Admittedly the Lord doesn’t always deliver us from our problems in the way we want Him to. He does it His way, but in the long run His way is always best, and it always leads to worship. We hear Him speak in Psalm 50:15: “Call upon Me in the day of trouble; I will deliver you, and you shall glorify Me.”

I thought of this verse some time ago when a friend called, deeply troubled for her sixteen-year-old son. He had fallen into the wrong crowd, had dropped out of school, was using drugs, and was spiraling out of control. Now Jason had been arrested for assault and armed robbery. Sobbing on the phone, she told me how she loved her boy, but her problems with him were beyond solution.

As she drove to the juvenile detention center, she needed windshield wipers for her eyes, for she could hardly see the road for the tears. But she arrived to find God at work, answering her prayers. Jason, dressed in prison fatigues, was also weeping. He wanted a Bible, and he wanted to turn his life around. Like the prodigal son, he had come to his senses, and spiritually speaking, he was ready to return home. From that day he has been a different person.

“Many prodigals don’t return until the twenties or thir­ties,” I later told her. “Yours came home at age sixteen.” Like the experience of the Israelites at the Red Sea, the worst moment of her life was really her greatest day, for the Lord is in the business of delivering His people

… in His own way

… in His own time

… for His own glory.

“Many are the afflictions of the righteous,” wrote David in Psalm 34:19, “but the Lord delivers him out of them all.” So now, instead of asking, “How can I get out of this mess?” Ask, “How can God be glorified in the situation I’m facing?”

Robert J. Morgan, The Red Sea Rules. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2001, p. 26, 27.