Racing Through the Night
The dark of the night is a scary thing when you are driving. Your peripheral vision is hampered. You can only see ahead of you as far as the headlights will illuminate. Who knows what dangers lurk just out of our sight? For most of us, night is not the ideal time for us to be out and about.
In fact, the night is meant for us to rest. Our bodies perform many important functions during our night time sleeping hours (important cell repair work and making cholesterol are 2 that just pop right to mind). In reality, night is a very important part of our life, even though, in the darkness of night, we are shown how utterly helpless we are… that is, without a light. Try getting up to get a drink in the middle of the night without a light of some sort--and no fair counting those full moon nights. You know the way to the kitchen and back, but in the darkness, things have a way of not being quite where we thought they were, and usually something jumps out for us to stub our pinky toe on!
The truth is, we are unable to move around in the night. We must be still. Perhaps that is the only time when our bodies and minds slow down enough for God to talk to us, and for us to listen to Him. The Bible is full of references to the Lord speaking to people at night, and in dreams or night visions. Check out David’s psalms, Psalms 17:3 and 42:8 to start with. God warns the wise men in a night vision about not returning to Herod. (Matthew 2:1-12) Abimelech is warned by God twice in night visitations about taking Abraham’s wife, and Isaac’s wife. (Genesis 20:1-4; Genesis 26:7-11)
We go through times of spiritual and emotional “night”, too. We sometimes find ourselves in dark places in our lives, those “nights” in our lives when we wonder if we will ever make it through our hard time. Our problems and the attacks on us seem like the road in the night. We can not see very far ahead of us. Our peripheral vision is gone. We need a light, and Jesus is our Light through the darkness. We don’t see the way, but with Him shining His presence and instruction in our night, we are able to make it through.
So if night is such a beneficial time for us, why are we always racing to get through it? I do not like the night, or the darkness. That is why I always want to be out of the darkness and into the light. In reality, we need the night and all it holds and all it provides, to be able to live in the day. We can not function well in the day if we have not slept or rested the night before. Go a few nights without rest or sleep, and things really get out of whack (just ask those around us). If we go an extended amount of time without proper rest or enough sleep. And our body goes haywire.
Again, the physical shows us a spiritual truth. In the physical darkness of night, we are forced to be still. In the emotional and spiritual darkness of our hard times and trials, we realize how helpless we are, too. It is dark, and we do not just go bee-bopping around as usual. We must be still, as in “Be still and know that I am God”. It is also in those dark days of the soul that we slow down enough to realize that without light, God’s light, shining in our lives, we are nothing, and utterly helpless and hopeless. Once we do slow down and be still in the midst of those dark days, God comes to us, ministers to us, and gives us comfort and instruction, and sheds Light on the subject.
Think for a moment about the following situations: Joseph is crushed. The love of his life, his wonderful bride-to-be suddenly turns up pregnant. He knows it is not his baby. How could she do this to him? To them? The night comes crashing down around him, but in the night, the Lord meets him and gives him comfort and instruction to make it through- “Do not fear to take Mary as your wife…” Matthew 1:18-25. Jacob just cons his father out of the blessing that he was going to give to Esau. Now his father is really angry, Esau is going to kill him, and his mother sends him away from home to run for his life. He has nothing. He is going into a very uncertain future. Yet in the darkness of his life that very night, God meets him and promises to lead him through it all--FOREVER (Genesis 28). Wow. I would not have wanted to miss that night because I had my own flashlight thing going on.
That is exactly, however, what happens in our lives. We are afraid of the dark. We don’t like the night. We do not like having to be still and quiet. Therefore, we speed through it, or bring our own 5000 watt flashlight into the night, and we miss what God wanted to do through that night. We are like little children, who don’t want to go to sleep. We don’t want to close our eyes and submit to the dark, so that God can teach us, and reach us, and help us to be totally dependent on Him for our way through.
Our nights are not just our own, you know. They don’t just belong to us. They belong to the one who made both us and the night, the trial and the Light, for His purposes and for His glory, and to bring others around us to the same saving knowledge and experience that He had for us.
In Luke 22:31, Jesus says to Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded (obtained by asking) permission to sift you like wheat; but I have prayed for you, that your faith may not fail; and you, when once you have turned again, strengthen your brothers.” Notice that Jesus does not say- “Satan has asked to sift you like wheat, but I won’t let him, or I will prevent him from hurting you.” Satan did sift Peter, and it did hurt. Jesus says “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail. He says, after you come through the darkness of night with your faith strengthened, you will be able to strengthen your brothers.
Sometimes the nights are necessary for us to live in the day, and whether the nights are of our own making (Job 33:14-18), or for refining or strengthening, God will meet us there. In those times of darkness in our lives, when our tendency is to speed through, to get out of the night, perhaps we should slow down a little to listen and hold on to the Lord. Cuddle up in His strong arms and let Him rock us through the night with soothing comfort and important instruction and direction, if we are quiet and listening.
Satan wants us, that is clear, but he can not have us. Jesus said so.
(John 10:27-29) When your enemy seeks to sift you like wheat in the dark, know that God wants to meet you there and lead you through in His Light.
“Weeping may endure for the night, but joy comes in the morning.”