Your 100 Day Prayer: Day 33 – The Hiding Place

by TJ Bates

You are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance. -Psalm 32:7

I have been quoting only a portion of Pastor John’s comments each day. Today, I am going to quote everything he says about this particular passage. I feel it is too important to leave out any portion of it:

It was Corrie ten Boom who titled her amazing biography after this phrase in Psalm 32. In The Hiding Place, she tells of her experience in one of Hitler’s worst concentration camps during World War II. We can’t even imagine what it was like to go through the intensity of suffering there. But that was exactly where she learned firsthand what it meant to see God as a hiding place.

It wasn’t that God hid her away from all the squalor and suffering of the death camp. It was that, in the midst of it, she was kept safe and whole as she found her safety in God’s trustworthiness. She survived when so many others did not.

God grants these experiences not just for the growth of the one going through them, but for us as well. We profit from all the accounts of believers who have gone before us, for in a sense they form the archives of our family (our faith family) history. We have every right to claim all the true stories of believers throughout history (including biblical history) as our own. We need to know them, memorize the details, let them sink into our consciousness, and tell them to our children and grandchildren.

Let’s never forget, God is our hiding place, our “fortress” (Ps. 46:7), who protects us from ultimate harm and often even from earthly sufferings and danger. He’s the only truly reliable keeper and protector, the only absolutely trustworthy source of faithfulness and unwavering loyalty. So when everyone else around us is giving in to despair and fear, he is our foundation for remaining stubbornly positive.

TODAY’S PRAYER: As you pray today, remind yourself that you are safe in the hiding place God has created for you. Ask the Holy Spirit to make clear all the various advantages offered to you as you dwell securely in it.

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Photo by Márcio Cabral de Moura via Flickr