Psalm 118:5 (NIV) When hard pressed, I cried to the Lord; he brought me into a spacious place.

Some people have a big problem dealing with tight spaces. They are described as being claustrophobic. They get an overwhelming feeling of being confined and it leads to a lot of anxiety. The only way out of that dilemma for them is to get out of whatever space they are feeling confined in. Sometimes life gets claustrophobic. During those times in life when trouble comes to you from difference angles, it feels as if the walls are closing in around you. The problem during those troublesome times is that you can’t just walk out of them. There is no getting out of it. You can’t physically leave the tight spaces that life sometimes confines you to. So what do you do? You do what the psalmist did in the scripture above.

God is always the one to go to when trouble comes your way. Actually, He is the one to go to in life for everything, not just trouble. He is the one who leads you and guides you in good times and in bad times (Psalm 32:8). Through joy or sorrow, trouble or blessing, He promised to guide us in the best direction. While we need God’s care and guidance at all times, we need it desperately when things go wrong. When trouble comes at you like a tsunami, you need someone to rescue you, and no one compares with Jesus in being able to do that. He does it in the most supernatural way. It’s as though He takes you out of the confined space mentally, emotionally and spiritually while you are still going through the tsunami of trouble. He removes the walls while the problem may still be there. He will deliver you completely from the trouble in His perfect timing, but He doesn’t wait in delivering you mentally, emotionally and spiritually. He takes you, as the psalmist put it, to a spacious place. You then are in that spacious place as you wait for the physical deliverance from all your trouble. But in that spacious place, you are able to experience the miracle of God’s peace and joy while you wait. The reason for that is that Jesus is the spacious place that He takes you to. He told us that if we abide in Him and He abides in us, we will be fruitful. That fruitfulness remains no matter what is happening in your life.

Jesus told us that He gave us His peace (John 14:27). He is that peace. He told us that His joy would remain in us completely (John 15:11). He is that joy. Don’t linger any longer in your fear and your anxiety but instead, cry out to the Lord Jesus. He will then take you to your spacious place in Him where you will experience His peace and joy until He brings you safely through to deliverance.

Pastor Joey Vazquez