You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. (Isaiah 26:3 ESV)
There have been times in my life when this verse has comforted me, and other times when I longed for it to be true in my life. This week I have experienced both... sometimes hours apart!
When a verse resonates with me over and over again throughout the day, I tend to sit and dissect it.
I had always thought that ‘mind’ meant my brain... my thoughts. We are to strive to live in His presence, but when I am busy at my job or doing other tasks that require my full concentration, how am I to keep thinking about Him? But when I looked up the verse and the Hebrew meaning of the word, ‘mind’ I found it meant, purpose, imagination, device (intellectual framework)... How interesting...
I don’t know about you, but often when I allow my imagination to run free, it can often go to the dark side. As a survivor of skin cancer, any strange new lesions leads me to think of cancer, a government envelope arriving means a tax audit, a call in the middle of the night, well that’s perhaps the scariest of all. Mercy how our minds can rob us of peace! We need to set the purpose of our life and our imaginations on Him – not on our own! Imagine that He’s got us and our situations!
So then I wondered what the word, ‘stayed’ meant... to lean, lay, rest, support, put, uphold, lean upon.
To lean on something requires trust. My cubicle at work has a false wall that is not stable and I have had several people rest their elbow on it, only to have the whole thing bend forty-five degrees! Not a trustworthy resting place to be sure!
But the Lord... there is nothing false about Him. He has proven Himself over and over again in our lives. We can and should trust Him! And we can lean on Him with no chance of falling.
To consistently have His peace comes down to surrendering our life for His purpose and leaning on Him. For some of us, we haven’t cemented our understanding of who He is (perhaps best revealed by studying the names of God). Until we do truly know Him, we won’t walk in perfect peace as we aren’t convinced of his surety and can’t confidently lean. To know Him is to trust Him.
Father, thank You so much for being a solid, trustworthy leaning post. Help us to live our lives for Your purpose in our lives and in doing so, calm our imaginations, knowing that You are going to see us through whatever may come. Amen!
