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Tuesday Morning Epistles
Tom Barnard's Tuesday Morning epistle
is being sent out a day late because of a day filled
with personal commitments yesterday.
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Welcome to "Tuesday Morning"—a fresh sea breeze on
humid, windless days for Christians everywhere.
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to hard times,
including times he spent in Roman prisons. In 2
Corinthians 1:8-9 he wrote:
"We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers,
about the hardships we suffered in the province of Asia.
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."
More than once I have visited with men confined to
prison for crimes they have committed against society,
and I will tell you they were not pleasant experiences.
But I have counseled with folk who were prisoners of
another type—suffering the consequences of poor choices
they made in business, in their personal lives, and in
their relationships with other people. Dark times visit
people from all cultures and classes in society. There
are even some folk who suffer because of what
someone else has done or not done to them.
What do we do when dark times come our way? That's the
question addressed in this week's "Tuesday Morning." It
is attached. Open it whenever you need a lift. Good news
is just ahead.
Tom Barnard
A Senior Encourager
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Dark Times? Not! Tom Barnard
n last week’s “Tuesday Morning” I quoted from David McCasland’s excellent biography of Oswald Chambers, Abandoned to God. I referred to chapter 7, entitled “Dark Night of the Soul”—a time in Chambers’ early ministry when for about four years the voice of God was silent. Later he described those four years as a time when “nothing but the overruling grace of God and the kindness of friends kept me out of an asylum.” Eventually he would emerge from this period triumphantly.
A subscriber to these weekly epistles, responding to the quote from Chambers, wrote to tell me about how God had been helping her deal with the anxiety over the downturn in our nation’s financial systems. One particular verse from the Psalms helped lift her spirits. In it David spoke of his confidence in God:
“If I say, ‘Surely the darkness will hide me and the light become night around me,’ even the darkness will not be dark to you; the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.” (Psalm 139:12)
David experienced his own “dark nights of the soul”—many of which were caused by his own selfish decisions. But even in these dark times he understood that God had the power to turn the night into day. God never abandoned David, though there were times when he thought he was very alone. Had God rejected him in these times? No. Did he feel like God had turned his back on him? Oh, yes he did.
David understood a quality about God that we need to capture today. The fact is that God is never intimidated by bad days—in the stock market or in any other part of our lives. One of my favorite New Testament verses is found in 1 John 1:5, as paraphrased in the New Living Translation:
“This is the message he has given us to announce to you: God is light and there is no darkness in him at all.”
What did John mean? He meant this: God shines. It is his nature to do so. And he shines wherever darkness reigns. In his poem, “Creation,” James Weldon Johnson opens the epic piece with these lines:
And God stepped out on space, And he looked around and said, “I’m lonely—I’ll make me a world.”
And far as the eye of God could see Darkness covered everything, Blacker than a hundred midnights Down in a cypress swamp.
Then God smiled, And the light broke, And the darkness rolled up on one side, And the light stood shining on the other, And God said, “That’s good.”
“Blacker than a hundred midnights down in a cypress swamp”? It doesn’t get much darker than that. If that’s where you are, God stands ready to “smile” on your dark times and bring light to them. Ask him. Then trust him. He knows exactly where you are, and where he wants you to be.
There are numerous benedictions in the New Testament. This one is from Jude 1:24—
“To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy—to the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.” Dark times? Not today! |