He’ll Deliver You

Transcript

Alright, thank you very much. And hello again, radio friends. How in the world are you? You doing Alright today? Well, I surely trust so. Bless your heart. This is your good friend, Bob Cook. I’m glad to be back with you to share from God’s Word.

We’re finishing up our comment on the 91st Psalm, and I trust it’s a blessing to you. Notice now what God says He will do because you have set your love on Him and you’ve known His name. Says I’ll… “He’ll call on me, and I will answer Him.” Answered prayer. “Call unto me, and I will answer thee.” God guarantees to answer a prayer. Have you decided that that promise is true? Have you really decided that God will answer your prayer when you pray? The blessed spirit of God, who indwells the believer, will whisper in your own heart. According to the will and the Word of God, God will always answer in line with His own Word, and sometimes you find the answer when you read your Bible. But the Spirit of God will whisper to your heart, either a passage of Scripture or some directive that He will give you in line with God’s perfect, organized plan.

You will get your answer when you pray. Yes, indeed. He said it. “Call unto me, and I will answer thee. He shall call upon me, and I will answer.” There’s no “maybe” about that. Trust your blessed God to answer prayers today. “I’ll be with him in trouble.” We talked about that the last time we got together. God doesn’t guarantee that you won’t go into trouble. He doesn’t promise that you won’t walk through the valley of the shadow. He said, “I’ll be with you.” There is all the difference.

Then it says, “I will deliver him.” “I will deliver him.” The Lord knoweth how to deliver the godly out of temptation. “Call unto me,” He said, “and I will answer thee.” “I will deliver him.” “Call upon the Lord in the day of trouble, and He shall deliver thee.” What does it mean to be delivered? As I see it, it means not to avoid the pressure but to be made victorious through it. “Thanks be unto God which always causeth us to triumph and maketh manifest the savor,” that’s the fragrance, “Of His knowledge through us in every place.” God doesn’t say that you won’t go through the crusher. He doesn’t say that you won’t have some troubles. He says that He’ll be with you, and in that fact, you become a victor, and you’re delivered.

Paul, the apostle, had to go into his hearings in Rome alone because all his friends deserted him. He said, “At my first hearing, no man stood with me.” But he also said, “I was delivered from the mouth of the lion.” God brought him out of that, and although he was a prisoner for some more time, and that he had a number of other experiences that weren’t altogether pleasant, and tradition tells us that he was finally executed in Rome, still he said, “I was delivered from the mouth of the lion. They didn’t throw me to the lions. God stood with me.” He said, “Nevertheless, the Lord stood with me and delivered me.” So what does it mean? It means that you’ll have the presence of the Lord, the protection of the Lord, and the plan of the Lord worked out in your life.

God’s plan does not exclude the idea of troubles and pressures or tears or heartbreak. God’s plan does not exclude them, but God’s plan does guarantee His presence with you and victory as the outcome. God’s presence, God’s protection, God’s complete, beautiful plan for your life. Deliver. Get hold of that for yourself, will you?

It’s my tendency to say, “Lord, get me out of this.” When I’m in trouble, I wanna get out of it. God’s plan oftentimes involves going through it instead, but with Him. As I said a moment ago, “It’s not where you are but with whom that counts.” Then He says, “I’ll honor him. Them that honor me I will honor,” is the promise. “Promotion cometh not from the east or the west or the south but from the Lord. He setteth up one and putteth down another.” “I’ll honor him.” How does God do this? He does it by arranging the circumstances of life so that they point unerringly to the fact that God is doing something in your life. “This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvelous in our eyes.” That’s the reaction. When God honors you, He doesn’t put the focus upon you but upon Himself in you. “The life which I now live in the flesh, I live by the faith of the Son of God. Christ liveth in me. The secret we preach among the nations, the open, now revealed, secret mystery is Christ in you, the hope of glory, the blessed message of a shining life that points to the Savior.”

“I’ll honor him.” What does it mean? It means that God will establish His credibility through your life. Said the woman to the Prophet, “Now, I know that thou art a man of God and that the word of the Lord in thy mouth is truth.” She’d had him living in her house for a year, but she said, “Now I know why.” Because God had done something wonderful in her own life through Him.

Establish God’s credibility through your life. Establish the rightness and the truth of God’s message through your message. Establish the beauty and loveliness of your Savior through your life. “Let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us and establish now the work of our hands,” Moses prayed. When God honors you, He honors you not for you but for Himself through you. “I’ll honor him.”

