Category: Psalm 91

“When they call on me, I will answer; I will be with them in trouble. I will rescue and honor them.”

With so many of these verses, it is easy to gloss over it and respond with a basic, “Well, that’s nice…” Maybe if you want to be an extra good Christian you might take the time to make a verse quote-pic for Instagram. Yay Jesus! But whenever I am just soaking in one verse at a time, I like to really feel the depth of meaning that is there. These words are revealing the very nature of God, so there is no end to the depth we can find here.

Have you ever called someone and waited for them to call you back? After a while, you might start to wonder if they forgot about you. But this verse has a rock solid guarantee: “when they [those who love and trust God] call on me, I will answer.” Will. Period. Then he says he will be with us in trouble. That strikes me because when I picture kids in trouble I imagine them sitting alone in a room. But God is with us in trouble. Not only that, but he will rescue us. And as if that were not enough, here’s the really crazy part: he will honor us.

Here’s your freedom for today: God wants to lift you up. He answers when you call, he stays by your side in troubling times, he rescues you and he lifts you up to restore your dignity. God made humans to have a great place of honor in his kingdom. When we fell, we ended up in a deep, dark pit. God is in the midst of doing the restoration work that will return us to the place he intended for us: royalty sitting with him at his table.

 

“I will reward them with a long life and give them my salvation.”

We finish Psalm 91 with the promise of rewards: long life and salvation. Whenever we hear the phrase “long life,” we usually think of being 100 years old and peacefully dying in our sleep. But that word “salvation” is interesting showing up in the same sentence as “long life.” Perhaps we need to rethink our old-age imagery and dream bigger.

Christians talk a lot about eternal life, but often this is more like a destination than a continuation. “Do you know where you would go if you died tonight??” is the classic pressure-filled evangelistic question. But what if we really think about what it means to have a long life? So long you might even call it eternal. How might you plan differently for your life now if you had eternity in mind?

Here’s your freedom for today: you were meant to live. I mean really live. Death was never part of the design of God’s world. When you accept the rescuing love of Jesus, you immediately return to the reality that you were meant to have — your life becomes eternal. Funny how everyone has been searching for the fountain of youth or the key to eternal life, almost as if we have a deep yearning for the way things were meant to be. And here Jesus is handing it out for free. But don’t wait until you die to start really living in God’s kingdom. Dwell there now, walking in a victory that is truly supernatural. Enjoy the scenery, you’ve got all the time in this world and the next…