...the door is only God...

“1 In the LORD I take refuge.

How then can you say to me: ‘Flee like a bird to your mountain.

2 For look, the wicked bend their bows;

        they set their arrows against the strings

        to shoot from the shadows at the upright in heart.

3 When the foundations are being destroyed,

        what can the righteous do” Psalm 11:1-3.

I have always loved the opening words of Psalm 11: “In the LORD I take refuge” verse 1. When we are surrounded by our own weaknesses and sin, as well as those who lure us into sin, we have only one, single recourse — to take refuge in the Lord. To flea back to the Lord when we stray or completely fall from the path that God has laid out for us, do not be tricked. There is only one thing we must do, only one thing remains: Take refuge in the Lord. return to the Lord. Do not let your own thinking change your mind or persuade you to do something other than return to the Lord. For if we don’t return to God, to whom shall we turn?

Our confidence in God can only be grounded in years of walking with God. Look around and consider the lack of stability of those who advise us to do differently. Where is their faith when they counsel us to flee? The psalmist knows the futility of trying to “Flee like a bird” (verse 1). To step away from the Lord is nothing but a quick escape in search of something other than the Lord. So we must “take refuge inn the Lord.”

The psalmist also warns us not top take refuge in continuing on our path of sin, abandoning God. “Look”, the Psalmist warns us, “the wicked lurk in the dark…and shoot arrows at others.” So it is with evil. So it is with temptation.

this is why, when Jesus taught us to pray, He warned us to pray that God would lead us away from temptation, for continuing to embrace temptations always lead to evil decisions. “Oh God, lead us away from our temptations and deliver us from evil” is the only way to pray and live life!

And notice at the end of these verses that the Psalmist warns us about our culture, the foundations of the world in which we live. In verse 3 we read that the foundations, the order of our society, are destroyed.

So today pray that you take refuge in the Lord — and in no one else or in nothing else.

Lord Jesus Christ, Son off the Living God, have mercy on me a sinner.

From the Bible:

“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him” John 3:16-17.

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Cursed is the person who trusts in other people and makes people their strength, whose heart turns away from the Lord. You are like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see any good come. You shall dwell in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. ‘Blessed is the one who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord’” Jeremiah 17:5-7.

“I am the door. If anyone enters by Me, you will be saved and will go in and out and find pasture” John 10:9.