Then He says, “With long life will I satisfy him.” What are you gonna do with the people who die before they’re 40 or 50 or 60 years old, at a young age, the way we count things now? Did they somehow not measure up to God’s promise? “With long life will I satisfy him.” [chuckle] I can’t answer that question. I wish I could. I’ll ask the Lord about that when we get to heaven. I think, however, the emphasis in that phrase has to be not on the ‘long life’ but on the word ‘satisfy.’

You see, a lot depends on what happened while you were alive. Bob Pierce used to thunder out when he was preaching to the crowds at Youth for Christ, “You’re gonna die sometime. Make sure that you die for something worthwhile and that you’ve lived for something worthwhile.” I used to tell the young fellas in Youth for Christ, “Work hard for God. You may die a little sooner, but you will have lived for something worthwhile.” Be that as it may, we face the fact that there are people who have died, seemingly, as we would say, before their time. Does that mean that God’s promise isn’t true, or that that’s an exception, or what does it mean? I think the emphasis has to be on the word ‘satisfy.’ “He shall see of the travail of his soul,” the prophet says concerning the Savior, the Lord Jesus and His suffering on Calvary. “He shall see of the travail of his soul and shall be satisfied.”

Oh, I pray day by day that God may be able to look down upon Bob Cook and that our Savior may be able to say, “Calvary was worth it when I look at that life.” “He shall see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied.” “With long life will I satisfy him.” What does it mean? It means that the plan of God was perfectly worked out in that life, and there wasn’t anything left to be completed. Now, when you take that point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Looking, for example, at missionaries, who have been slain on the mission field, many of them young. Think of the five young men who lost their lives in the Auca Jungle years ago. Who is to say that that was a mistake? The press did, of course. I read in the press various accounts, many of which said, “Why didn’t these young men stay in the large cities and train nationals to go out, the people who would be more accepted, and they themselves would not have been slain? What a waste of talented, young life. They should have stayed in the cities,” and all of that. Well, what happened?

Well, first of all, when the news of their martyrdom came through, I, for one, was speaking to some hundreds of students at the Moody Bible Institute that very day. And as I was speaking, the news came through that they had found these bodies of the young men who had been martyred in their attempt to reach the Auca Indians. And I said, “You know, the Lord is asking some of you here,” I spoke to the students, “Asking some of you here to say, ‘I’ll fill that breach. I’ll give my life. I’ll volunteer my life for the mission field.'” And there were several hundred of them who quite sincerely said, “We’ll volunteer for foreign missionary service.” This happened, not only at that point, but I am told on good authority that in Bible schools and colleges all across the land, there were literally thousands of young people who volunteered their services to give the Gospel to the people who had never heard it. So that there was a great resurgence of missionary volunteers in the years that followed. People going out to the foreign fields. Now, that’s one result. Another result, of course, was that the widow of one of those young men went back into that tribe, and the entire tribe was brought to the knowledge of the Lord Jesus Christ, so that one day an old Auca could say to the widow of that slain missionary, “Your God is now my God, and your Savior is my Savior.” And he was one of those who threw the spears that pierced those bodies.

You wanna think about God’s timing? ‘Satisfy’ is the key. It’s not when you die, it’s for what you die and for whom. Isn’t it, really? God’s been good to me. I feel like I’d live forever. [chuckle] And I just enjoy every day, but that doesn’t prove that I should have, does it? Because I look around me, and there are other people who have finished their life’s work at age 40 or 50 or 60. Why didn’t they live as long as I? I don’t know. I only know that God uses the word ‘satisfy,’ and when God says, “That’s Alright now. The plan is done. The work is finished. Come on home,” you’ll be satisfied. Does it make sense to you? Well, I hope it does because I don’t know any other answer to the differences that we see in lifespans of believers.

He says, “I’ll show him my salvation.” ‘Show’ means demonstrate, demonstrate in a living package. In the New Testament, the corresponding verb is the Greek, ‘phaneroo,’ to show in a package, a human being package. “I’ll show him my salvation.” This is living demonstration, proof that God is real. Oh, the key to all of victorious living is that personal relationship with God where He is real in the experiences of life. Turn to Him today. If you have never committed your life to him completely, do it right now. Turn to Him today and say, “Lord, make yourself real to me. Through Jesus Christ, I pray.” He’ll answer. I promise you.

Dear Father, today, O make yourself real to us. Honor yourself through us. Reveal, blessed Lord, Thy power through our yielded lives. In Jesus’ name, I pray, Amen.

Till I meet you once again by way of radio, walk with the King today, and be a blessing!