March 25, 2013

Isaiah 26:3, 4

I don’t like dentists!  Well, it isn’t really dentists that I don’t like, it is being in the dentist chair on the receiving end of a filling, a root canal or worse!  Actually, I like my dentist.  He is a very nice gentleman, and over the years he helped to greatly reduce the fear I used to have of dentist appointments.  Still, root canals are not one of the favorite things on my ‘to-do’ list!

One day, a few years ago, I was facing just that – a root canal.  I gotta tell ya, I was nervous.  I was so nervous that my dentist prescribed Valium to calm me down, to be taken an hour before my appointment.  “Be sure to have your wife drive you here,” warned my dentist.

When I arrived home, I looked at the prescription and thought, “This is ridiculous!  Why do I need Valium when God has promised me peace?!”  I recalled a gem from God’s Word that I had committed to memory years before, Isaiah 26:3 & 4:

Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.  Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength….

I could use a good dose of peace facing this root canal.  And God said He would do it – keep me in perfect peace – if I would stay my mind on Him, that is, put my mind on the Lord and His promise and keep it there.

So I did not fill the prescription of Valium.  Instead I focused my thinking on the promise of God’s supply of peace which He was offering me.  In my mind I went over Isaiah 26:3 & 4 again and again, thinking about it, meditating on it, chewing on it, digesting it, and getting it down deep inside me.

Two days later I drove to my root canal appointment armed with nothing more than God’s promise to keep me calm.  Before the doctor started his procedure, I asked him, “Jim, can you tell if a patient does not take the prescribed Valium?”

“Oh yes,” he said.  “I can tell right away!”

“Well, I didn’t take it!”

He shook his head, a worried look on his face thinking he would be having a rough time with a very nervous patient.  “We’ll see how it goes, but I will know.”

He began the procedure while I sat calmly in the chair.  He deeply injected my gums with Novocain and I didn’t flinch.  I didn’t squirm even through the nerve-shattering whine of the dentist drill.  As a matter of fact, I almost fell asleep!  After poking, prodding, digging and so on for fifteen or twenty minutes he stopped, leaned back and asked, “Are you sure you didn’t take the Valium?”

“No,” I said, “I took something else!”

“I knew it,” he exclaimed!  “What did you take?”

I said, “I took a good dose of Isaiah 26: 3 & 4:  “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee: because he trusteth in thee.  Trust ye in the LORD for ever: for in the LORD JEHOVAH is everlasting strength….”

Jim is a man of faith.  He looked closely at me and said, “I wish my other patients would take that kind of medicine before they come here!”

No, it was not an earth-shaking event.  But it was a Chip-shaking event, and I learned when I am grounded on the Rock Christ Jesus, the Rock doesn’t shake.  And I don’t either, even in a dentist chair!