"Preserved By Love"

"Withhold not Thou Thy tender mercies from me, O LORD: let Thy lovingkindness and Thy truth continually preserve me." (Psalms 40:11) With every passing moment of every day, one thing remains constant through it all, God remains the same! It might have taken some time to figure that out, even though God declares that fact in His word, we still require learning it ourselves; some of require several lessons, in several different areas of our lives. This is the part where this Psalm takes a turn from "A Song of Deliverance" to "A Prayer for Help"; but the prayer for help is not a needy prayer, as if there were some catastrophic event going on in our lives; but rather, it is the surrender over to God of all that concerns us, no matter how big or small, God is big enough to handle anything, and He cares enough to mind the small things as well. When David says, "Withhold not Thou Thy tender mercies", I seriously doubt that he questions God's faithfulness to give him mercy, because he knows full well that God is more than merciful; but his point is more about humility and the need to have God be merciful to him because of his sin. Once we truly see how grievous our sin is before God, it gets pretty hard to sometimes accept the fact that He has forgiven us; yet, He has said in His word, that our sins are forgiven as far as the east is from the west, because of His great mercy towards us (Psalms 103:11-13). That is what it feels like to know that we have a Father that loves us unconditionally; not that we can totally understand His unconditional love for us, but we can grab hold of whatever we do understand, and we can hold on for dear life; but rest assured, He is not letting go of us. Complete surrender only requires that we completely understand that God loves us, no matter what; just a Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego totally understood God's love for them, and no matter what, they were not going to bow down before any other god or image, it was just not going to happen. They didn't even need to think twice about the matter, because no matter what, God was more powerful than anything else; and even if He didn't save them from that fire, He was still their God, and into His arms they would go... "Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said to his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said to the king, True, O king. He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God. Then Nebuchadnezzar came near to the mouth of the burning fiery furnace, and spake, and said, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, ye servants of the most high God, come forth, and come hither. Then Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, came forth of the midst of the fire. And the princes, governors, and captains, and the king's counsellors, being gathered together, saw these men, upon whose bodies the fire had no power, nor was a hair of their head singed, neither were their coats changed, nor the smell of fire had passed on them." (Daniel 3:24-27)