Early this morning, as I was in that early morning stage of waking, I felt that creepy, crawly feeling of fear start to niggle at my mind. This has always been the time when the enemy must find me most vulnerable to a fear attack. Fortunately, as I've allowed the Holy Spirit to form and mold me gradually over the years, He rises up within my mind to do battle with the enemy who plays on my weaknesses.
The way that the Holy Spirit usually combats this menace (who seeks to start my day off in fear) is to bring back a specific portion of scripture to my mind. Today that is again what happened. The words of Psalm 91:1-3 came up like a shield against the enemy bringing with it calm and peace--pushing back the arrows of fear.
Many years ago God impressed upon me the desire to memorize His scripture. I would walk and memorize portions of the Bible most every day. Psalm 91 was one that I memorized after hearing a sister in the Lord at our fellowship say that this was the chapter that was getting her through her battle with cancer. Sort of in honor of her fight I chose that scripture to memorize. Although most nights I only hear the first 3 verses, these verses have become my shield against early morning fear attacks.
Today I determined to "refresh" my mind by re-memorizing the rest of the chapter one verse at a time, so Psalm 91:4 is todays refresher verse.
It says,
He shall cover you with His feathers,
And under His wings you shall take refuge;
His truth shall be your shield and buckler.
Do you ever feel that something you read pops out at you as if it's in neon lights? The words His truth shall be your shield and buckler is that for me.
So I pulled up biblegateway.com to do a little research about the words shield and buckler. I wanted to get a picture in my mind about what that looks like.
A shield and buckler as it turns out is much like it sounds. A protective shield that reflects arrows. As I looked deeper I found out that typically this was a body size shield that completely blocked the body and although it was movable it was quite large and heavy and often stayed stationery during a battle.. A buckler is a small hand held shield that gave the warrior a way to ward off stray arrows.
What an amazing picture! In this chapter of Psalms we have already seen that God is our refuge when we decide to draw close to Him. It is our choice to abide under "the shadow of the Almighty" (verse 1). Then in verse 3 we see what that looks like--God closes his "wings" around us to be our safe refuge. I love this imagery. He covers me and holds me in an embrace that is feather like--sweet and soft.
And yet, the next portion of the verse says that 'His Truth is my shield and buckler". His Truth is a full body shield and a hand held shield. His Truth wards off the arrows of the enemy. His truth protects from the arrows of sin and destruction. His Truth makes sure that we can "abide under the shadow of the Almighty" and be protected from being lead away from the protection of our Lord.
So how do we "abide under the shadow of the Almighty". It's not so difficult. We press in to love God with all our hearts, we lean our heads against his chest and hear His heartbeat. We allow our hearts to beat as one with His. We spend time learning about our precious God just as we would a lover that we are falling in love with for the first time. We put God first in our thoughts and actions because God deserves to be first in our lives. We seek His Truth and we walk in His Way.
Oh how important this is to find the peace that we are offered by God. Tomorrow I will explore verse 5 and why Truth is so important.
May this day be the day when you abide under HIs shadow.
