| Yesterday's Bible Study |
In this verse, Job's friend Zophar is trying to encourage Job to trust the Lord despite the many troubles that have befallen him. A little later, Zophar tells Job that if he stretches out his hand toward God (v.13), he will be secure and find hope. Today, like Job, we have the same opportunity. Will we stretch out our hands to the Lord in the midst of whatever we are facing to find hope and safety in Him?
Stretching out our hands is the universal symbol for surrender. It's saying that we need help; we can't do this on our own. As Christians, we have already admitted that we needed Jesus to save us. We cannot become good enough to merit our own heavenly entrances. We surrender to God at the moment of our salvation, and we should surrender to him again and again when we, like Job, face trials of any kind.
When we surrender to the Lord, He takes our cause upon Himself. He secures us in His grip; he makes sure that nothing comes between us and Himself because the most important thing in our lives is our relationship with Him. Nothing is so painful or hard that it will inevitably take away our relationship with Jesus. When we surrender to the Lord, we will be able to endure.
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Knowing that we are secure in the Lord gives us hope because we know that He is all-powerful and all-loving. He will not allow something to happen to us for the sake of harming us. While He does allow painful things to happen in our lives, they are not meant to wound us. Instead, they are the results of living in a world full of sin. Yet we have hope because we know they cannot overtake us. We know that even though we live in a broken world, our Savior is with us.
The Lord gives us rest in safety. This means we can rest in full confidence that He will keep us in His hands. While painful things will happen in our lives, the Lord will never remove Himself from us. If we surrender to Him by asking Him to help us, He will draw close to us in any battle we face.
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