“Knowing the God of Our Past, Present, and the Future”

Deut 1-3 God is the same today as he was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Failure only happens because of our unbelief in this truth.

How often are we set to take on a new project but forget to ask God to go before us, and when we step out, we lose heart because we see with our earthly eyes rather than our heavenly eyes? How often, like the children of Israel, we see the enemies and lose confidence because we forget that God has given us all we need and wisdom for the asking. Remember this truth: the fear of man is a snare, but he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted. [Prov 29:25a]

The same God that took them out of Egypt would be the same God that would go before them. He would carry them; fight for them; provide direction for each step ahead and place terror in the eyes of the enemy. And the same is true for us today!

Is God the same promise keeper to you now as he was in your past? Reread this verse from Proverbs: “trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him, and He will make your paths straight.”  d of Our Past, Present, and the Future”

God is the same today as he was yesterday and will be tomorrow. Failure only happens because of our unbelief of this truth.

How often are we set to take on a new project but forget to ask God to go before us and when we step out we lose heart because we see with our earthly eyes rather than our heavenly eyes? How often, like the children of Israel, we see the enemies and lose confidence because we forget that God has given us all we need and wisdom for the asking. Remember this truth: the fear of man is a snare but he who trusts in the Lord will be exalted. [Prov 29:25a]

The same God that took them out of Egypt would be the same God that would go before them. He would carry them; fight for them; provide direction for each step ahead and place terror in the eyes of the enemy. And the same is true for us today!

Is God the same promise keeper to you now as he was in your past? Reread this verse from Proverbs: “trust in the Lord with all your heart, lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways acknowledge him and He will make your paths straight.”

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Waiting…easy or hard?

Exodus 32 Do you have trouble waiting–especially for God to act, to speak, or “fill in the blank?”

Do you become impatient? Do you want to wait, but circumstances take over, and you decide to take matters into your own hands? The Israelites had just said, ‘we will obey.’ Yet when a test came into their lives to wait, their commitment was shallow.  When the people “saw” that Moses still had not returned, they made a decision: Moses’ God wasn’t working on their time table. It won’t be the last time these Israelites have a problem with waiting. They became impatient with Samuel and said you are old and your sons don’t follow, so appoint us a king. King David’s prayer life reveals that he must have had trouble with waiting too, for he wrote three times for God to help him in ‘waiting.’ [Ps 17:14; 37:7, 62:5]

Why do we have a problem with waiting? We misperceive time. The drama of leaving Egypt was still fresh in their minds, and they were anxious to get to the Promised Land, yet God knew that they needed the skill of waiting because time had always been determined for them. Now they were being tested to see if their commitment was real. Sometimes as we wait, we yearn for routine, and we get bored. Without a routine, we get lazy, and we become discontented; we lack a commitment to the cause. Like the Israelites, we do not have perseverance. We think we have the plan all figured out, and we want God to do it ‘now.’ One author put it this way; Waiting reveals the best and the worst in us and also reveals our lack of understanding that God doesn’t work on our time table.

Are you having trouble waiting? Cultivate this skill through prayerful meditation and study.

Grumbling or Trusting?

Exodus 5 to 7 When God calls us to His work do we immediately respond or are we like Moses with his many excuses: I can’t speak eloquently; send someone else or why me? God wants us to trust He will equip us for the task. For Moses, God gave him his brother Aaron to walk beside him. For us, He has given us the Holy Spirit.

Forty yrs. had passed and we find Moses sharing God’s plan to release the Israelites from slavery and the people bowed in reverence forgetting to ask: when will this happen. And so when the sticky-wicket Pharaoh exclaimed:  “I don’t know the Lord!” they were dumbfounded to hear not deliverance but: slave masters increase the workload of the Israelites!

They said: What happened to our deliverance? “You have made us stink in the opinion of Pharaoh and his servants!”  Like us, they had a mindset that it would happen right then and when it didn’t, they complained. Moses wasn’t much better at hearing this news either. “Lord, why have you caused trouble for these people? You have not rescued them!”

When things don’t go as we think they should, we find ourselves wallowing in the pit of grumbling. The Israelites and Moses fell into that trap and we do as well because we are an instant gratification people.

There is an important lesson here for us: God does not work on our timetable! He only asks us to trust in Him with all of our heart and not rely on our own understanding. How are we doing?

Whom do you fear?

 

Evil Hearts Fear Men Not God – Gen 10-11

When God made the decision to flood the earth and remove mankind, He noted that although men’s hearts are inclined to evil, He would be gracious and not destroy them again. The rainbow is His sign to men that He is a promise keeper. If only men would see that and remember but *sigh* they do not! And so we find them in the plains of Shinar planning to disobey God’s explicit command to be fruitful, multiply and fill the whole earth. “Come let’s build a city and a tower with its top in the heavens. Let’s make a name for ourselves.” They feared being scattered instead of trusting the Lord. They sought self-protection rather than God’s protection.  Their hearts were self-centered—and today men are the same! God noted that “nothing they plan to do will be beyond them.”

Because they intentionally disobeyed God’s command, He confounded their language and scattered them across the face of the earth. And that, in a nutshell, is the story behind the word “Babel.”

There are some lessons we can glean from this incident. One “they hated moral knowledge, and did not choose to fear the Lord,” [Prov 1] Secondly, just like in the Garden, they heeded the words of our adversary: “you will not die but be like God.” His motive is always to get men to not believe God but to elevate self above God. Fearing the Lord is the beginning of discernment, but fools have despised wisdom and moral instruction.

Proverbs 3:5 reminds us to Trust God! “Trust in the LORD with all your heart And do not lean on your own understanding.”

This is a lesson we need to heed. Whom do you fear? Men or God?

Psalm 125: Be A Mountain! Trust God!

Last year as we traveled to Calgary Canada we were thrilled with the majestic Canadian Rockies. The mountains are stunningly tall, seemingly impenetrable and a reminder of Psalm 125. God has created the sea, the mountains and all of the lands in between. All of which is a reminder of the psalmist’s words in Psalm 125: if we trust in the Lord we will be like Mt. Zion.

A mountain can withstand a storm’s fury or stand tall and erect on a sunny day yet from a spoken word the rocks can tumble forth. As Elijah stood in the mouth the cave he listened for God’s voice which was not in the earthquake and tumbling rocks but instead in the still soft quiet whisper of God. It was there that Elijah learned to trust in the God of the mountain and it is where we can retreat to find our own peace and strength because the mountains offer us a picture of stability and security.

Where is your trust? The psalmist tells us that if we trust in the Lord we will be “like” Mt. Zion which cannot be moved or shaken but endures forever.

Facts or Feeling?

Psalm 13  Into thy hands I commit my spirit we somberly say but do we really mean it? What does it mean? David has been in some sort of conflict but in the quiet, he pens the words of his heart to the Everlasting God. Four times he asks God “how long?” It is as if we are re-reading the book of Job where he too asked God “how long?” It is so much like us. When facing a situation that seems that it goes on forever, we hear ourselves say “how long? We can relate having walked that road many a time and may even now be walking that road. We feel adrift with no answers, no solutions, and no help from man or God.

It is in these times we must determine that our emotions are not led by our feelings but the facts. And the fact of the matter is this: God promises He will never leave us nor forsake us. He is faithful even when we rail and pound our hands crying out for His answer. He delivers—in His perfect time for His plan is greater than ours. It is then that we fall upon our faces and commit ourselves to Him who knows the end from the beginning and say “I trust you Lord!” You have not failed me in the past nor will you fail me in the future. Therefore, I trust, I rejoice, I sing for You are my God and my Savior.