I wish you could meet some of the people who work at CCEF. We are, of course, far from perfect, but we see Christ in each other, and we see evidence of the Spirit in the way the Lord forges a community among us. One place this happens is at our morning prayer meetings where a different person leads each time we gather. I will take one morning at random as a way to invite you in.
Brandon led this one. He has been married for four years but he has been a student and now staff at CCEF for nine. This means that many of us witnessed the early days of his relationship with his wife and have prayed often for them. We also had insider information about his plans to fly out one weekend to ask her to marry him. Now, married, they have a one-year-old daughter. At this prayer meeting he had a complicated mission: he knew we had to have at least one ridiculously cute story about his daughter; since he is a walking historian, he needed to offer some interesting anecdote from the past; and we wanted him to direct us as we considered Scripture together. He masterfully brought those three pieces together.
He began by telling us of a family routine in which he reads a Bible story to his daughter each day. Now remember that she is a one-year-old and understands very little of what he reads, but she still loves to be read to, and he wants reading the Bible together to be a foundation for her life. Having already read a number of the Bible storybooks for children, he looked for one that included more of the stories that other versions pass over. Somehow, he found a Zondervan reprint of an early 1900s book by Jesse Lyman Hurlbut, Story of the Bible for Young and Old.
As he opened the book to read to us, he pulled out a bookmark that turns out to be among his daughter’s favorite parts of reading with her father—she grabs the paper bookmark, scurries just out of reach, and chews it as he reads. The bookmark is now a mangled nub and ready to be archived. Then he shared one of the stories they read in working through the book: the story of Lot and the destruction of Sodom. (He also mentioned that the author paraphrases some sections to make them age-appropriate.) One particular feature of the story captured his attention, and, with him, our own.
Two angels had been sent by the Lord to warn Lot and his family what was about to happen and take them away from Sodom. Lot, however, “lingered.” His infatuation with Sodom seemed to know no bounds. In response, “the men seized him and his wife and his two daughters by the hand, the Lord being merciful to him, and they brought him out and set him outside the city” (Gen 19:16). The Lord, through these two angels, took a reluctant family away from what would otherwise kill them.
The image is arresting. Your God is very close. He takes your hand because he likes to hold your hand. He takes your hand to comfort you. And he takes your hand when your temptations and the devil’s schemes leave you outnumbered. If you have doubts that the image is for you, amid the overt prophecies of Jesus in Isaiah, the Lord says, “I, the Lord your God, hold your right hand” (Isa 41:13), and “I will take you by the hand and keep you” (Isa 42:6). Your God is close and he is quite strong. The death and resurrection of Jesus Christ have assured you that your sin—the only thing that can separate you from God—has been taken in Jesus. He holds your hand and does not let go.
Brandon’s daughter does not understand all this, but she already knows plenty about having her hand held, which is all we need to understand if we are to make these passages our own.
