Gen 20:6, Then God said to him in the dream, "Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her. Amen.
	In this morning’s reading, we come upon a very key reality of which many of us can give witness. God speaks to Abimelech, king of Gerar, in a dream and pronounces to him that I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me… God manifested His providential hand of protection upon Abimelech because he did not purposefully do anything against the will of God. Therefore God worked to keep Abimelech from sinning. 
	Many of us can bear witness to this same providential hand of God’s protection upon our lives throughout all those times when we could have made some very grave and dangerous mistakes and decisions. This seems especially true during our youth when we do not yet have a living relationship with God. Despite our lack of spiritual understanding, He has, none the less, made Himself very real to us in the manner of keeping us safe from tremendous and catastrophic harm. We can look back on our lives and see those times when, if it were not for God’s divine intervention, we would now be ruined or dead. We would have made some very awful and ruinous mistakes that would have shifted the entire course of our lives away from Him. But praise be to God, He ruled and overruled, even in our ignorance, to work mightily in His lovingkindness and His tender mercy.
	Such is the witness that we have before us in this passage. Let us therefore trace this marvelous working of God’s grace in scripture. We want to highlight the manner in which we must thank God with all our hearts and minds for His divine protection upon those whom He so blesses with His kindness and compassion.  
	In Gen 31:4-7, we read of God’s Sovereign protection upon Jacob in his dealings with his father-in-law, Laban. So Jacob sent and called Rachel and Leah to his flock in the field, and said to them, "I see your father's attitude, that it is not friendly toward me as formerly, but the God of my father has been with me. And you know that I have served your father with all my strength. Yet your father has cheated me and changed my wages ten times; however, God did not allow him to hurt me. 
Despite the manner in which Laban mistreated Jacob, there was an overriding truth in action. God did not allow him to hurt Jacob. Jacob had the blessing from God’s own mouth. It was God’s every intent and purpose to see to it that His promise was fulfilled, as we have considered so fully in our past deliberations. Therefore, no matter what else Laban devised, Jacob knew the protection from God as the source of his comfort and faithful dealing.
In Ex 34:23+24, we have the witness of the Lord God Almighty to Moses in terms of what all the men of Israel needed to do when they finally entered into the Promised Land. Three times a year all your males are to appear before the Lord God, the God of Israel. For I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your borders, and no man shall covet your land when you go up three times a year to appear before the Lord your God. The Children of Israel would be surrounded with enemies and would be on constant guard against the nations whom the Lord dispossessed before them. It would have been folly to leave any portion of the land empty of men to fight against the warring tribes that would continually harass them. However, during the span of those three times a year when all the male citizenry were to come together before the Lord, God provided that there would be no encroachment or attack from their enemies. In honoring the Lord, God honored their faithfulness with peace at that time, despite all the actions of violence that preceded or followed those thrice yearly sojourns unto Him.
	Next we find the protection of God upon David in his dealing with Nabal. David was wrought with anger against Nabal, who was wicked and had mistreated David and his men. David had been his protector and yet Nabal cast only insult and arrogance against David. David’s immediate impulse was to kill Nabal and all his male family and workers. If it had not been for the intervention of the Lord, David would have had Nabal killed. But God restrained David’s hand of vengeance and kept him from murdering Nabal and all Nabal’s men that very day. 
It was the direct intervention of the Lord which moved Abigail to plead with David thus preventing such a slaughter of innocent men. 1 Sam 25:23-26, When Abigail saw David, she hurried and dismounted from her donkey, and fell on her face before David, and bowed herself to the ground. And she fell at his feet and said, "On me alone, my lord, be the blame. And please let your maidservant speak to you, and listen to the words of your maidservant. Please do not let my lord pay attention to this worthless man, Nabal, for as his name is, so is he. Nabal is his name and folly is with him; but I your maidservant did not see the young men of my lord whom you sent. Now therefore, my lord, as the Lord lives, and as your soul lives, since the Lord has restrained you from shedding blood, and from avenging yourself by your own hand, now then let your enemies, and those who seek evil against my lord, be as Nabal. 
	
	This brings us to the fact recognized by the Psalmist as recorded in Ps 84:11. For the Lord God is a sun and shield; The Lord gives grace and glory; No good thing does He withhold from those who walk uprightly. God is the very shield of our lives. He manifests His loving goodness toward us in the daily manner in which He guides and protects our every step. 
	Please be aware, however, that we are not freed from the consequences of our actions. Although God does divinely intervene on our behalf, that does not mean that we have a free pass to transgress against Him or His laws and statutes. Returning once again to this morning’s reading regarding King Abimelech, please note that there were consequences in place because of his action of taking Sarah as his wife. Gen 20:18, For the Lord had closed fast all the wombs of the household of Abimelech because of Sarah, Abraham's wife. It took the very prayers of Abraham to beseech God on behalf of Abimelech and his household for more children to be produced in his family. 
	We must never consider ourselves immune to the pain and the suffering and the penalty for our actions. We count on the Lord to protect and to keep us, but we do so with the heart that only wants what He desires in our lives. When we are lost in our ignorance and our shallowness of heart and mind, we must not expect God to give us dispensation for our sinful ways. Rather, we are to look back and to thank Him that He caused us to not become more deeply involved than we did in our sins and trespasses. We thank Him that He does provide the means in which to deal with all the sorrow and strife that we do undergo as we were brought to the end of ourselves and as we are caused to seek Him with all our hearts.
	The Writer of the Proverbs knew this overruling providence of God’s consideration of the heart as we read in Prov 21:1+2. The king's heart is like channels of water in the hand of the Lord; He turns it wherever He wishes. Every man's way is right in his own eyes, But the Lord weighs the hearts. 
