Feeling Fragile

Yesterday, I was inspired when reading a blog by John Piper. He is the author of one of my favorite books, Desiring God. He discussed how many mornings, he wakes up with the ominous feeling that something is wrong or something may go wrong. I resonate with this feeling in that I know I have to do some kind of battle that day, and I just don’t feel up to it. I need someone to have my back, yet I don’t have a line of bodyguards to protect me. Often though, the battle is not a physical one where bodyguards are needed but a spiritual one where my mind and thoughts are attacked. This in itself makes me feel fragile and a bit fearful.

Piper writes, “Instead of letting me sink into a paralysis of fear, or run to a mirage of greener grass, he has awakened a cry for help and then answered with a concrete promise.”
Scenario: You wake up and feel weak, lifeless and vulnerable. You don’t even know how or what to pray, you just know you need help. That is when you just say, “Help me Jesus…I’m feeling weak.”

What verse can be a comfort? “Jerusalem shall be inhabited as villages without walls, because of the multitude of people and livestock in it. And I will be to her a wall of fire all around, declares the Lord, and I will be the glory in her midst. (Zechariah 2:4–5)

How is this comforting? Piper notes that for that time, “There will be such prosperity and growth for the people of God that Jerusalem will not be able to be walled in any more. “The multitude of people and livestock” will be so many that Jerusalem will be like many villages spreading out across the land without walls.”

Walls are security however. They secure us from the enemy and give us borders. God is promising us to be not only a wall but that of fire! What protection that can that be from the arrows from the enemy. But, moreover, “and I will be the glory in her midst” assures us not only protection but the knowledge of HIS PRESENCE. He’s always with us and that is genuine security.

For Piper, this was his “deliverance.” I find this comforting as well, and will cry out to Him when I fear or fret. He IS there. He IS our protection. As Piper says, “We are fragile. But he is not.”

Source: http://www.desiringgod.org/blog/posts/what-to-do-if-you-wake-up-feeling-fragile

 

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