“Praise our God, all peoples, … he has preserved our lives and kept our feet from slipping”.

Ps 66:8, 9 NIV

We do many things to preserve our lives. We try to eat healthy food and do sensible things. We exercise to keep fit, invest in medical aid insurance to pay for medical bills, and dress warmly in winter. We go on holidays for the sake of having a break and we keep proper hours for sleeping.

The Israelites’ story began with the call of Abraham. God said he would make them a great nation. He did. And down all the centuries he acted to preserve them both as a people and as individuals. The long 400-year enslavement in Egypt is hardly ever mentioned, but God was preserving them, and keeping alive his plan of salvation that was for them to be, eventually, a light to the Gentiles and to bearers of his truth to the world. God not only kept them alive – he kept alive their calling to be his people.

That role is still the calling of the people of God, now the Christian church. Our mission is not to look after ourselves and preserve the church. It is to spend and be spent in getting the message and mission of Christ heard and understood in all the world. We live for other people – those not part of the church. In all the ups and downs, twists and turns of the church’s two-thousand-year-long pilgrimage God has somehow recalled us to the basic task again and again when we have gone off the track. Behind all this has been God’s preserving love and kindly tolerance.

He will go on preserving until the end of time.

PRAYER THOUGHT

Lord, keep us, as your people, within your renewing love.