EVER FEEL REALLY SAFE?

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In that day this song will be sung in the land of Judah: "We have a strong city; he sets up salvation as walls and bulwarks. Open the gates, that the righteous nation that keeps faith may enter in. You keep him in perfect peace whose mind is stayed on you, because he trusts in you. Trust in the Lord forever, for the Lord God is an everlasting rock. For he has humbled the inhabitants of the height, the lofty city. He lays it low, lays it low to the ground, casts it to the dust. The foot tramples it, the feet of the poor, the steps of the needy."
Isaiah 26:1‭-‬6 ESV

¶This is the city Jesus came and occupied, the city of salvation. It was through these gates that on a donkey He figuratively entered in an unlikely display of triumph. It was within these walls that Jesus located the Kingdom of Heaven. It was among these peacemakers that He promised perfect peace. It was among these poor that His Kingdom rules. Those He walked among, the humble, the poor, the unclean, the defiled, the righteousness-deficient, the frazzled, the harassed, the exploited, the surrendered, the dependent, not the well but the sick, these became not just His flock, but His army, the secret shock troops of a new kind of kingdom. These He gathered up, uniting them in the Spirit of a new kind of holiness. These form the vanguard of an unlikely army against which hell's very gates cannot prevail.

Glorious things of thee are spoken,
Zion, city of our God!
He, whose Word cannot be broken,
Formed thee for His own abode;
On the Rock of Ages founded,
What can shake thy sure repose?
With salvation’s walls surrounded,
Thou mayst smile at all thy foes.
John Newton, 1779

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