come out singing

TODAY’S SPECIAL: Psalm 32:1-11

TO CHEW ON: “You are my hiding place; You shall preserve me from trouble; You shall surround me with songs of deliverance.” Psalm 32:7

When I hear ‘hiding place’ I think of Corrie Ten Boom’s book by that name. It was well-titled, for Corrie’s family was arrested for giving Jews a hiding place in their home when Holland was under the Nazis. Later she relates several instances of God performing feats of hiding for her and her sister. In one, they managed to smuggle a Bible into prison right under the nose of their captors.

That God’s followers would need hiding or preservation or deliverance points to a sobering truth about the Christian life: just because God is in our lives doesn’t mean we are immune from trouble. We are just as vulnerable to calamity, sickness, accidents and natural disasters as the next person. However, in those times we have these promises: God will hide us; God will preserve us; He will surround us with songs of deliverance.

The need for “songs of deliverance” implies that we’ve been caught, or very close to it. My Bible has cross references from this phrase to Exodus 15:1 and Judges 5:1. The Exodus reference is to the song that Moses sang after Pharaoh’s army drowned in the Red Sea after pursuing the Israelites in an attempt to bring them back to slavery. The Judges song is one Deborah and Barak sang after Jael, a feisty desert woman, killed Sisera, the army commander of their enemy King Jabin (Judges 4).

Next time you’re in the thick of trouble, don’t take it as a sign of God’s displeasure or punishment. Rather, welcome it as another opportunity to strengthen your faith as you experience God’s care for you in the midst of it. He will bring you through, singing your own song of deliverance.

PRAYER: Dear God, thank You for being with me in times of testing, threat, and sickness. Please hide me, preserve me and help me to come out the other side singing. Amen.


MORE: A quote from O.C.

“Who shall separate us from the love of Christ?” Romans 8:35


“God does not keep a man immune from trouble; He says – “I will be with him in trouble.” It does not matter what actual troubles in the most extreme form get hold of a man’s life, not one of them can separate him from his relationship to God. We are “more than conquerors in all these things.” Paul is not talking of imaginary things, but of things that are desperately actual; and he says we are super-victors in the midst of them, not by our ingenuity, or by our courage, or by anything other than the fact that not one of them affects our relationship to God in Jesus Christ. Rightly or wrongly, we are where we are exactly in the condition we are in. I am sorry for the Christian who has not something in his circumstances he wishes was not there.”

- Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, May 19th reading