Words Of Encouragement To Start The Day (Wednesday 09/22/2010)

Are We Making It Happen?

Isaiah 30:18-22 (Amplified Bible)

¹⁸And therefore the Lord [earnestly] waits [expecting, looking, and longing] to be gracious to you; and therefore He lifts Himself up, that He may have mercy on you and show loving-kindness to you. For the Lord is a God of justice. Blessed (happy, fortunate, to be envied) are all those who [earnestly] wait for Him, who expect and look and long for Him [for His victory, His favor, His love, His peace, His joy, and His matchless, unbroken companionship]! ¹⁹O people who dwell in Zion at Jerusalem, you will weep no more. He will surely be gracious to you at the sound of your cry; when He hears it, He will answer you. ²⁰And though the Lord gives you the bread of adversity and the water of affliction, yet your Teacher will not hide Himself any more, but your eyes will constantly behold your Teacher. ²¹And your ears will hear a word behind you, saying, This is the way; walk in it, when you turn to the right hand and when you turn to the left. ²²Then you will defile your carved images overlaid with silver and your molten images plated with gold; you will cast them away as a filthy bloodstained cloth, and you will say to them, Be gone!

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine, and she was sharing the process that God had taken her through concerning her divorce (Our stories are very similar). As we talked about being separated and everybody telling us we need to go ahead and end it, she revealed that people were asking why she hadn’t gone through with the divorce yet, and all she could simply reply was “I have to wait on God for my release.” People around her did not understand, she admitted that often times she did not understand herself, because of the nature of the breakup, and I could emphatically agree with her on that one. As time went on and she petitioned the Lord concerning what was to happen with her marriage, one day as she read her scriptures the Lord gave her that said something to the effect that the work she had done was completed. Then He woke her up in the middle of the night and told her to watch a particular movie, which gave her clarity as to God’s release over her life, and in those moments an irreplaceable peace washed over her.

All too often we are making things happen, instead of waiting on God to complete something within us, or give us direction in His timing. We are manipulating the system. We are not waiting on God’s timing, His release, His mandate, His word, His command, but we have chosen to force the issue and make it happen for ourselves. We neglect to understand that moving out of God’s timing and will is disobedience and can even be classified as rebellion. When we move out, and say I am going to do this, just because we feel it is the right thing to do, or we are tired of waiting, we are moving out in our strength and power and we are bound to trip ourselves up, find that we may not have enough strength and power to handle what we have stepped out into or caused ourselves more harm and a harder road then if we had just conceded to humble ourselves and acknowledge God and wait for an answer. When we wait on God to answer, to give us insight and direction it is then that His grace is over the moves that we are making and His divine provision is in place. Sometimes we are so bound and so determined to do it our way that we are choosing to miss out on God’s grace and we are sending a message that we don’t need God in the middle of our situation, and that we can handle it all by ourselves. So God in His infinite wisdom and power lets us do just that!

I would tell anybody in a heartbeat that it is better to wait on God and to be thought a fool by people then to not wait on God and make a fool out of ourselves. The wisdom of man is the foolishness of God and the wisdom of God is often seen and the foolishness of man. We have to have an understanding of who qualifies to speak into our lives…To wait may seem foolish to most, but may be the thing that guides us into a place of obedience, peace, blessings and prosperity, that would have been otherwise missed by taking matters into our own hands! Let God make it happen instead of YOU!