It feels like it's been 'centuries' since my last post and I hope it won't be 'decades' before the next one, but in the mean time, I'd like to share a recent piece with you. It's a little something I wrote for the new year edition of a magazine; Hope it blesses you.
Here goes...
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It’s that time of year again when hope is rife and many start to make plans for the days ahead. Regardless of how the last twelve months have been, the chance to see another year is proof that God has been faithful, and as the New Year rolls around, it tends to bring with it an aura of being at the starting point of a race; one that has God’s promises as the prizes at stake.
It’s not unusual to hear specific prophecies on what God is saying at the start of the year, but even if we don’t hear any new ones, there are apparently 8810 promises of God tucked away in the Bible. What’s interesting about God’s promises though, is that He puts them within our reach, not in our hands. His design is such that we are expected to co-labour with Him to bring them to pass in our lives, and by stretching to receive His promises, our faith muscles are developed and we mature as believers. The need to co-labour is demonstrated in the story of the Israelites, who were promised a land flowing with milk and honey when they came out of slavery in Egypt. God had promised them the land, but they still had to contend for it. They couldn’t take possession without going to battle and driving out the inhabitants of the land first. This is where many of us miss the mark; we don’t understand human involvement in the plans of God and the contention we might face along the way.
I used to think that everything God said would come to pass regardless of what I did, and that with God it would always be smooth-sailing. The reality is that He never promised that we wouldn’t face adversity, so I’m not sure why I ever thought otherwise. I think the dilemma for us as human beings is in trying to comprehend how someone who is all-powerful can say that He loves you, but yet allow you to go through some very difficult situations. We generally don’t associate love with any sort of pain.
