Believing God

I had been thinking of having a moment of silence on this blog in honor of September 11^th. I thought that I would write a short sentence or two saying that, and leave this page as a blank one for people to take a pause and reflect, but then something happened yesterday that reminded me that we sometimes need reminders of life and encouragement to believe in miracles, and as I thought about what to write for today, the Lord spoke to me that people need encouragement more than ever. We’re living in a time when people have forgotten what faith really means, a time when even people who say they believe in the power of prayer forget to pray or just go through the motions while speaking words of death and defeat over their own and other peoples’ lives. I’ll be the first to admit that I am capable of that too – it feels more comfortable to say that so and so is a hot mess than to speak the Word of God over their lives. It makes more sense to believe that things will always be the way they always were – that nothing ever changes unless we do the changing ourselves.

There’s a saying that I’ve heard people say many times that is found nowhere in the Bible – “God helps those who help themselves.” That’s actually fundamentally untrue. Time after time we read about people who had trouble helping themselves and God stepped in and miracles happened. Time after time we read about how important it is to “wait on the Lord,” and time after time we hear that we need to be weak in order for Him to be strong. But in the natural world, in human eyes, weakness and waiting mean not getting ahead and not changing anything for the better, but sometimes that’s exactly the place where we need to be in order to see the Glory of God.

It can get a little complicated because it’s not that God doesn’t want us to do anything at all, it’s just that there are times when He will say, “Wait,” and we need to wait. There are times when we need to keep our opinions to ourselves, times when we need to just trust in what He can do and not look at our own failings and faults and weaknesses or those of anybody else. Yesterday He gave me a word that He has given to me many times over this past year, a year of waiting on His promises and standing on His word when things look like anything but what He has spoken over my life, when they look like the exact opposite of what He has spoken over the lives of people He has had me speak His word to. The word He gave me was from Isaiah 46. When I just looked it up, I found a visual, a slide from a blog post on www.mynipahut.com, http://www.mynipahut.com/tag/isaiah-469/, for Isaiah 46:9, “I am God, and there is none else; I am God and there is none like me.” That really says it all, but I will add what He gave to me yesterday morning.

The first passage He gave me was verse 4, “Even to your old age and gray hairs, I am He who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you.” That was from the Verse of the Day I receive in my email from www.BibleGateway.com. I get the verse of the day in five different translations, but I’ve listed it here from the New International Version. Then when I got on the subway to go out to Brooklyn, I read the whole chapter in my little red leather bound New King James version, and these are the verses that He spoke very clearly to me about. He took me before verse 4 to verse 3, “Listen to me, O house of Jacob, all the remnant of the house of Israel, who have been upheld by me from birth, who have been carried from the womb.” Then of course that flows right into verse 4, which reads this way in the New King James, “Even to your old age, I am He, and even to gray hairs I will carry you! I have made and I will bear; even I will carry and will deliver you.” After that comes verse 5, “To whom will you liken Me and make Me equal, and compare Me, that we should be alike?” Then He highlighted verses 9-11, “Remember the former things of old, for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done, saying, “My counsel shall stand, and I will do all my pleasure. Calling a bird of prey from the East, the man who executes My counsel from a far country. Indeed I have spoken it; I will also bring it to pass. I have purposed it; I will also do it.”

When we read these words, we have the option of believing them as truth, or thinking that they are just nice words of encouragement that may or may not be real. If we choose the second option, we are missing out on all that God can do. When we choose the first, and make a conscious decision that we are going to believe Him at His word, we know that even if the situation all around us looks exactly the opposite of what the Lord has been speaking to our hearts, He will bring to pass what He has spoken over our lives and over every situation where He has spoken a word to us. When we decide to believe God, we take the hand that He is holding out to us and say I know I can’t do it, but I know you can.

Blessings,

Jannie Susan