Good Morning Everyone,
Our theme for this month: “Taking care of your soul”
Our Bible verse for today: “Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer. From the ends of the earth I call to you, I call as my heart grows faint; lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For you have been my refuge, a strong tower against the foe.” Psalm 61:1-3 (NIV)
Our thought for today: “God calls us to higher ground”
Have you ever stood at the bottom of a high mountain and contemplated what it must be like up on the peak? You imagine that it would be a great adventure to get there and that the view at the top would be spectacular, but you also imagine that the space at the top would be small and limited, so-much-so that you might even be in danger of falling off. But then once you make it to the top you’re surprised to discover that what appeared to be a tiny peak from the bottom, actually turned out to be a wide plateau at the top and that if you wanted to you could actually have spread out, set up a tent, and safely camped out.
Higher spiritual ground is like that too. When the Lord is calling us to join Him at a higher spiritual place it can seem like a great adventure, and we can anticipate the prospect of a spiritual mountaintop experience, but we also often envision it as being constricted and limited. Surely the spiritual discipline required to get to that height with the Lord is not something we can or would want to try to maintain. We’re not cloistered monks after all.
But lo and behold, once we get there we discover that just like the physical mountaintop I described earlier, this new and higher spiritual ground also turns out to be a vast plateau where we can easily and comfortably spread out and live a full life with the Lord. The difference is that we are now at a new and better place with the Lord. This higher ground with the Lord is a better and safer place to live than where we were before. The predators that live and thrive in the lower lying regions of life aren’t such a threat in this new higher place. Oh, sometimes they may still manage to make it there where we are, but they’re out of their element and we are in a stronger place of refuge with the Lord.
Spiritual formation, and the associated soul-care, helps to bring us to new higher ground with the Lord and when we get there, we discover it’s a much better, and a much safer place to live. I encourage you to move up to higher ground with the Lord today.
God Bless,
Pastor Jim
Oak Hill Baptist Church 