WHATEVER life appears to have thrown at you, turn your face toward Jesus, put your situation and yourself in His hands, and seek Him with all your heart. You will not believe what He will bring out of your troubles and put into your life once you lock on to Him and refuse to let go.
I am not speaking some namby-pamby “Name it and claim it†words into the air. I am talking about a search for Jesus that brings one to an altar of repentance with tears and heart-wrenching prayer. I am talking about total commitment to obey the Acts 2:38 gospel message or to realign with it or to simply declare you have been living it faithfully and do not understand what is happening to you, but you will die holding on if God doesn’t deliver you.
Things WILL happen, somewhere in your heart and life and world when you do this.
You see, God devises means (2 Samuel 14:14) to bring about His plans: not often obvious, but always intentional.
There was a Hebrew family who was prophesied to serve in a strange land four hundred years and afterward come out with great substance and be brought into a promised land to possess it. The plan for getting them there called for a Hebrew youth to rise to power in that strange country first, save the day for them, and win the right to establish his own family in the choicest part of the land. We know that beautiful part of the story.
But the ugly part was used to bring about the beautiful part. Joseph was not likely to wake up one day in his father’s house where he was favored above his brothers and decide to run off to Egypt to find his fortune. Yet, he had to be gotten to Egypt.
So, God’s plan called for a cruel crime to be committed that broke his heart and his father’s, and must have seemed to both to have no possibility of any kind of happy ending.
But Joseph was rock-solid faithful to God, and after going through more and worse trials he was brought out and made the centerpiece of one of the greatest deliverances of the Old Testament. His family saw what God had done, repented and reconciled to him, and planted themselves where they could grow into a mighty nation from a small nomadic family.
Not every story turns out so well. Many testimonies have beautiful stories of redemption and restoration because of faithfulness.
Daniel 3:17-18 KJV
If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king. But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods…
We know this story for how gloriously it worked out for these three young men. Even if it had gone against them (as it did for some referenced in Hebrews 11:36-39), their battle cry of “But if not…†would have still rung in our ears as the way to give it all to God no matter what. It can become our own rallying cry at at altar of prayer.
The time is short, and the door is closing. Some will fall, but we do not have to. We can let the forces coming against us propel us to an altar, or back to one again and again. We can see what God will do, trusting Him to bring unbelievable deliverance for us or our loved ones out of what presently does not make sense to our human eyes. If we see nothing else from it, we will see His face in peace one day, and positively declare that it was worth it all!