God is with you constantly. He’s with you in the dark hours, when the circumstances look bleak, when the storms rise up against you. When the wind’s blowing and it looks like you’re going down, He’s there in the boat with you. “I’ll never leave you nor forsake you,” Jesus says. (See Hebrews 13:5.) Now, look at verse 15: He will call upon Me, and I will answer him; I will be with him in trouble, I will deliver him and

honor him.

He’s waiting for you to call on Him. Some people don’t want to call on God because they’re afraid to bother Him. They think He’s too busy. But you’re not bothering Him. He wants you to bother Him! You have not because you ask not. (See James 4:2.) Call unto Him! Call unto me, and I will answer thee, and show thee great and mighty things, which thou knowest not.

JEREMIAH 33:3

And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.

ISAIAH 65:24

I pray this word goes right into your heart and burns like a Holy Ghost firebrand on the inside of you! Jesus is your shelter in the time of trouble. The Bible doesn’t say you won’t have any trouble, but God says, “I will be with you in trouble.” He wants to remind you that while you’re in trouble, He’s there. Call upon Him. You could get into trouble and die, not knowing or else forgetting that He’s right there with you. So call to Him. Cry out to Him.

If you find yourself in a problem and you call on the Lord and He doesn’t deliver you, you come and tell me, and I’ll quit the ministry and come and join you. That’s a strong statement, but I want you to know that when you call out to Him with all of your heart, He’s going to come. He didn’t bring you this far to leave you. I will deliver him and honor him (v. 15). He not only wants to deliver you, He wants to honor you!

Look at the last verse: With long life I will satisfy him and show him My salvation. They put preservatives in most of the food we eat. In fact, I heard that a favorite snack of ours has a shelf life of twenty seven years. If you want something to last long, you must preserve it. God says I will give you long life. That means He is going to preserve you.

With long life, will I satisfy him and show him My salvation (v. 16). There are people who have this passage of Scripture printed on a T-shirt, printed on a book mark, or printed on a wall hanging — yet they die young. They never experience the reality of this passage because they’ve never come to the place where they’ve said, “Yes, Jesus is my Savior, He’s my Healer, He’s my Deliverer, but He’s also my Protector. He is my shelter. He is my rock. He’s my tower. He’s my wall of fire.” They’ve never received it. They’ve never taken this word and made it personal and acted upon it and told it to their wife and told it to their children and told it to their loved ones. Have you?

God might be requiring you to do certain things that mean stepping out of your comfort zone, stepping out beyond the natural, carnal mind and into a place where you must confront your fear. That brings us to the life of Joshua, because if there was ever an individual who should have been afraid, it was Joshua. Joshua was second in command to Moses, leading the children of Israel to the Promised Land. Rodney Howard Browne points out that, then Moses died and God told Joshua, “I want you to take his place.” I don’t know about you, but if that were me, my knees would be having close fellowship one with the other!

“Moses is dead and I must take his place. God, are You sure?” Joshua was having the same argument with God that Moses had right at the beginning. When God called Moses, he was afraid the Israelites wouldn’t accept his authority, so he said, “Who must I say sent me?”

God said, “Tell them I AM sent you.”