The Rock that is Higher

UV 618/10,000 A Rock that is Higher “ From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee when my heart is overwhelmed: lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” Psalms 61 v 2 Sometimes when we are overwhelmed with sorrow or anger or anxiety, we cry out to the Lord as if we have sunk to the very end of the earth, the bottom of the miry pit. Our emotions can sometimes be like a quicksand, a horrible pit- the more we think about a particular thing, the more we try to get out , the more we get sucked into it. At that time,we need to ask the Lord to lead us to the rock of ages, Jesus who sees all things from a higher and eternal perspective. He will not let us languish in our deep depression but cause us to rejoice. He is the only rock that is higher than all of our challenges and difficulties. For those who think money or fame or success or power is the solution, death and disease can quickly destabilize the security that these provide. No human experienced such intensity of sorrow as Jesus Himself. He told His disciples the night before He was arrested, “ My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death.” There are three types of sorrows: the sorrow of the heart, the sorrow of the mind and the sorrow of the soul. Jesus suffered the sorrow of the soul as He was going to be separated from the Father for the first time as He became payment for all the sins of mankind. His soul would sink to the bottom of the miry pit. His sorrow physically manifested in His sweating great drops of blood. Symbolically, He prayed kneeling for strength on the rock of agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Similarly, in times when we are overwhelmed with sorrow and pain, we must lean on the Rock that is Jesus. Jesus is the Rock that is “ higher than I”. He is higher, much higher than our hurt egos, our deep regrets, our painful disappointments, our errors of judgement and flawed decisions, our greatest failures and sorrows. He will cheer us up in these moments when all seems lost. He will place our feet once more on solid rock and lead us by our right hand, implying that He will enable us to take the right decisions and execute these with firmness and resolve. We shall not be greatly moved in the sense that our feelings and emotions will not sway so much as to move us to despair and hopelessness. As the psalmist says, He will “ establish our goings” or He will restore us to intellectual, emotional and spiritual stability. He will restore “health to our countenance” or smiles to our faces and hope and joy to our hearts and minds. He also promises to inlay our mansions in His Kingdom with “stones of fair colours and with a foundation of sapphires.” Prateep V Philip