August 14
“The Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me for His heavenly kingdom,” 2 Timothy 4:18.
In the last or the Seventh Petition of the Lord’s Prayer, we pray, “But deliver us from evil.” In his explanation of this Petition, Dr. Martin Luther wrote, “We pray in this petition, as the sum of all, that our Father in heaven would deliver us from every evil of body and soul, property and honor, and finally, when our last hour has come, grant us a blessed end, and graciously take us from this vale of tears to Himself in heaven.”
We ask God to deliver us from every evil according to His good and gracious will. To speak these words requires faith and trust in the promises of God for this life and for the life that is to come. With a firm faith in God’s promises, the apostle Paul wrote to Timothy, “The Lord will deliver me from every evil work and preserve me for His heavenly kingdom.”
What the apostle Paul confessed, every Christian can say: “The Lord will deliver me from every evil work.” This does not mean that a Christian should never get sick or that a Christian should never be involved in any kind of accident or suffer any kind of reverses or difficulties. Indeed, Christians also experience the hurts and aches that are common to all people. However, we have God’s promise that He will deliver us from every evil work.
Psalm 91 is a victory psalm that expresses the faith and trust of the child of God, and it summarizes God’s promises to watch over us in various ways. In part, the psalm reads, “Because you have made the Lord, who is my Refuge, even the Most High, your dwelling place, no evil shall befall you, nor shall any plague come near your dwelling; for He shall give His angels charge over you, to keep you in all your ways. In their hands they shall bear you up, lest you dash your foot against a stone . . . Because he has set his love upon Me, therefore I will deliver him; I will set him on high, because he has known My name. He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble; I will deliver him and honor him. With long life I will satisfy him, and show him My salvation,” Psalm 91:9-12, 14-16.
Our faith and trust in God’s promises are expressed beautifully in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He writes, “I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed in us . . . We know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose . . . What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? . . . It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? . . . In all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord,” Romans 8:18, 28, 31-32, 34-35, 37-39.
We might be inclined to say that it was easy for Paul to speak with such conviction. He was directly called by God to be the messenger of the Gospel, and he was blessed with special gifts from the Holy Spirit. In everything that Paul wrote, there is one word that is so important – the little word, “us.” Paul was not speaking just for himself. What he said, every child of God can say: “(Nothing) shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord!”
With the words of the psalmist, we close: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil; for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me,” Psalm 23:4. Amen.