"WHEN YOU KNOW YOU'VE BEEN HAD"

Have you ever felt like you fought a loosing battle?

I know that life can take sudden turns for the worse and when that happens we tend to react with panic, fear and sometimes even feel like running for our lives. Isn't this so true of almost everybody in the world today? Yes, there are still a few unusual people who bow their backs, hold their heads high and will fight on to the death. There are those people who will begin to plan another strategy and another angle of attack to hold off the approaching army, but there are times when even those brave and stubborn people must realize that they too must seek help to win.

In the Word of God we find a King who had just experienced that feeling of fear and panic and just didn't know what he needed to do. His name was Jehoshaphat and he had just been given the message that he was going to be attacked, not by one, not by two, but by three armies. These armies were of the children of Moab, Ammon and the Ammonites. He was informed that the group was of a very great multitude coming from the sea and they were getting closer every minute. Don't you think that this king who had been placed over the children of Israel and had served the Lord in all his ways may have been a pretty fearless kind of guy? After all he had the Lord of all creation on his side! how would you have reacted to this message knowing that you had a much smaller army? Let's read a passage that shows his reaction to this message;

2 Chronicles 20:3-4 And Jehoshaphat feared, and set himself to seek the LORD, and proclaimed a fast throughout all Judah. And Judah gathered themselves together, to ask help of the LORD: even out of ALL the cities of Judah they came to seek the LORD. (For a way out & direction)

Wow! Can you believe that? It says that Jehoshaphat (the King) feared! What did he fear? He was afraid of the armies headed in his direction and he knew that he was in an impossible situation to escape alive. He couldn't help his feelings of fear and panic, BUT he could help how he responded to the news that had overwhelmed  him at that moment of surprise!

Haven't we all gotten surprises in our lives that shock us and leave us feeling helpless or in a total state of panic? Yes, I have experienced this and I know that anyone alive today has also been through this feeling and some may have even felt this way recently. My friend, let's learn from the reaction of this King to his fearful situation, his helpless situation. He had no hope of winning. He knew he was doomed to loose this battle and also to loose all that he had received from the Lord himself! What did he do though?

He set himself to the LORD! This means that he turned his face to the LORD and turned his attention to the LORD for help. Then he proclaimed to all of his kingdom to fast and pray. You see, the prayer and fasting come before the impossible over and over in the Bible. When I read this my first thought was of how the lack of food would have made the warriors of Judah even weaker physically as the armies of their enemies gained ground towards the great attack on their city. Knowing that they would grow weaker without food and continuing to proceed with the fast was a total move of faith in the LORD. As a matter of fact, it was the only choice that King Jehoshaphat had, that presented any chance of victory in this hopeless situation!

Think about this for a minute! Every life was in jeopardy and their very existence was at stake at this moment of their lives! Is this where you are in your life today? There are millions of people in the US right now that don't know where there sustenance will come from for the next day, week or month.

To be continued....

Hold fast and look to the LORD for a way, find a way to fast and meditate on thanking God for the way He is going to work in your life. Let's see how this situation turns out my next post.