Friday, August 15, 2014

Trusting God, Is Not Always Easy.

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Trust is something that God wants you to have in Him.  The hard thing about this is that God is literally asking you to trust in something that you cannot see.  We often talk to God and feel His presence, but what happens when God has told you something; such as a purpose, marriage, child, or a situation that you have been waiting to come to pass.

At first you may be going full speed at the promise that God has told you.  But once time goes by the trust that you once had in God is harder and harder to keep. You start to think:

“ Did I hear God right?”
Is this (fill in the blank) really going to happen?

When I think of this I am often drawn to the story of Abraham.  When God told him he was going to have a child despite his barren wife, I sure he jumped for joy.  But then years pass, things didn’t change.  Then more years past, and they pretty much started to seem impossible.

Abraham knew that he heard from God, but then his wife thought that perhaps he had heard God wrong.  Perhaps all this waiting that they were doing was in vein.  God did not really mean that Sarah and Abraham were going to have a child.  Surely, God meant that He was going to use Hagar (Sarah’s servant) to bring them a child.

And so was born Ishmael.  This type of forcing God’s will started all types of problems.  One that would continue to haunt us to this day.  Since Ishmael is a key figure in the Muslim religion and there has been a war in some countries between Christians and Muslims since...well forever it seems like.

Sarah and Hagar were at war.  And forcing God’s will brought more torment on her than she would have thought.  She was forced to share her husband.  And this direct disobedience of God’s will, God stop talking to Abraham for over a decade.

When deciding to trust God there are times when we feel that we must act.  There is nothing happening.  Your job is not here. You husband or wife is not here. That child that God promised is not here.

So there must be something extra that you need to do on your part to hurry things along.  Even though this seems like the most obvious answer it is also the opposite of trusting God to do what He said He was going to do, by taking things into your own hands.

Going back to Abraham, when he finally got his golden child Issac.  God told Abraham to go and offer his son as a sacrifice.  That sounds all fancy but God basically told him to kill his son to prove that he loved God more than he loved what God has given him.


Think about his story, this is really some hard stuff to digest.  Historians agree that Issac had to be around 30 years old, when this happened.  Therefore, this took trust on both their parts.

Abraham had to trust that somehow God was going to change His mind about killing Issac.  Or after he killed Issac, God would do some miraculous resurrection from the dead.  After all, God promised Abraham Issac, and from him would be many decedents, so how could God permanently kill him?

Issac, being a grown man had to trust that his father was a man of God.  He submitted to being tied up and was more than likely looking at the dagger in his father’s hand, ready to kill him.  He had to trust that some how some way he was not going to die that day, despite what was going on around him.

Can you trust God that much?

If I were Issac I am sure my father would have been chasing me up and down the mountain side if he told me he were going to tie me up, kill me, and that somehow this is God’s will.

When you look at whatever you are trusting God for, it pales in comparison doesn’t it?

There are many points to this story.  If God has told you something you have to trust that he going to fulfill it.  And like Issac even though it look like you  may be about to die, you have to trust that not all is as it seems and that somehow someway, God’s promise to you will come to pass.

Abraham waiting for Issac, beyond the years that he and his wife were biologically able to have kids.  I sure somewhere past his 90th birthday, Abraham thought this may not happen for me.  I mind as well get over it.

But God is not a liar and so He did fulfill His promise.  And who knows it may have been done sooner if Abraham and his wife did not go about their own way and create Ishmael.

The morale of this story is to trust God.  Look beyond what you see and know that He is going to do whatever it is that He told you He was going to do.  You also have to trust that God’s time, is the best time.  And honestly, this is often easier said than done.  But you have to.  You do not want to go making of mess of thing, leaving God to clean it up, prolonging the promise that He has given you. Because now He has to clean up your mess.

Think about it?

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