	God knows the paths that mankind will choose unto himself. God also knows the results of those choices. Despite man’s best efforts to justify and to qualify the choices made, God knows the heart, both of the individual and of the matter at hand. God rules and overrules to establish what needs to happen in order for the heart to be brought into conformity with the reality of His glory in action.
	Consider how God dealt with the faithlessness of His Chosen People. They were the blessed people of God. They had the very heart of God towards them, His own peculiar people. From them would come the Savior of the world. Yet, their hearts were after the same things of this realm as they saw in the other nations. Rather than enjoying the unique fellowship with the Only Wise, Living, and True God that was their inheritance, they rather chose to run after the idols and the theologies of the age. 
Despite that adulterous behavior, God kept them protected as recounted by the prophet in Hos 2:6+7. "Therefore, behold, I will hedge up her way with thorns, And I will build a wall against her so that she cannot find her paths. "And she will pursue her lovers, but she will not overtake them; And she will seek them, but will not find them. Then she will say, 'I will go back to my first husband, For it was better for me then than now!' 
	God allowed them to go so far but no more. It is the same principle as recounted in Job 38:10+11, in terms of the boundaries that God sets upon those who are His own. And I placed boundaries on it, And I set a bolt and doors, And I said, 'Thus far you shall come, but no farther; And here shall your proud waves stop'? Just as He controls the every motion of His creation, so does He fully control the every movement of man despite mankind’s plans and motivations after those things which are harmful and treacherous. 
	This control extends beyond humanity, beyond creation, even to the enemy with all those vile and perfidious designs against the authority of God. Please turn to 2 Thess 2:5-14. 2 Thess 2:5-14, Do you not remember that while I was still with you, I was telling you these things? And you know what restrains him now, so that in his time he may be revealed. For the mystery of lawlessness is already at work; only he who now restrains will do so until he is taken out of the way. And then that lawless one will be revealed whom the Lord will slay with the breath of His mouth and bring to an end by the appearance of His coming; that is, the one whose coming is in accord with the activity of Satan, with all power and signs and false wonders, and with all the deception of wickedness for those who perish, because they did not receive the love of the truth so as to be saved. And for this reason God will send upon them a deluding influence so that they might believe what is false, in order that they all may be judged who did not believe the truth, but took pleasure in wickedness. But we should always give thanks to God for you, brethren beloved by the Lord, because God has chosen you from the beginning for salvation through sanctification by the Spirit and faith in the truth. And it was for this He called you through our gospel, that you may gain the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ. 
	Even as God restrains the enemy, so also does He restrain us unto Himself that we may gain the glory of Our Lord Jesus Christ. What a joyous truth to know and to celebrate as we so consider His great love toward us. We are kept unto His very heart. As we joyously read in Deut 18:13+14, You shall be blameless before the Lord your God. "For those nations, which you shall dispossess, listen to those who practice witchcraft and to diviners, but as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do so. While that was written about the Children of Israel, it also pertains fully to us in Jesus Christ. As His own, there are those things in which He will neither allow us to indulge nor give ourselves unto. 
	Job 33:16-18, Then He opens the ears of men, And seals their instruction, That He may turn man aside from his conduct, And keep man from pride; He keeps back his soul from the pit, And his life from passing over into Sheol. His divine Hand is upon all those whom He has predestined to be His own. He will not give up a single one into the hands of the enemy. He will only let us go so far and no further along the path of self-destruction because He so fully has our best interest in His very heart.
	As the Psalmist proclaims in Ps 19:13+14, Also keep back Thy servant from presumptuous sins; Let them not rule over me; Then I shall be blameless, And I shall be acquitted of great transgression. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart Be acceptable in Thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my Redeemer. It is not just the blatant sins from which we find protection in Him, but also those sins of rashness, as we considered in the case of David, and those sins of arrogance and conceit. God rather works through them to bring us into full humbleness of being and spirit, to seek Him with all our hearts and minds and souls. 
	This should be of great encouragement to each of us in consideration of our past failures and wrong choices. We must consider each one of them in the terms that God freely rules and overrules when our heart is to seek Him and His glory alone. So often, we go through the seeming fires of hell before we set our minds and our hearts solidly on Him, but that we do, even as He shows His Hand of protection in the midst of those flames. They scorch and burn us, but they do not destroy us. Rather, they work to purify and to burn away all those elements of otherness before Him as He uses them to make us purely His very own Beloved.
	As parents, we need to hold onto this reality for the sake of our children as they are struggling through the trials and circumstances. We need to earnestly beseech the Lord to cause them to seek Him with all their hearts. We cannot protect them, but God can and He so fully does. Ours is to pray on their behalf. We keep them in our hearts and we encourage them continually to seek after the way of the Lord in their lives. We watch as they proceed forward. We are filled with the confident assurance that God has all things well in hand in the lives of those whom we have committed fully unto Him. It may take decades, but our trust is in God not in man. We do not panic at the choices they make, but lay them before the Lord. We do so with the prayer for the Lord to open and to close all those doors as He so wills. This is in order that He will establish a living and personal relationship with Himself in their lives and in our lives.
	We close with the glorious declaration of God in Zech 2:8. For thus says the Lord of hosts, "After glory He has sent me against the nations which plunder you, for he who touches you, touches the apple of His eye. We are the apple of His eye, His very Beloved Children in Jesus Christ. Whoever would try to harm us must face the consequences of His righteous and pure jealousy after us. He will never forget us nor will He ever forsake us. Neither will He ever allow anything to remove us from His heart for all of eternity. So be it!
Then God said to him in the dream, "Yes, I know that in the integrity of your heart you have done this, and I also kept you from sinning against Me; therefore I did not let you touch her. Amen.  

This morning’s benediction is Col 3:16+17. Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts to God. And whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father. Amen.