9682	Forums / Theology Forum / The Bible Driven Church	on: February 05, 2006, 02:23:59 AM
Snares are a temporary problem for us as believers. We have a most gracious God who we turn to in when we get caught in them. His name is always faithful, full of love, gracious, forgiving, kind. He is our place of refuge. When we know that we have gone from the wading waters into the deep waters where we feel helpless there is a tendency to look at our circumstances and our sin and conclude that God is not in these waters. If we enter waters that are too deep for us we are confronted by those who want to push our heads under, and our guilt and shame that drives us even deeper, as if we were walking down into the bottom of a lake. We conclude that this snare is too much for any ones care of us. We feel the weight of our sin and we feel the weight of our accusers. We know that struggling with a sin is taking the life rite out of us and we have a hard time gaining peace and understanding grace in these waters. We must preach to ourselves as if we were ready to be over taken by the waters. We must understand that our experiencing guilt and shame before our accusers is not like experiencing a refuge from the only one in whom we have to rely on. We must see that He knows that the floods of guilt and shame and ungracious people are about to engulf us and we must experience grace in these deep waters. He brings us to the deep waters to increase our trust in Him. We can take refuge in Him with our head just sticking above the waves. We can tread the waves in the loving arms of our Father. A christian is not one who stays in the shallow waters and enjoys the sun and the coolness of the waters. A christian is one who struggles as he grows and ends up going out into the deep waters. There in those waters is a refuge, there is a great experience of faith. The deep waters have great pressure pushing on our bodies. They threaten to engulf us and swallow us up.  We can tread only for a short while and then we will go under. Yet we never go under with our taking refuge in Him. We experience all the sensations of going under. Yet we cast ourselves on His mercy and we experience a very powerful rescuer. What safety we have in Him in the deepest of life's trials. He is there in the deep waters!