Enlarged in Distress

"Thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress." ~Psalm 4:1(KJV)

The poetry of this verse is too beautiful to overlook. David is deliberately placing two extremes side by side to demonstrate the profound difference that God's power makes in our lives when we call out to Him for mercy.

Distress means "a tight spot." Enlarged means "a spacious place."
From the very moment of our birth we have known that in order to get to a spacious place, we must first pass through a tight spot. Our mother's labor pains pushed us through the distress of delivery and ushered us into the largeness of Life itself.
Is it not the same when we are born again? Wasn't it some pressing weight of sorrow, some overbearing load of guilt and shame, some driving fear, or suffocating loneliness that distressed your soul sufficient enough for you to call upon the Name of the Lord? And didn't He answer in the day of your trouble and deliver you into a large place?
It is a law in the Kingdom of Heaven — God always enlarges us when we are in distress.
Therefore, when God wants to make us larger than we have settled for being, what do you suppose He does? He introduces distress into our comfortable lives, and thereby invites us to ascend to a larger place.

Charles Spurgeon wrote, "I must confess that all the grace I have got out of my comfortable and easy times and happy hours might almost lie on a penny. But the good that I have received from my sorrows and pains and griefs is altogether incalculable. What do I not owe to the hammer and the anvil, the fire and the file!"

If you are in a tight spot — God is enlarging you my friend, and the best you can do right now is to thank Him for it.


Culled from Daily Devotions by James Ryle.