Sing of His Steadfast Love

Psalms 59:1-4 ESV

 

“Deliver me from my enemies, O my God;

    protect me from those who rise up against me;

deliver me from those who work evil,

    and save me from bloodthirsty men.

 

“For behold, they lie in wait for my life;

    fierce men stir up strife against me.

For no transgression or sin of mine, O Lord,

    for no fault of mine, they run and make ready.”

 

When we are following Jesus Christ with our lives we will have enemies who are supposed to be mainly from the world, but who often are primarily those who also profess faith in Jesus Christ but who are not living in full surrender to the Lord Jesus, kind of like the Pharisees of Jesus’ day, only not all are making big shows of righteousness, but they are still sinning in secret.

 

So, why are they our enemies? What is it about us that they don’t like? Why are they opposed to us and want nothing to do with us? And why do they reject us and even persecute us, for they claim to be our brothers and sisters in Christ? Honestly, if we are truly following the Lord in obedience, it is because we are following the Lord in obedience that they reject us.

 

Let’s take social media for example. Christians post a lot of memes on there, and memes are like short little sayings or an image or a video “that is copied and spread rapidly by internet users” (source: Google). People view them quickly and then make quick decisions whether to like them, or to share them, or whether to comment on them, and then usually they move on.

 

But these memes can be very powerful ways of programming people’s minds to accepting certain images or messages without much forethought to what they are accepting and liking and then sharing. So, what I am finding is that not many Christians are actually testing what they are reading or seeing to check it out against the Scriptures to find if it agrees with Scripture or not.

 

And if you happen to read one of these memes, and you are able to discern quickly that the message that they are giving in the name of God, and under the pretense of Christianity, is not of God, but it is a lie of Satan cleverly disguised as truth, and so you question what is being shared as truth, because that is what we are supposed to do, then you either get immediately “unfriended,” i.e. totally rejected, or you get opposed, or you get ignored, usually just ignored, because most Christians seem to not be in the habit of nor inclined toward testing what they hear and read and see.

 

But we, as believers in Jesus, need to wake up to the fact that many of these memes are tricks and traps, and many of them are purposefully deceptive in order to trap people and to lead them astray. We need to wake up to the fact that we live in an evil world, even within the gatherings of what is called “church,” and that there are hordes of charlatans out there who are charming and winsome but who are wolves in sheep’s clothing.

 

So, we should not just accept these things (memes and such) at face value just because they sound good or they sound biblical or they sound like truth, for deception is twisted truth. And we should be challenging them. We should be testing them, not just for our own benefit, but for the benefit of all our friends and family and followers who are also reading the same lies.

 

For we are not only to be ministers of the gospel of Jesus Christ, which we should be doing on the internet while we still can, but we are to test everything, and we are to be those who expose the fruitless deeds of darkness so that our brothers and sisters in Christ are made aware and so hopefully, if they will listen, that they will not be deceived by these memes.

 

Psalms 59:8-10 ESV

 

“But you, O Lord, laugh at them;

    you hold all the nations in derision.

O my Strength, I will watch for you,

    for you, O God, are my fortress.

My God in his steadfast love will meet me;

    God will let me look in triumph on my enemies.”

 

No matter how clever these writers or publishers of deceptive memes are (and they are not all deceptive), they can’t outwit God, for he knows all, and he sees all, and he is still completely in control and sovereign over all that he has made. And no one and nothing can thwart his purposes. So they aren’t “pulling the wool over” God’s eyes. But they may fool many people.

 

So, we are not to fear these liars and deceivers who are charlatans and wolves in sheep’s clothing. And we are not to fear the rejection of other professers of faith in Jesus Christ who are not akin to us testing the spirits to see if they are of God and with regard to us questioning what does not appear to agree with Scripture.

 

But we should not back down, either, for it is not just for our benefit that we should test memes and devotions and sermons and Christian talks, etc. For when we question them in public then others may realize that what they are reading or seeing or hearing is not the truth, even though it looks like truth, and so perhaps they will begin the practice of testing the spirits, too.

 

And we have to not let how others treat us discourage or dishearten us, but we must stay the course of getting out the truth of the gospel and of exposing the lies and the deceptions even if all reject and desert us, like they did Jesus. For we have to be more concerned about the safety and protection and salvation of other humans than with how others might perceive us. For the Lord will be our strength and our courage.

 

Psalms 59:16-17 ESV

 

“But I will sing of your strength;

    I will sing aloud of your steadfast love in the morning.

For you have been to me a fortress

    and a refuge in the day of my distress.

O my Strength, I will sing praises to you,

    for you, O God, are my fortress,

    the God who shows me steadfast love.”

 

So, we have to keep singing of God’s steadfast love, of his grace, of his strength to help us, and of his delivering us from our slavery to sin and from the control of Satan over our lives. We have to keep telling people the truth of the gospel for the lies are permeating the church here in America today. We must keep talking about the forsaking of our sins and of us walking in obedience to our Lord’s commands, for they are critical to our salvation.

 

And we must keep encouraging our fellow Christians to follow the Lord in obedience and to walk in his love and grace, and to be living holy lives, and to be sharing the gospel, and to be testing the spirits, and to be exposing the fruitless deeds of darkness for what they are. For it means the salvation of human lives, for people are being deceived by the hordes, and many of them claim to have faith in Jesus Christ.

 

And we have to keep pressing on in the strength of the Lord. And when people mistreat us and they reject us and they ignore us because we are speaking the truth to them, in love, as we ought, and because we are testing the spirits, as we all should be doing, we must go to the Lord with our pain and with our suffering and rest in his unchanging love.

 

For the Lord is our comfort and joy. He is our protection from evil. He is our Father and he is our Savior, and he loves and cares for us, and he cares when we get rejected. He feels our pain, for he was rejected, too. So, we need to just take his hand and let him lead us in the way that he wants us to go and trust him with the results and with other people, too. For he loves us.

 

This song, “You’ll Be in My Heart,” is a secular song written by Phil Collins who, from what I read, originally wrote the song as a lullaby for his daughter. The words closely express God’s words for his daughter, his church, so I believe that is why the Lord led me to this song:

 

You’ll Be in My Heart

 

By Phil Collins

 

Come stop your crying

It will be alright

Just take my hand

Hold it tight

I will protect you

From all around you

I will be here

Don't you cry

 

'Cause you'll be in my heart

Yes, you'll be in my heart

From this day on

Now and forever more

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJ0dLlAskIY

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