Because I was late when I arrived at the intercessory prayer meeting I had been invited to attend, I sought a far, vacant corner of the room that everyone seemed to be avoiding.
The frantic hand signals of a fellow intercessor stopped me in my tracks. Her finger was pointing to an ominous reflection on the wall next to me. There, looming bigger than life, was the shadow of a spider—hairy legs and all!
I shivered. My mind raced with pictures of the hairy beast jumping onto my sweater—or worse, into my hair! I shivered again. Thank God someone stopped me! What if it had bitten me? Then I saw the culprit.
Was that it? Why had I been so afraid? I laughed. The actual spider wasn’t as big as the shadow it had cast. It raced to a crack in the door and disappeared. Obviously, it had been a shadow.
This reminded me of the enemy and how he works. Satan whispers to us all the time, playing the “What if?” game. What if you lose your job? What if they whisper about you when you leave the room? What if you gain all that weight? What if you go belly up financially? What if you are too old to try something new?”
Satan’s lies, like dark, ominous shadows on the wall, loom big, at times bigger than our power to do anything about them. God’s Word warns us that the devil walks about like a roaring lion (see 1 Pet. 5:8). He isn’t the real McCoy, but his threats can, if we are not careful, get us to take our eyes off Jesus and His great power that guides, provides for and protects us.
That is not to say that you or I don’t need to take care of ourselves and our families as good stewards; but we do so with our eyes on Jesus and not on the fears that overshadow Him and His great powerful promises of God—promises for eternal life and for abundant life on earth, promises for a future, no matter how bad the past has been.
Jesus commands us in Matthew 6:25: “Therefore, I say to you, take no thought about your life, what you will eat, or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on.” No worry or ominous threat to us is any match for our Lord, “the God of all flesh” (Jer. 32:27). It is He, after all, who is the “head of all principality and power” (see Col. 2:10).
It is sometimes hard to remember this during seasons in which you see nothing but shadows. Yet God promises to take care of us in such times. Psalm 23 mentions “the valley of the shadow of death” (v.4)—revealing that it is a place one goes through but doesn’t live in permanently.
And even in the valley we are to fear no evil, for the Lord our Shepherd is with us. The psalm ends with a promise of position for us—that we are to dwell in the house of the Lord forever. A God who claims us for eternity is a God of power. What, then, is there to fear in the shadows?
You and I are in Christ—”the secret place of the Most High” (Ps. 91:1)—which means that you and I are under only one shadow, and that is the shadow of the Almighty (v. 2). When the dark shadow on the wall sees the shadow of the Almighty, in whom we dwell, it has to go.
Prayer Power for the Week of Feb. 2, 2015
This week praise God that we are protected under the shadow of the Almighty when we abide in Him. Choose to believe His Word and embrace His peace, no matter what you face. Pray in faith, knowing that He hears and answers according to His perfect will. Continue to pray for our president and others whose decisions impact the entire world. Pray for those affected by recent storms and ask the Lord what you can do to help meet needs. As you pray for Israel, remember the persecuted church and ask God for more workers for His harvest fields (Ps. 91; Is. 26:3; 1 Tim. 2:1-8).
