Prepare today for disaster tomorrow

In the last article, we discussed the need to partner with God in discerning his purpose for our lives and how to live out that purpose in accordance with his will. Today, let’s take a closer look at the next step in experiencing God’s hope during these times: preparing now for what the future might bring. 

One of the many reasons we were so terrorized on 9/11 was that we had no public plan for responding. There had never been such an attack on the homeland, so there was no such thing as “Homeland Security” or any other agency to coordinate governmental and local actions. Nor did most Americans understand the ideology behind the attacks; according to the FBI, hate crimes against innocent Muslims in our country soared seventeen-fold that year.

The threats we’ve discussed thus far illustrate the unknowability and thus the unpredictability of the future. But here’s what all such dangers have in common: our Father not only knows about them before we do, but he will prepare us today to face them tomorrow, whatever they are.

SEAL teams undergo rigorous, multi-year physical and mental preparations for missions yet to be assigned. Physicians, attorneys, and other professionals spend many years in educational and practical preparation for challenges they cannot define at the time.

God’s people are similarly called to make spiritual preparations today to serve our Lord tomorrow in a fallen world aligned against his word and will. Just as Jesus spent three years mentoring his disciples for their future ministries, so they paid forward the disciple-making process with those who would advance the kingdom long after their work was done. Paul had his Timothy, and Peter had his John Mark.

The same principle applies to the hope we need in facing a hopeless world. The day to prepare for tomorrow’s next challenge or calamity is today.

To this end, let’s take three steps vital to our souls.

Embrace your identity as God’s beloved

If your father could have prevented your suffering but did not, it would be natural to question your status in his eyes. There is even a perennial theological current that equates all pain with divine punishment (cf. John 9:1–2).

Our transactional culture similarly measures us by our performance or lack thereof. In short, when hard times come, our first reaction is often to blame ourselves and assume God and others do the same.

To be sure, much of our suffering is of our own making. But much of it is not. And regardless of its source, the fact remains: our Father loves us so completely and unconditionally that nothing we do or fail to do changes our status in his heart.

This is not because we are deserving of such love. To the contrary, it is because “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Love is not just what he does—it is what he is. His character is defined by agape love, the unconditional and unmerited commitment to place the other first.

This was what drove our Father to make us for relationship with himself, because love requires an object. It is what drove him to make us even knowing beforehand that our sins would cost his Son his life (Revelation 13:8 NIV). It is what drove him to refuse his Son’s pleas in the Garden of Gethsemane and stand by, watching Jesus writhe in tortured pain as he bore the sins of humanity on his sinless soul. It is what drove that Son to choose to die so that we might live eternally.

Because God is the supreme being, he does not and cannot change (Malachi 3:6). To do so would mean either that he becomes less than he is presently, or that he is presently less than he could become. Both are impossible for the God who is “holy, holy, holy” (Isaiah 6:3; Revelation 4:8).

Add his changeless reality to his loving nature, and you must conclude that your Father loves you as completely as only a perfect Father can. As St. Augustine noted, “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

This means that you are, in the phrase of Henri Nouwen, God’s “beloved.” Henri Nouwen was right: “Being the Beloved expresses the core truth of our existence.”

When we remind ourselves every day of this fact and ask the Spirit to help us believe and embrace its truth, we are ready to face the pain and struggles of this fallen world with the confidence that we are loved and precious in the heart of our Father (cf. Isaiah 43:4).

Here is my favorite paragraph in Scripture:

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, “For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Romans 8:35–39).

Do you believe this to be true?

Do you really?

Begin every day by submitting your life to the Spirit

Self-reliance is spiritual suicide. The more we depend on ourselves, the less we depend on God. And the less we depend on God, the less we can experience his love and power when we need them most.

Part of our problem is cultural, as we have seen. America was founded by hardy pioneers and pilgrims willing to make much of little and forge a new future in an inhospitable land.

But part is personal. As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, the “will to power” is the basic drive in human nature. From Genesis 3 to today, we have sought to “be like God” (v. 5). Everything fallen people do is a means to this end: from the money we earn and the possessions we accumulate for the status they confirm, to transactional relationships even with loved ones in order to receive what we want and need from them.

In his book The Preaching Event, the marvelous preacher John Claypool spoke for us:

People used to ask me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I was shrewd enough to fashion my answer according to what I thought they wanted to hear. For some it was a policeman, for others, a fireman or a preacher. However, in my own heart of hearts, I had my own private fantasy that I never dared to share with anyone. Do you know what it was? I am telling you the gospel truth: I wanted to be president of the world.

The only way to defeat the peril of self-dependence and the lure of personal power is to submit our lives every single day to the Holy Spirit of God. This is why we are commanded to “be filled with the Spirit” (Ephesians 5:18). The phrase can be translated literally, “be continually being controlled by the Spirit.” It points to a continual lifestyle of surrendering our minds and lives to the Spirit so he can “fill,” control, empower, and use our lives for their best purpose.

The best time to do this is at the start of each day. As pilots are taught, you cannot use the runway behind you. If Jesus needed to rise “very early in the morning” to pray, how much more do we (Mark 1:35)? If he needed the strength God can give only to those who seek it, how much more do we?

Let me encourage you to begin tomorrow by getting alone with your Lord. Ask his Spirit to bring to mind anything you need to confess, then confess all that comes to your thoughts and claim his forgiving grace (1 John 1:9).

Now submit your life consciously and intentionally to him. Pray through your day, trusting it to his direction and purpose. Ask him to use you for his glory and the advancement of his kingdom.

Plug the power tool into the socket before you turn it on. Yield the wood of your soul to the carpenter so he can mold it in his image (Romans 8:29).

Before the crisis comes, be so yielded to the Spirit that you can face it in the omnipotence of your Lord.

Practice the presence of Christ through the day

Once we plug an electrical tool into a power socket, we leave it connected so it has the power it needs to fulfill the purpose it was designed to accomplish. So with our souls.

As you go through your day, pray about what comes your way. You can “practice the presence of Jesus,” as Brother Lawrence famously suggested, by thinking with his mind and walking in his Spirit. When you face decisions, ask him to direct you. When you face temptations, ask him to empower you. If you fall to temptation, ask him to forgive you and restore you.

When you have the opportunity to speak his word, do so in his Spirit. Use your influence in every dimension of your life for his glory.

Psalm 91 begins:

He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty. I will say to the Lord, “My refuge and my fortress, my God, in whom I trust” (vv. 1–2).

Note the personal pronouns: three times, the psalmist speaks of the Lord of the universe as “my” refuge, fortress, and God. Then he adds that he is the one “in whom I trust.”

It is one thing to say that the Lord is “the” refuge or even “our” refuge, but neither connotes the protection that comes to us when we make him “my” refuge. A fortress in the distance is no help when the enemy attacks your tent. Believing intellectually that he is the “Most High” and the “Almighty” is of no practical good unless you embrace personally what his omnipotence offers.

Will you dwell in “the shelter of the Most High” today?