Psalm 20:1-9
1 May the LORD answer you when you are in distress;
may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.
2 May he send you help from the sanctuary
and grant you support from Zion.
3 May he remember all your sacrifices
and accept your burnt offerings.
4 May he give you the desire of your heart
and make all your plans succeed.
5 May we shout for joy over your victory
and lift up our banners in the name of our God.
May the LORD grant all your requests.
6 Now this I know:
The LORD gives victory to his anointed.
He answers him from his heavenly sanctuary
with the victorious power of his right hand.
7 Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.
8 They are brought to their knees and fall,
but we rise up and stand firm.
9 LORD, give victory to the king!
Answer us when we call!
David wrote, “Some trust in chariots, and some in horses; but we will remember the name of the Lord our God” (v. 7). The big question is, What are you trusting today? Everybody trusts in or believes in something. Some people trust in their money or credit cards. Some trust in their strength or expertise or experience. Verses 1 and 2 say, “May the Lord answer you in the day of trouble; may the name of the God of Jacob defend you; may He send you help from the sanctuary, and strengthen you out of Zion.” The Christian trusts in the Lord, and he exemplifies this trust by praying.
When we are in trouble, what we do to solve our problems and turn our trouble into triumph is evidence of what or whom we’re trusting. When the day of trouble arrives, some people reach for their checkbooks. They think money will solve their problems. Others reach for the telephone. They look to friends to solve their problems. While “some trust in chariots, and some in horses,” Christians remember the name of the Lord (v. 7). Our faith is in Jesus Christ, and we should not be afraid to let people know about it. “We will rejoice in your salvation, and in the name of our God we will set up our banners!” (v. 5). In other words, we do not hesitate to wave the banner of faith because He will not fail us.
God’s name is good. “The name of the God of Jacob defend you” (v. 1). Take time to trust the Lord. Roll your burden on Him. Get your strength from Him. Wave your banner in the name of the Lord, and He will turn your burden into a blessing.
Where do you place your trust? Whereas wealth and others fail you, Jesus never fails. Take whatever burden you are carrying today and give it to the Lord. Trust Him, and He will work on your behalf.
Nearly a hundred years ago a twenty-eight-year-old woman from a windy little village on the north coast of Ireland began her missionary work in India. Amy Carmichael was single, but on the very eve of her leaving the docks, an opportunity “which looked towards ‘the other life’” was presented.
Amy, with the combined reticence of being a Victorian and being Irish, never said how or by whom this “opportunity” was presented. She spoke very little of matters of the heart. She was also a thoroughgoing Christian, with a soldier’s determination to carry out her Commander’s orders. Single life, she believed, was not only a part of those orders; it was also a gift.
She tried not to suggest in any way that her gift was superior. “Remember,” she wrote, “our God did not say to me, ‘I have something greater for you to do.’ This life is not greater than the other, but it is different.” It was simply God’s call to her.
The oldest of seven children, she had been full of ideas to amuse, educate, inspire, and spiritually edify her brothers and sisters. One of these ideas was a family magazine called Scraps, beautifully handwritten, illustrated, and published monthly for family and friends. Before Amy was twenty, one brother knew the direction her life was taking. In a series of sketches for Scraps he wrote:
Our eldest sister is the
light of our life.
She says that she will never
be a wife.
Amy took as her guide the ideal set forth by the apostle Paul: “The unmarried (woman) concerns herself with the Lord’s affairs, and her aim is to make herself holy in body and in spirit. . .I am not putting difficulties in your path, but setting before you an ideal, so that your service of God may be as far as possible free from worldly distractions” (1 Corinthians 7:34, 35 PHILLIPS).
With all her heart she determined to please him who had chosen her to be his soldier. She was awed by the privilege. She accepted the disciplines.
Loneliness was one of those disciplines. How–the modern young person always wants to know–did she “handle” it? Amy Carmichael would not have had the slightest idea what the questioner was talking about. “Handle” loneliness? Why, it was part of the cost of obedience, of course. Everybody is lonely in some way, the single in one way, the married in another; the missionary in certain obvious ways, the schoolteacher, the mother, the bank teller in others.
Amy had a dear co-worker whom she nicknamed Twin. At a missions conference they found that in the posted dinner lists, Twin and a friend named Mina had been seated side by side.
“Well, I was very glad that dear Mina should have Twin,” Amy wrote to her family, “and I don’t think I grudged her to her one little bit, and yet at the bottom of my heart there was just a touch of disappointment, for I had almost fancied I had somebody of my very own again, and there was a little ache somewhere. I could not rejoice in it. . .I longed, yes longed, to be glad, to be filled with such a wealth of unselfish love that I should be far gladder to see those two together than I should have been to have had Twin to myself. And while I was asking for it, it came. For the very first time I felt a rush, a real joy in it, His joy, a thing one cannot pump up or imitate or force in any way. . .Half-unconsciously, perhaps, I had been saying, ‘Thou and Twin are enough for me’–one so soon clings to the gift instead of only to the Giver.”
