Daily Devotion

July 14, 2006

Psalms 103:9-10 He will not always chide: neither will he keep his anger for ever. (10) He hath not dealt with us after our sins; nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.

Several years ago, I suffered a bout of asthma that left sick for days on end. I had been using some sort of inhaler but I had gone beyond the stage of its usefulness. I had asked the Lord about going to the hospital but I was not given permission; before getting physically delivered, the Lord wanted me to come to grips with sin in my life. I laid in bed for several days praying and waiting for deliverance but to no avail; things were going very bad.

When conditions bring us to a physically weakened state, pride, arrogance and self-dependency seem to more easily take the back seat of the composition of our attitudes. At that moment, when through physical affliction my heart was freed from the blinding of self-justification, my mean, intolerant and harsh behavior towards people I was working with came to light in my own sight and convicted my heart. Then pride, the relentless enemy of godliness, took hold of me in the form of extreme condemnation and discouragement, a misplaced feeling of unworthiness that kept me form reaching out to God for forgiveness, restoration and healing, both spiritually and physically.

One evening, as my wife read to me the text mentioned above, it brought tears to my eyes when I realized that even this discouragement was conceived by my pride; if He said that He will not be angry with me forever, and that He has not rewarded me according to my iniquity, also needed not to try to be more ‘righteous’ than Him, accept the forgiveness that He offered my repentant heart and also forgive myself. After coming to grips with these precious spiritual lesson, faith returned to me; I claimed healing by getting up in my sickened state, forced food into my weakened body and went to an outreach event we had that evening singing at a Gipsy Church in the suburbs of Paris, France.

Oh precious words of grace. We see here the love of the Father. The anger, the indignation, and the wrath have their time and place as they that expose the offense, the scar and the tear. But the Father of all, not wanting to be separate from His creation, provides, at His own cost, the means of restoration into heavenly fellowship.

Isaiah 1:18 Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.

Patrick Lumbroso
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