My Suitable Portion

 

	“ My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.”
	—Psalm 73:26

	“I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for Him.’”
	—Lamentations 3:24

I may lose, and lose, and lose—people, place, position, possessions, but not my portion. We tend to take our comfort, our joy, our stability, our sense of well-being and balance from these things.

Back in 1967, a study called the Holmes-Rahe Life Stress Inventory identified the top ten stressors they found. The list included:

• death of spouse
  
  
• divorce
  
  
• separation
  
  
• jail
  
  
• death of close relative
  
  
• injury or illness
  
  
• marriage
  
  
• being fired from job
  
  
• marriage reconciliation
  
  
• retirement.
  
  

Personally, I would add “moving to a new city.” And, from the experience of many Christians, I would add “strife within the church.”

The human race has never been without stress. Can you imagine how stressed Adam and Eve must have been when God sent them from Eden, their home, into a “big, bad world” they had never known, with sin and death and pain? Stress and loss pretty much sum up the human condition under the rule of sin.

The psalm which inspired Martin Luther to write the hymn, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” speaks the following from Psalm 46:1-3:

“God is our refuge and strength, an ever-present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth give way and the mountains fall into the heart of the sea, though its waters roar and foam and the mountains quake with their surging.”

Sometimes we feel like the “earth is giving way.” Everything we have relied on, or that helped our sense of stability can be taken from us. Why does God allow this to happen? I would purport God uses such losses to drive us to Him alone. He wants to be our portion; that which we feed upon, that which gives us nourishment and delights us.

In the 17th century, Puritan writer Thomas Brooks wrote:

“Our God is a suitable portion. No object is as suitable to the heart as he is. He is a portion that is exactly suited to the condition of the soul in its desires, needs, wants, longings and prayers.” ¹

Think how awesome the banquet of God’s love and provision. He who fed the Israelites in the wilderness for forty years on manna can feed us with everything we need. Yes, the manna gave these people a temporary provision while they waited to taste the full bounty of the Promised Land, but he gave them enough as recorded in Exodus 16:12:

“You will be filled with bread.”

The Apostle Paul writes of contentment in Philippians 4:12b:

“I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.”

From this we see our need to learn contentment and rejoice in the portion God gives us.

Whether your portion today is a wafer of manna or a feast of the finest foods, praise God that HE is your portion and HE is enough.

______________________

1 Thomas Brooks, Works, 11:27-28 as quoted in Voices from the Past, edited by Richard Rushing.