Attentive Love – February 24, 2021

He was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.
Mark 1:13

Attentive Love

Imagine coming home from a hard day. You call a friend, talk to your spouse, or pour out your heart to your mom or dad. You are hoping for comfort and encouragement. But you get no response, no reaction. Your confidant just sits there, staring into space, saying nothing. After a few minutes of silence, if you don’t say it out loud, you might be saying it in your head: “Don’t you care?”

Although there may be times when the people in your life don’t seem to care, you can be sure that God cares. He cares when you cry. He cares when you worry. And he cares when you are being tempted to do the wrong thing and go the wrong way.

Fighting against temptation is a daily battle for every Christian. When we want to do the right thing, evil is always there to sabotage us. We do the evil we are trying to avoid and avoid the good we are trying to do. It is exhausting.

Thanks be to God; we don’t fight those battles alone, and we don’t win them on our own. God attends to our every need. He puts his name on us and claims us as his own. He gives us the victory Jesus won by resisting every temptation for us and paying for our failures to resist temptation with his holy lifeblood. You are God’s child. He loves you.

He even has special, powerful allies to assist him in caring for you. The Bible says that God sends his angels to attend you in all your ways. When you face temptation, his angels are at hand to reinforce you. When you fight temptation and the devil flees, the protection provided by God’s angels refreshes you in keeping with God’s life-giving Word.

God cares. All day, all night, his angels watch over you.

Prayer:
Heavenly Father, let your holy angel be with me that the devil may have no power over me. Amen.