June 2024
| Isaiah 43.1-5 MSG 1Don’t be afraid, I have paid the price for you. I’ve called you by name. You are mine. 2When you’re in over your head, I’ll be there with you. When you’re in rough waters, you will not go down. When you’re between a rock and a hard place, it won’t be a dead end. When in you are in a destructive firestorm, you will be unharmed. 3I am the LORD, your God, the Holy One of Israel, your Rescuer. 4I paid a huge price for you: all of Egypt, with rich Cush and Seba thrown in! That’s how much you mean to me! That’s how much I love you! I’d sell off the whole world to get you back, trade the creation just for you. 5So don’t be afraid: I’m with you. |
Sometimes, it’s much easier to get going in prayer if something has inspired you – a beautiful place, a loving person, somebody in need. It may be lovely words from a person or a book.
The passage on the left is from the book of Isaiah, in the Bible. It is one of Rev Helen’s favourite passages. Could we chew over the words, a verse at a time and use these thoughts and pictures to create a prayer?
“Lord, I am afraid. You know what’s going on in my life. Please make me feel safe, and know that I belong to You, and You are holding on to me. Amen”
Verse 1, Isaiah 43
At the core of Isaiah’s words is the message that, somehow, the Lord has paid a price to rescue us from our weaknesses and the anxiety of facing difficult problems in our life. It may be that our minds go to Jesus’ final words on the cross….”It is finished”, a common phrase at the time for “paid in full” – whatever it took to rescue us from a life of fear and uncertainty, Jesus has done it!
Praying to the greatest Rescuer of all
Isaiah goes on to give pictures of the scariest events, a sinking ship, floods, the horror of a devastating fire. God is saying to us that any dark and dirty pit that we might fall down in our life, is never too deep for Him to rescue us. He is much deeper. God is the greatest of all Rescuers.
The words on wall that inspired a prayer for rescue
Recently, on BBC Songs of Praise, there was a man who, as a child, had lost both his parents through illness. He was placed in an orphanage with many other children. On Sundays they all had to attend the orphanage chapel, and it was there his rescue came – not from prayers or preaching – but from a Bible verse painted on the wall of that austere place. To us, this is a very sad verse from Psalm 27, but for him, it was a source of hope. The young boy turned this promise into a prayer, and the Lord heard him, and blessed him, and he went on to do great things for God.
Smoking his way to a prayer bridge
An evangelist for the Zimbabwe Bible Society was on the street giving out New Testaments. When he offered the book to a man smoking a homemade cigarette, the man said no thank you. The evangelist insisted that he have one. The man said: “I’ll only rip out the pages to make cigarettes” Surprisingly, the worker said that was fine – as long as the smoker read each page before using it for a roll-up. The man agreed, and took the New Testament.
| When I got to John chapter 3, I was reading it before rolling the page into a cigarette…. then I came to verse 16…. |
Several years later the evangelist was at a gathering of pastors and ministers, when he recognised the same man. He crossed over to him and asked why he was at the conference. The man said, “I smoked through Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and started John. When I got to John chapter 3, I was reading it before rolling it and then I came to verse 16: ‘God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten son that whoever believes in Him should not die but have everlasting life’ Those words were so striking, I had to kneel down and pray, asking God to give me this life’ That’s why I’m here now.
Lord may my heart be so soft and open when I read your precious words, that I too will be to moved to pray the prayers that transform my life, and bring rescue to others. Amen