Exodus 14:14 “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” Today's episode is all about how the Lord wants us to spend time in silence with Him so He can come in and minister to us. He also wants us to turn our battles over to Him and let Him fight them for us. We are not alone in the fight, if we allow Him too, He will fight out battles for us. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The Lord Will Fight For You!
Exodus 14:14 “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.”
I heard this verse the other day, and I thought it would be perfect for an episode, as I know so many of you listening are going through some pretty hard stuff right now. Being still is not easy for most of us. We are doers, and we want to go, go, go. This is compounded by the fact that we live in a world that never stops. I know so many people who are doing so much, and they never have time to rest. They have jobs that are so busy they can’t finish all they are supposed to finish in the allotted 40-hour work week.
Being busy is not a bad thing in itself. Benjamin Franklin said, “Idle hands are the devil's playthings.” If we sit around doing nothing, we get bored, and who knows what we might get ourselves into. However, being too busy becomes a problem when we no longer make time for the Lord. Being busy becomes a problem when we stop recharging our batteries with the power of the Holy Spirit and start relying on our own power.
Something we have been learning in Encounter Ministries is that all fruitfulness flows from our intimacy with Christ. Fruitfulness means success. The success of all that we do flows from our relationship with the Lord. Think about this in terms of your other relationships. Let’s look at family life. Doesn’t it seem true that the fruitfulness or the success of your family depends on your relationship with those in your family? What if you never talk to your spouse, you never spend time with him or her, and you just go about your day? It is not necessarily that you don’t want to spend time with them, it is just you don’t seem to have the time. You don’t make the time because there are so many other things you have to do. How successful would that marriage be?
What if you never had time to spend with your children? They have sports games or dance recitals, but you don’t have time to go because you are always working. When you are at home, you don’t spend time with them because you are trying to catch up on all the things to do around the house. If you never make time to spend with them, if you don’t ever talk to them, how successful do you think your relationship with them will be?
The same is true with your relationship with God. We need to make time for Him, and He will take care of all of our worries. When we spend time with Him, we can tell Him all that is going on. We can give Him our stresses, our cares, and our worries. We can hand them over to Him and let Him take care of them. Who else can we entrust our cares and worries to?
The verse above says, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” After we talk to the Lord about what is going on in our lives, we can sit there in silence and let Him come into our hearts and heal us. The Lord has told us many times in our prayer group that He is coming in during the silence and healing our hearts. It is great to talk to the Lord. It is great to pray to the Lord and to do the Rosary, the Divine Mercy Chaplet, and all the other devotions that we do to grow closer to the Lord. These are all amazing and will help develop a more intimate relationship with the Lord.
The Lord is also calling us to a time with Him that is spent in silence. He just wants us to sit with us and minister to us. God can do all things. He can minister to you anywhere and anytime. Yet, He likes to come in the stillness. He likes to come to us when we make the time just to sit and be still with Him. I know it feels like you don’t have any more time left in your schedule. However, if you spend quiet time consistently with Jesus, I am willing to bet you will see more time open up in your schedule. God can’t be outdone in generosity. If you give him 20 minutes, He will give you 10 hours. He is that good.
God's math is not the same as our math. It doesn’t make the same kind of sense that our math does. If he can feed 5,000 men plus women and children with 5 loaves of bread and 2 fish, then he can certainly replace the 15 or 20 minutes during the day that you gave to Him in quiet time. My sister Dee gave me a plaque once with a poem on it and I feel like it is the perfect poem for reminding us how important it is to start our day with the Lord. It shows how important it is to check in with God before starting our day. Here is the Poem:
The Difference By Alan Grant.
I got up early one morning and rushed right into the day;
I had so much to accomplish that I didn't have time to pray.
Problems just tumbled out about me, and heavier came each task.
“Why doesn't God help me?” I wondered. He answered, "You didn't ask.”
I wanted to see joy and beauty, but the day toiled on, gray and bleak;
I wondered why God didn't show me; He said, “But you didn't seek.”
I tried to come into God's presence; I used all my keys at the lock.
God gently and lovingly chided, “My child, you didn't knock.”
I woke up early this morning and paused before entering the day.
I had so much to accomplish that I had to take to take time to pray.
As you can see by this poem, God is ready to help us, He is just waiting for us to ask. Then, once we ask, He is waiting for us to give Him the time to work on us, to heal us. If you are going through a really tough time right now, I want to invite you to some quiet time with the Lord today. Sit with Him and ask Him what He wants you to do, and then listen for His answer. If you need to be filled up with energy, strength, hope, love, power, or anything else today, just ask the Lord and then sit there for a few minutes and receive it. The Lord says when we ask, He answers, so when you ask for something, expect to receive it.
I know sometimes, maybe most of the time, it feels like we are all alone in our battles. We feel like we are the only ones fighting our fights. This verse this morning reminds us that we are not in this alone. Not only is God in it with us, but He will fight our battles for us if we let Him. If we turn our battles over to the Lord, He will take care of them for us. Isn’t that amazing? This reminds me of 2 Kings 6:17. It says, "And Elisha prayed, “Open his eyes, Lord, so that he may see.” Then the Lord opened the servant’s eyes, and he looked and saw the hills full of horses and chariots of fire all around Elisha.” Imagine all the Lord surrounds us with. There is so much we can’t see when it comes to the Lord.
We can’t usually see His angels, we can’t see the reason He allows some things to happen, and we can’t seem to make sense of things at times. We might be sad that we can’t see these things, and I often wish I could see into the spiritual world. However, we have to remember there are also evil spirits in the spiritual world, and I think we would be very frightened if we saw all that goes on in the spiritual world around us.
Even though we can’t see God’s horses and chariots of fire ready to fight for us, we can trust they are there because the Bible is the Word of God. It is fact, and it is God’s promises to us. So, when we read in the Bible, “The Lord will fight for you, and you have only to keep still.” We can take that to the bank. We can count on that. We can be still and watch as the Lord fights our battles for us. Can we be still and allow Him to do that today?
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask that you bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, we ask that you help us to be still and allow us to fight our battles. We ask that you teach us how to be still and that you give us the power to do so because we really struggle with it. Lord, we thank you for all you do for us each day. We thank you for fighting our battles. We thank you for surrounding us with protection and an army to defend us. We want to call on that army, Lord. We want to hand over all of our struggles to you, Lord. You are the almighty one; you are the alpha and the omega, the beginning and the end. We love you so very much. We ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’s holy name, Amen!
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. This is a reminder that tomorrow is mentoring. If you want to join, you can click on the link below or go to the website at WalkBoldlywithJesus.com. I look forward to meeting you again tomorrow. Remember, Jesus loves you, and so do I! Have a blessed day!
Today’s Word from the Lord was received in November 2023 by a member of the Catholic Charismatic Prayer Group during one of our meetings. For more information about the prayer group or these words, please email CatholicCharismaticPrayerGroup@gmail.com. Today’s Word is, “My children, I long to give you my heart. I long to mold your heart to be like mine. That you may see your brothers and sisters and you may reach out to them, pray with them, give them words of hope, pray for healing, give them food if they are hungry. Give them shelter if they have nowhere to stay.”