Tag: sovereign God

The God who sees

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

Amaryllis

When we are in difficult circumstances, we tend to cry out that the Lord doesn’t see or He is too busy to help us or He just doesn’t care what is going on in our lives.  Do not believe these lies that Satan loves to whisper in our minds.  Our Lord is sovereign and He is working all things together for our good (Romans 8:28).  He loves us more than we can ever know and His plans for us are good all of the time.  Just because we cannot see His salvation and restoration right now does not mean that He is powerless or is sitting idly by, watching us suffer.

Think about the story of the Exodus.  The Israelites had been slaves in Egypt for hundreds of years.  If they thought of God at all, they must have questioned whether or not He cared about them.  They suffered, they worked hard, and then the Pharaoh even tried to kill their babies!  Where was God in all of this?  Despite the outward circumstances, God had a plan. First, He allowed Moses to be born and saved from the murderous Pharaoh.  Then, after Moses was a grown man, God spoke to him from a burning bush, and He said,

“I have surely seen the oppression of My people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters, for I know their sorrows.  So I have come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them up from that land to a good and large land, to a land flowing with milk and honey, to the place of the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Amorites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites.  Now therefore, behold, the cry of the children of Israel has come to Me, and I have also seen the oppression with which the Egyptians oppress them.0 Come now, therefore, and I will send you to Pharaoh that you may bring My people, the children of Israel, out of Egypt.” 

Despite what the Israelites thought, God did care.  He did hear their cries.  He had a plan to rescue them, which is what He did, bringing them out of Egypt in a miraculous way.

Or what about the time the people of Israel had been exiled to Babylon.  For 70 years, they wondered about God’s promises to them to establish His kingdom through the line of David forever.  What had happened?  Did God forget His promise?  Had He abandoned them?  No, after a time, He brought them back into their land and finally, He fulfilled His promises when Jesus, the Son of David, the Messiah was born in Bethlehem and with His coming, God’s promises to establish an everlasting king of Israel were fulfilled.

God has a plan for you as well.  He sees your suffering, your losses, your difficulties.  He hears your cries.  Just as He led the Israelites out of Egypt with gold and herds and many precious things, which had belonged to the Egyptians.  Just as He brought them back into Israel after the Babylonian exile. Just as He fulfilled all of His promises in Christ, who is our wisdom, our sanctification, our righteousness, and our redemption.  So He has a plan to save you, to draw you to Himself, to restore you.  Trust Him. He will restore the years that the locusts have eaten, as the prophet Joel wrote thousands of years ago and we shall “eat in plenty and be satisfied, and praise the name of the Lord our God”. (Exodus 3:7-10)

The Irreparable Past

~ Joy O'Toole ~ Leave a comment

Mountains in WV

As we go forth into the coming year, let it not be in the haste of impetuous, unremembering delight, nor with the flight of impulsive thoughtlessness, but with the patient power of knowing that the God of Israel will go before us. Our yesterdays present irreparable things to us; it is true that we have lost opportunities which will never return, but God can transform this destructive anxiety into a constructive thoughtfulness for the future. Let the past sleep, but let it sleep on the bosom of Christ.

Leave the Irreparable Past in His hands, and step out into the Irresistible Future with Him.

–Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest, December 31

Do you have things in your past that you regret?  I know I do.  Missed opportunities, wasted time and energy, failures, sinful decisions–so many things to regret.  I think it is the rare person who doesn’t regularly have a regret or two.

When I was twenty years old, I came to a realization that I had chosen the wrong major in college.  I had made the choice in good faith with the counsel of others, but about two thirds of the way through my four year course, it dawned on me that I was studying subjects for which I only had a slight ability and liking rather than studying the subjects for which I had a true aptitude .  However, it was too late to change majors without adding an extra two years onto my college career.  I toughed it out the last year and a half, earned my degree, and got a job.  It wasn’t until many years later that I was able to study and work in a field for which I had a great capability and which I loved.  Do I regret that initial decision to study the wrong subject?  Yes, I do sometimes.  I wonder what my life would have looked like had I chosen a more fitting major or changed my major when I first realized my error.  I wonder what paths I would have pursued instead of the ones I walked.  I could spent a lot of time regretting the ways not chosen, but is that a constructive way to live?

I believe that it is not a good use of my time to rue the past.  Instead, I must remember the good news that our God takes those regrets, the things in the past which I should have done but didn’t or should not have done but did, what Oswald Chambers calls the “irreparable things” and He redeems them.  The Lord somehow, in a way that is beyond my comprehension and knowledge, makes those regrettable words, deeds, and thoughts work for good in my life, in my loved ones’ lives, in His kingdom.

It is so easy to fall prey to guilt and depression when we think of all of the things we could have done or should have done.  We question if our life will be all that it could have been since we made a certain choice or turned in a direction that we now see so clearly was wrong.

Yet we have a Sovereign Lord who holds the whole world in His hands and who also knows our entire story from beginning to end.  Wonder at the fact that He is in control not only of the planets and the stars, the atoms and the molecules but also of your irreparable past.  Believe that He has a purpose for that past that seems so wrong and look forward to the promise of the future where He will never leave you nor forsake you.  And keep in mind Julian of Norwich’s words, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”