If God Himself Be for Me

If God Himself Be for Me

No angel and no gladness,

No high place, pomp, or show,

No love, no hate, no badness,

No sadness, pain , or woe,

No scheming, no contrivance,

No subtle thing or great          

Shall draw me from your guidance

Nor from you separate. (5)

For joy my heart is ringing;

All sorrow disappears;

And full of mirth and singing,

It wipes away all tears.

The sun that cheers my spirit

Is Jesus Christ, my king;

The heav’n I shall  inherit

Makes me rejoice and sing.(6)

When you think of it, life if filled with strategies to ward off disaster. This afternoon, my wife and I met with a person selling long-term care insurance that one buys in the event that at some point you might become permanently incapacitated. Then there is life insurance to provide for your family in the event that the primary caregiver dies young. Then there is health insurance in the event that you get sick. There is insurance to provide money for you if your house burns down. There is insurance to protect you in the event you have a car accident. Of course there are also warranties. They give you money if your computer, or washer and dryer, or refrigerator, or TV fails. Life is filled with risks, and we have somehow become convinced that we ought to avoid all of them.

Reflecting on all this, there are probably too many opportunities in our affluent society to help us hold on to what we’ve already acquired. Having lived in Africa this past fall where people have none of this risk protection, it’s clear that we are blessed not only with our advantages, but also with the monies that allow us to purchase all this protection if we choose. If one calculates the amount of protection we pay for in a given year, as I just did, the total amounts to many thousands of dollars– just to secure our advantage should something go wrong. Some of this is good, especially if it helps us from becoming dependent on others. However, there is a danger of becoming obsessed with the need to protect yourself against impending disaster-against imagined and even unlikely risks.

I had an uncle who was a pastor and he purchased no life insurance because he believed that God would take care of him. It was the way of another time and place for there were many who placed more confidence in God than in insurance and warranties.

Yet I wonder whether there is not some happy medium between a trust which borders on naivete and an obsession which trusts warranties that cost almost as much as some of the technology we buy these days.

Paul Gerhardt, the 400^th Anniversary of whose birth we celebrate this year, provides some perspective for our dilemma. Most of the things in which we place confidence were ripped out from under him. In the Thirty Year’s War and the diseases, which came in its aftermath, he lost his ancestral home, his wife and his children, many of his friends and the possessions that he held dear. There was no insurance. And certainly the government did not provide annuities because he had lost loved ones in a surprise attack. Still he shares his confidence in his many hymns: „No fire or sword or thunder Shall sever me from you; No danger, thirst, or hunger, No pain or poverty, No mighty princes‘ anger Shall ever vanquish me.“

Gerhardt had a different treasure, a grander one than the world can provide. In the prequel to the movie, The Lion King, Timon, the prarie dog, is trying to find his solace, his secure and happy resting-place. The wise baboon advises him, „Look beyond what you see!“ This is our dilemma as well. We are so enamoured of what we see, of the things that we have acquired, that we center our meaning, our confidence in them. Yet Gerhardt points us beyond what we see to the one who alone is our hope and desire. Trusting in Christ gives us the confidence to face the future because he has secured our advantage before God:

Christ Jesus is my splendor, My sun, my light, alone;

Were he not my defender Before God’s awesome throne,

I never should find favor And mercy in his sight

But be destroyed forever As darkness by the light. (3)

One wonders how best to achieve the balance in this life between a confident trust in the God who places strong ground under our feet through his love for us in Christ Jesus, and the acquisitions of those common sense provisions which keep us from being dependent on others. Surely there is some foolishness involved in failing to take precautions. However, Gerhardt’s faith has a great deal to teach us. As we focus on God’s love for us, we have a different feeling about whose we are and what we need. Some things, which may be very necessary to others, are not so necessary for Christians who know that „Jesus and his blood alone are our salvation, the true, eternal good.“

It would be interesting for each of us to reflect on this love that God has shared in Jesus and then make a list of the things which we can’t do without-a list of the things so important to us that we have to buy insurance and warranties to assure that we will always have them. It might be interesting for us to share with each other how long those lists really are. And whether or not they stand in the way of our faith.