Her letter then continued with a stanza from the Frances Ridley Havergal hymn:
Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure-store.
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for thee.
After writing this, Amy felt inclined to tear it out of the letter. It was too personal, too humiliating. But she decided the Lord wanted her to let it stand, to tell its tale of weakness and of God’s strength. She was finding firsthand that missionaries are not apart from the rest of the human race, not purer, nobler, higher.
“Wings are an illusive fallacy,” she wrote. “Some may possess them, but they are not very visible, and as for me, there isn’t the least sign of a feather. Don’t imagine that by crossing the sea and landing on a foreign shore and learning a foreign lingo you ‘burst the bonds of outer sin and hatch yourself a cherubim.’ “
Amy landed in India in 1897 and spent the first few years in itinerant evangelism. She began to uncover a secret traffic in little girls who were being sold or given for temple prostitution. She prayed that God would enable her find a way to rescue some of them, even though not one had ever been known to escape.
Several years later, God began to answer that prayer. One little girl actually escaped and came (led by an angel, Amy believed) straight to Amy. Then in various ways babies were rescued. Soon she found that little boys were being used for homosexual purposes by dramatic societies connected with Hindu temple worship. She prayed for the boys, and in a few years Amy Carmichael was Amma (“Mother”) to a rapidly growing Indian family that, by the late 1940s, numbered about 900. In a specially literal way the words of Jesus seemed to have been fulfilled: “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).
In answer to a question from one of her children who years later had become a close fellow worker, Amy described a transaction in a cave. She had gone there to spend the day with God and face her feelings of fear about the future. Things were all right at the moment, but could she endure years of being alone?
The Devil painted pictures of loneliness that were vivid to her years later. She turned to the Lord in desperation. “What can I do, Lord? How can I go on to the end?”
His answer: “None of them that trust in me shall be desolate” (from Psalms 34:22 KJV). So she did not “handle” loneliness–she handed it to her Lord and trusted his Word.
“There is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others,” she wrote. “No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence.”
Her commitment to obedience was unconditional. Finding that singleness was the condition her Master had appointed for her, she received it with both hands, willing to renounce all rights for his sake and, although she could not have imagined it at the time, for the sake of the children he would give her–a job she could not possibly have done if she had had a family of her own.
Many whose houses, for one reason or another, seem empty, and the lessons of solitude hard to learn, have found strength and comfort in the following Amy Carmichael poem:
O Prince of Glory, who dost bring
Thy sons to glory through Thy Cross,
Let me not shrink from suffering,
Reproach or loss ….
If Thy dear Home be fuller, Lord,
For that a little emptier
My house on earth, what rich reward
That guerdon* were.
*recompense; something earned or gained
The Single “Mother”
“A Touch of Disappointment”
Nearly a hundred years ago a twenty-eight-year-old woman from a windy little village on the north coast of Ireland began her missionary work in India. Amy Carmichael was single, but on the very eve of her leaving the docks, an opportunity “which looked towards ‘the other life’” was presented.
Amy, with the combined reticence of being a Victorian and being Irish, never said how or by whom this “opportunity” was presented. She spoke very little of matters of the heart. She was also a thoroughgoing Christian, with a soldier’s determination to carry out her Commander’s orders. Single life, she believed, was not only a part of those orders; it was also a gift.
She tried not to suggest in any way that her gift was superior. “Remember,” she wrote, “our God did not say to me, ‘I have something greater for you to do.’ This life is not greater than the other, but it is different.” It was simply God’s call to her.
The oldest of seven children, she had been full of ideas to amuse, educate, inspire, and spiritually edify her brothers and sisters. One of these ideas was a family magazine called Scraps, beautifully handwritten, illustrated, and published monthly for family and friends. Before Amy was twenty, one brother knew the direction her life was taking. In a series of sketches for Scraps he wrote:
Our eldest sister is the
light of our life.
She says that she will never
be a wife.
Amy took as her guide the ideal set forth by the apostle Paul: “The unmarried (woman) concerns herself with the Lord’s affairs, and her aim is to make herself holy in body and in spirit. . .I am not putting difficulties in your path, but setting before you an ideal, so that your service of God may be as far as possible free from worldly distractions” (1 Corinthians 7:34, 35 PHILLIPS).
With all her heart she determined to please him who had chosen her to be his soldier. She was awed by the privilege. She accepted the disciplines.
