In Psalm 91:15a, God says “He shall call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble.”
None of us knows when trouble will come. None of us knows of upcoming sickness or disease.
I’ll give you one example of when trouble came unexpectedly upon me. I was flying in the right seat of a Piper Navajo that was nearly out of gas when we encountered a vicious thunderstorm. Then most of our electronic equipment went out.
We were flying over the mountains of Costa Rica, and the minimum approach altitude was 9,000 feet. The only instrument working in our little Navajo was the distance measuring equipment, so we had to estimate the flight path to the nearest mountain and then, flying at the minimum required altitude in the rain, make a left turn into what we hoped would be the airport. We could not see the airport because the officials there had turned off the lights.
To this day I don’t know how it happened, but the lights eventually came back on. Perhaps there was a sensor at the airport that responded to an approaching aircraft. We were like a tiny wood chip in a pitch-black turbulent sea and surrounded by mountains. And yet the choice before us was to try to land at the airport or fly over the mountains and crash in the ocean. You find out for yourself what trouble is when you get into a situation like that.
But I remembered that the God who was the recipient of my love had said, “I will be with you in trouble.” And He was there.
We landed the plane safely at the San Jose airport and marveled at our own stupidity in putting ourselves in such a precarious position. And as the psalm reminds us, “He who causes everything to be” had us under control because He promised “I will be with you in trouble.”
I was shaken, but on the next day we enjoyed a Christmas festival and then traveled to a small area outside of San Jose called Paraíso (Paradise), where we were able to inspect a million-watt AM radio station that we had hoped to use to broadcast the gospel all over Central and South America. Radio Paradise had a nice sound to it.
Fortunately for me, my time to visit the real paradise hadn’t quite come. {eoa}
This is an adapted excerpt from I Have Walked With the Living God by Pat Robertson. Copyright © 2020, published by Charisma House. Used by permission.
