O God, Restore us and Save us

Restore us, O God; make your face shine on us, that we may be saved.  (Psalm 80:3)

With every enemy, face the danger of losing much more than material things.

When we are faced with an enemy we pray for victory over our enemy.  We believe victory over our enemies is about getting what we want.  What we do not realize is, in the process we pay a heavy price and lose much more than we would ever win. 


We get caught up in the battle; and we lose our inner freedom, inner peace, capacity to love and to serve.  Instead, ego, self pity, insecurity, bitterness, hatred and selfishness begin to control the decisions we make. 

“Restore us O God, that we may be saved”…

When I turn to God in my crisis, first HE restores what I had lost… inner peace and freedom, the capacity to love and to serve; and most of all the grace to trust in HIS plans for me…  It is only when HE has restored what I had lost that I will be truly saved from the destruction that the enemy could cause in my life.

They mourned and wept and fasted till evening for Saul and his son Jonathan, and for the army of the LORD and for the nation of Israel, because they had fallen by the sword. (2 Samuel 1: 12)

David is mourning the death of his nemesis???

The crisis with Saul had taken David deeper into the heart of God.  David had found that his security, his fortress, his rock is his loving God.  Therefore, the death of his enemy was not a reason to celebrate, but a reason to mourn. 

God has not only saved David from his enemy, but had restored all that he could have lost –  his ability to love his enemy, serve his people, inner freedom to make the right decisions for his nation…

Our focus on our enemy loses our ability to make the right decisions.  Therefore we act in self defense, we try to protect ourselves and our interests, and make decisions that harm us in the long term.  We may win a battle but lose the war.

Every crisis is an opportunity to go deeper into the heart of God and to journey with HIM closely.  It is an opportunity to cling on to HIM till we hear HIS voice and see HIS leading. 

“Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, “He is out of his mind.”  (Mark 3: 20)

Crowds followed Jesus, yet the family thought Jesus was “out of his mind”. 

Family... the ones who should have been Jesus’s biggest support tried to stop HIM.  In a way, there were playing the roles of the enemy.  Towards the end of this Chapter Jesus says “whoever does God’s will is my brother and sister and mother”. 

I sense His disappointment about His family members in this statement.  But I also see Jesus’s rising above HIS disappointment to include everyone who does the will of God as HIS family.  The crisis had taken Jesus deeper into the heart of God, and what could have ended in bitterness ends up in a revelation.

This is the difference between focusing on God and focusing on our enemies.  Max Lucado says it beautifully in his book “Facing the Giants”.

“If you focus on God, your giants will fall.  If you focus on your giants, you will fall”.