Loneliness was one of those disciplines. How–the modern young person always wants to know–did she “handle” it? Amy Carmichael would not have had the slightest idea what the questioner was talking about. “Handle” loneliness? Why, it was part of the cost of obedience, of course. Everybody is lonely in some way, the single in one way, the married in another; the missionary in certain obvious ways, the schoolteacher, the mother, the bank teller in others.
Amy had a dear co-worker whom she nicknamed Twin. At a missions conference they found that in the posted dinner lists, Twin and a friend named Mina had been seated side by side.
“Well, I was very glad that dear Mina should have Twin,” Amy wrote to her family, “and I don’t think I grudged her to her one little bit, and yet at the bottom of my heart there was just a touch of disappointment, for I had almost fancied I had somebody of my very own again, and there was a little ache somewhere. I could not rejoice in it. . .I longed, yes longed, to be glad, to be filled with such a wealth of unselfish love that I should be far gladder to see those two together than I should have been to have had Twin to myself. And while I was asking for it, it came. For the very first time I felt a rush, a real joy in it, His joy, a thing one cannot pump up or imitate or force in any way. . .Half-unconsciously, perhaps, I had been saying, ‘Thou and Twin are enough for me’–one so soon clings to the gift instead of only to the Giver.”
Her letter then continued with a stanza from the Frances Ridley Havergal hymn:
Take my love, my Lord, I pour
At Thy feet its treasure-store.
Take myself and I will be
Ever, only, all for thee.
After writing this, Amy felt inclined to tear it out of the letter. It was too personal, too humiliating. But she decided the Lord wanted her to let it stand, to tell its tale of weakness and of God’s strength. She was finding firsthand that missionaries are not apart from the rest of the human race, not purer, nobler, higher.
“Wings are an illusive fallacy,” she wrote. “Some may possess them, but they are not very visible, and as for me, there isn’t the least sign of a feather. Don’t imagine that by crossing the sea and landing on a foreign shore and learning a foreign lingo you ‘burst the bonds of outer sin and hatch yourself a cherubim.’ “
Amy landed in India in 1897 and spent the first few years in itinerant evangelism. She began to uncover a secret traffic in little girls who were being sold or given for temple prostitution. She prayed that God would enable her find a way to rescue some of them, even though not one had ever been known to escape.
Several years later, God began to answer that prayer. One little girl actually escaped and came (led by an angel, Amy believed) straight to Amy. Then in various ways babies were rescued. Soon she found that little boys were being used for homosexual purposes by dramatic societies connected with Hindu temple worship. She prayed for the boys, and in a few years Amy Carmichael was Amma (“Mother”) to a rapidly growing Indian family that, by the late 1940s, numbered about 900. In a specially literal way the words of Jesus seemed to have been fulfilled: “Everyone who has left houses or brothers or sisters or father or mother or children or fields for my sake will receive a hundred times as much and will inherit eternal life” (Matthew 19:29).
In answer to a question from one of her children who years later had become a close fellow worker, Amy described a transaction in a cave. She had gone there to spend the day with God and face her feelings of fear about the future. Things were all right at the moment, but could she endure years of being alone?
The Devil painted pictures of loneliness that were vivid to her years later. She turned to the Lord in desperation. “What can I do, Lord? How can I go on to the end?”
His answer: “None of them that trust in me shall be desolate” (from Psalms 34:22 KJV). So she did not “handle” loneliness–she handed it to her Lord and trusted his Word.
“There is a secret discipline appointed for every man and woman whose life is lived for others,” she wrote. “No one escapes that discipline, nor would wish to escape it; nor can any shelter another from it. And just as we have seen the bud of a flower close round the treasure within, folding its secret up, petal by petal, so we have seen the soul that is chosen to serve, fold round its secret and hold it fast and cover it from the eyes of man. The petals of the soul are silence.”
Her commitment to obedience was unconditional. Finding that singleness was the condition her Master had appointed for her, she received it with both hands, willing to renounce all rights for his sake and, although she could not have imagined it at the time, for the sake of the children he would give her–a job she could not possibly have done if she had had a family of her own.
Many whose houses, for one reason or another, seem empty, and the lessons of solitude hard to learn, have found strength and comfort in the following Amy Carmichael poem:
O Prince of Glory, who dost bring
Thy sons to glory through Thy Cross,
Let me not shrink from suffering,
Reproach or loss ….
If Thy dear Home be fuller, Lord,
For that a little emptier
My house on earth, what rich reward
That guerdon* were.
*recompense; something earned or gained.
The Single “Mother”
“A Touch of Disappointment”
“In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free…” - (Colossians 3:11, NLT)
