There’s an interesting story that’s told by C.H. Spurgeon.
In 1854 he was just called to the neighborhood of the Metropolitan Tabernacle that he served in for so many years, there in London.
He had only labored in that area for one year when the area was visited by Asiatic Cholera. He writes in his diaries that day-by-day he was burying folk, every single day, with this sickness. He notes that he became wearied himself, he says actually: ‘I became sick of heart, because not only were my congregation falling, but my own friends fell one by one’.
Eventually, as he was burying day-by-day, he began to feel that he was sickening a little bit like them, and he felt that he was coming down with the same sickness. Into the bargain he felt burdened with such a heavy burden to bear in ministering to these folks who were bereaved. He felt, he says, that he was sinking down underneath this.
One day he recounts that, returning mournfully from one of those said funerals, curiosity led him to read a paper in a shoemaker’s window on the Dover Road.
Do you know what the newspaper said? Verse 9 and 10! ‘Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation; There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling’.
He said: ‘Immediately relief and faith was applied to my heart, and I felt I was girt with immortality! I felt that God had just come down with His word and put a cloak of armor around me, that nothing could touch me’ – that is what this word ought to do for you! It ought to gird you with immortality!
It ought to make you realize that no matter what touches me, nothing can touch me out of the will of God if I put myself under the shadow of God! Nothing can harm me: ‘I am immortal’, as the puritan says, ‘until God says I must go’.