Morning By Morning #123

My prayer is not that you take them out of the world.

John 17:15

From the pen of Charles Spurgeon:

In God’s timing a joyous and blessed event will be experienced by all believers—going home to be with Jesus. In a few short years the Lord’s soldiers who are now fighting “the good fight of faith” (1 Tim. 6:12) will be through with the conflict and will have entered into “the joy of the LORD” (Neh. 8:10). Although Christ prays for His people to be with Him where He is eventually, note that He does not ask for them to be taken away from this world to heaven immediately. He desires they stay here for now.

Yet how often does a weary pilgrim toss up the prayer: “Oh, that I had the wings of a dove! I would fly away and be at rest” (Ps. 55:6). Christ, however, does not pray like that. He leaves us in His Father’s hands until, like fully ripened sheaves of corn, we will each be gathered into our Master’s storehouse. Jesus does not ask for our instantaneous removal through death because our abiding in these bodies is needed by those around us, if not profitable for ourselves. He asks His Father to “protect [us] from the evil one” (John 17:15), but He never asks for us to be admitted into our inheritance in glory until we are at our God-determined age.

Christians often want to die when they encounter trouble. When asked why, they will say, “Because I want to be with the Lord.” I fear, however, it is not so much that they are longing to be with the Lord as it is that they desire to get rid of their troubles. If this were not true, then they would express the same wish for death when they are not experiencing such difficult trials. They desire to go home to heaven not so much for the company of the Savior as much as they desire to be at rest.

It is quite appropriate to desire to depart if we can do it in the same spirit Paul did, because to “be with Christ…is better by far” (Phil. 1:23). But a desire to leave simply to escape trouble is a selfish one.

Instead, may your concern and desire be to glorify God by your life here as long as He pleases even though it may be in the midst of toil, conflict, and suffering. Leave it with Him to say, “It is enough” (1 Kings 19:4 ESV).

From the pen of Jim Reimann:

Even Elijah, that great prophet of God, came to a point of despair. “He…went a day’s journey into the desert. He came to a broom tree, sat down under it and prayed that he might die. ‘I have had enough, LORD,’ he said. ‘Take my life; I am no better than my ancestors’” (1 Kings 19:4).

One of the greatest characteristics of God’s Word is that we see the humanness of even the major characters. Indeed, “Elijah was a man just like us” (James 5:17), but look how God used him!

Dear believer, you may be experiencing some grievous trial today, but don’t despair. Consider the words of the apostle Paul, who said:

We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about the hardships we suffered…We were under great pressure, far beyond our ability to endure, so that we despaired even of life. Indeed, in our hearts we felt the sentence of death. But this happened that we might not rely on ourselves but on God, who raises the dead.

2 Corinthians 1:8 – 9