God Will Deliver You From All Your Troubles

Suddenly, my bicycle light picked up on an oncoming bicycle. I braked in time, but fell. I was in a daze; my tongue instinctively grazed over my lip and teeth. I felt a deep cut in my upper lip and a front tooth had broken. I was bleeding. “Oh God! Have mercy on me, I thought to myself.”

The 24-hour clinics were closed early due the pandemic, I had to go to bed with my cut lip and broken tooth, but kept the faith to host our SG Zoom meeting the next morning. My SG prayed for me, and a member advised me to immerse the broken piece of tooth in milk and bring it to the dentist.  Immediately after our SG Meeting, I went to a clinic and got a tetanus jab. With my tooth in a plastic bag of milk, I found a dental clinic open on Sunday. The dentist confirmed that I did the right thing for my tooth. By God’s grace, she glued back my broken tooth! My lip has since healed completely.

This was one of the many incidents where I experienced God’s grace. Just the week before the accident, our Children Ministry touched on the topic, “God will deliver you from all your troubles”. The key memory verse was Psalm 34:17: “When the righteous cry for help, the Lord hears and delivers them out of all their troubles”.

We taught our children that God’s deliverance from our troubles may come in different forms (using the analogy of hail stones and umbrellas):

• God could deliver us miraculously like Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego who were delivered from the furnace (Daniel 3:28). He took away the harm of the fire (hailstones) from them.
• He could deliver by helping us and giving us the grace to go through something difficult. He gives us the “umbrella” to handle the “hailstones”.
• Sometimes He delivers us by taking us home to Himself, i.e. taking us away from the “hailstones”.

I see this promise of God at work during this Covid-19 pandemic.  I feel that God has not taken away the virus, in order to remind us of His faithfulness in the midst of trials; that His grace is sufficient for us. By God’s grace, the Singapore government has done reasonably well to manage the pandemic, despite the recent spike in infections. With one of the highest vaccinations rates in the world, it  enables as many of its vulnerable people as possible to be protected  against severe illness and death. Delicate decisions to balance health consideration with restoring its economy are being made, as Singapore calibrates safety measures to ease its people towards living with the virus. Success to overcome the virus depends on its people working together to stay safe. We must uphold our government in our daily prayers.  We must support the government’s efforts by observing the safety measures. Unless medically advised otherwise, we should get vaccinated to protect ourselves and those around us. Given the commandment to love one another, we must be prepared to help those in need.  Pray for the safety of those who have not taken the vaccination either because of medical reasons or vaccine hesitancy. The Lord is in control and we can trust the Lord to bring us through this pandemic.

During this pandemic, the Lord took my wife’s cousin home. She suffered from myeloma yet inspired many with her faith in God. She was at peace when she went home to the Lord. The Lord had delivered her soul and healed her spiritually. We are reminded that our final blessedness is not found in this temporal world but in His eternal kingdom to come.

By brother Lum Weng Kiong