COVID-19 Post for our regular followers:
We hope and pray that you and your families are staying staying safe during these uncertain and rapidly changing times, and that your focus remains on the only certainty we know to be true—God is sovereign over it all.
We wanted to reach out to you with a quick update. In response to these events, we have found it necessary to make the cross-country trek to California in an RV. We will be on the road for 7 days, making it challenging to post regularly. Stick with us, and we will upload our daily devotions as we can.
Stay strong, stay healthy, stay home.
Monty and Theresa
You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the LORD forever, for the LORD GOD is an everlasting rock.
Isaiah 26:3-4 ESV
In order to find rest in a world intent on stealing the peace in our marriage, we need to have a solid understanding of how we find His peace. We are reminded in this passage that we find His peace when we trust in Him because He is our rock. When everything else feels like slipping sand, He is our rock. When the news changes as rapidly as our emotions, He is our everlasting rock.
Diving deeper into the meaning of ‘everlasting rock’ helps us to uncover the significance of this term. Rock is used multiple times throughout scripture, and carries with it multiple connotations. Rock is equated with the idea of strength. Rock was used to build walls, fortresses, and strong towers in many stories from scripture. God is our source of strength and our protection in times of distress and danger. Imagine God as a wall of protection around you in these uncertain times; think of Him as your fortress and your strong tower against the world. The world will shoot arrows at you, it will try launch cannonballs over the walls, but if you are standing behind a wall built by God’s rock, those weapons won’t even scratch his wall of protection as they fall to the ground.
God is also our refuge. Like Moses, we can hide in the cleft of “the Rock.” God will care for us as He protects us. The word ‘rock’ reveals something about the very nature of God to us. As our rock, He is solid and unchangeable. We live in a world full of change right now, and that change can well up the fears inside of us because we can’t find any stability. Just as we grab ahold of our new reality, something changes. Finding our hope in this world is like aiming our weapons at a moving target. We think we know where we’re going, but life places a curve in the road and suddenly we’re headed somewhere different. God is unchanging. He is faithful and we can trust Him, regardless of where the world takes us. He is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow. We find peace by resting our minds on the fact that His promises are the only constant in the world.
The ‘rock’ symbolism continues in the New Testament with reference to Christ. He is the foundation, the chief-corner stone. He is the rock of offense to those who reject Him, but the spiritual rock for those who obey Him. Jesus is our foundation; He is where we find truth in a world of uncertainty. When the world has stolen our peace and replaced it with chaotic thoughts, the structure of our lives becomes weak and unstable. We have to tear everything down and return to our foundation. Jesus is truth we can build our lives on. He came to save the world, and that truth doesn’t change when the world feels upside down. He promises to be with you, to love you, to spend eternity with you. He promises to work all things out for good, and He promises to win in the end. None of that has changed despite what may be in front of you.
Finally, ‘everlasting’ is an important part of God’s nature. His love for you will last forever. His promises for you are eternal. Step back and recognize the sheer magnitude of forever, and allow it to shrink this month or this year to its relative size. All this madness is but a blip on God’s timeline. It’ll be over in a God-sized minute.
It took me a number of years as a Christian and great number of deep valleys to truly understand the truths in this scripture, but God has finally brought me to the place where He is my rock and my fortress during changing times. There were so many times when I thought He was my everything, then He would reveal yet another place in my heart where something else was placed first—my family, my children, even my home. These trials we walk through reveal where we place our hope; the foundations we set up and trust. He will dissolve them like sand because He wants to be our foundation, He wants to be our fortress, He wants to be our rock. Take some time to sit with your spouse today and remind yourselves where His peace is to be found—not in the job you thought was so secure, not in the family you thought you could hold, not in the hope that these uncertain times will soon pass. No, our peace is found in trusting that He is our everlasting rock.
Press on ~ you are loved 💗
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