Filed under: a buttery garlic sauce.
It’s been a while since I wrote. My hands feel a bit rusty against the keyboard…not that I haven’t done homework, but there’s a passion that fuels the movement of my fingers when I write about something that actually…matters.
As we continue in the book of Isaiah, picking up where we left off, we move into chapter 30. In the last installment, we talked about God’s judging of various people groups and how it stems from us forgetting God and what He has done and the plans that He has promised to fulfill. In this installment, we will talk about a few things, but the main idea I want to convey is this:
God is faithful in every circumstance.
We sing songs about it. We read about it. Our friends talk of God’s faithfulness. We say it all the time…”God is faithful.” But do we actually believe it? I’m going to put out there that we don’t…at all.
Let me describe this to you:
Person #1 – “I have been seeking the Lord fervently, or at least I believe I have been. I need to decide on my major. I need to make a decision…and I pray and I seek and I never reach a conclusion, or I never reach an understanding of what I should do. I have so many ideas of what to do, but my mission is to be pleasing to God in every aspect, to live a life that He is happy with. So I seek constantly, waiting for an answer of sorts. Where is God and where is His answer? When will I know? I try to be patient, but it wears thin.”
Person #2 - “I know that I want to be married. I want to date, but every dating opportunity seems to fall through…either I’m not right, or they’re not right, or things are not right. I know that marriage will come after a dating relationship, but I feel like its never going to come for me. I am seeking after the Lord, but the failures just keep stacking up. I want to be pleasing to God, but when will He come through for me in this way? What do I have to do…make a life of legalism for myself?”
Person #3 – “I am deep in depression. I see no hope. I seek after God and I know that He will come through, because everyone tells me that He will, but sometimes I have a hard time believing that He will come through for me in the way that I need it most. I read Scripture, but I find it difficult to see hope in a bunch of things written hundreds of years ago. They don’t understand what is going on with me. I pray, but I just end up feeling like I’m talking to myself. I don’t know where to turn anymore.”
What do all of these people have in common? A struggle with truly believing that God is faithful in every circumstance. What else? An active faith, where they seek and they pray and they spend time with God. Why is this?
We have been raised in a society that praises independence. Sometimes, without even realizing it, this causes us to blatantly ignore the Word that God set before us. We read what it says, but then we say, “well, society doesn’t expect us to do that…that’s asking too much (or too little).”
Isaiah 30:15, 16 says : “For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel, ‘In returning [repentance] and rest, you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.’ But you were unwilling, and you said, ‘No! We will flee upon horses’; therefore you shall flee away; and ‘We will ride upon swift steeds’; therefore your pursuers shall be swift.”
I want to put out there…this poison that society has spoon-fed us from the beginning is something we need to find an antidote for. God says something so obvious and simple to follow, but we say “No!” and do the opposite; we take action at the wrong time, or we think we have an advantage that we don’t have. We run when we are told to stay, we move faster when we are told to move slow. God’s Word says that we will follow our human instinct, and therefore, we will be overcome by the same thing we follow. Do we not realize that our battle is against flesh and not against God? Persons 1, 2, and 3…they are trying to come alongside of society’s expectations, not God’s. They are expecting God to fill those expectations and not His perfect ones. And they wonder why God isn’t “coming through”. One wants to figure out their major because the world tells them that they have to…God says “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” They say, “okay”, and then…they read more about majors and figure out more logistics. One wants to get married someday, because that’s what is expected of them, and that’s what they want. God says “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” They say, “okay”, and then…they see someone, they think about dating them, they think about marrying them…back to the slippery slope. One is deep in a pit of depression, and they want hope. God says “in quietness and in trust shall be your strength.” They say “okay”, and then…they go back to thinking that they are entitled to happiness, to the American Dream, to what everyone told them that they needed.
…And we wonder why we can’t see that God is faithful in every circumstance. We are not holding up our end of the deal. God told us what to do. Our job is to listen and do. We simply ignore.
But here, my friends, is how God is faithful:
Isaiah 30:18 – “Therefore the Lord waits to be gracious to you, and therefore he exalts himself to show mercy to you. For the Lord is a God of justice; blessed are all those who wait for him.”
Even though we don’t listen, the Lord waits to be gracious to us. He waits patiently to give us the desires of our heart, even though He really wants to. How’s that for faithful. All He asks is for us to wait for Him.
The bottom line: I believe that we are called to train our thoughts to be counter-cultural. Then, and only then, will we understand exactly how God is faithful in every circumstance. At that point, “God is faithful” will become more than just a reminder to ourselves to help us get through the day…it will become fact to us, a fact that we can support with our lives. Society has made God into a genie of sorts, when, as Christians, we understand that our faith is a relationship, not a magic lamp. There’s give and take. There are things we have to do. And nothing good has ever come from thinking we are entitled to certain things, especially when Scripture tells us that we are deserving of nothing. God is counter-culturally faithful…He is not a genie indebted to us, He is not a dog trailing behind us, but He is the Lord, dictating every whim of the universe. He is outside time and culture, and yet completely in it.
I believe the only answer to this is for us to be, in our human state, counter-culturally faithful as well. Wait on the Lord, as He waits upon us. And I think that this transformation of viewpoint might just show us the thing that we never thought we would actually experience:
God being faithful in every circumstance.
-CFG
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