A couple of years ago our family walked through a difficult season. My son told me, “I don’t understand, Dad. Why didn’t God answer our prayers? We fasted. We prayed. We did everything right. It doesn’t make sense.” He wasn’t wrong. We had plenty of faith that God would answer, yet here we were picking up the pieces of pain. I had to remind him, and myself, that our hope and faith in God isn’t based on the moment we’re in. We can look back throughout history and our lives and see that God is good. It may not seem like it when we’re in the middle of circumstances that aren’t going our way, but God has been faithful throughout generations. There are times when we have to hold tightly to our faith when we don’t understand what God is doing on the present moment.
In Genesis, God told Sarah she was going to have a child in her old age. She had prayed for decades to have one, but knew her circumstances showed it wasn’t going to happen. Her circumstances seemed to prove that God’s promise wouldn’t come true, yet she trusted God’s faithfulness over the way things appeared. Hebrews 11:11 wrote about her faith by saying, “It was by faith that even Sarah was able to have a child, though she was barren and was too old. She believed that God would keep his promise” (NLT). She had faith and believed that God would keep His promise even though everything she had been taught said it was impossible. She gave birth to Isaac late in life and had a daily reminder of God’s ability to keep His promise.
Hebrews 10:23 says, “Let us hold tightly without wavering to the hope we affirm, for God can be trusted to keep his promise.” It’s hard sometimes to hold on tightly to the hope we have without wavering, but the good news is that God’s faithfulness doesn’t depend on our strength. He is faithful even when we are unfaithful. When our circumstances seem to show the opposite of what we think should happen, God is still in control. He’s not just looking at the moment. He’s looking at the whole picture with an eternal perspective. We can trust Him to keep His promise and to make decisions based on His perspective and not our emotions. When our circumstances seem to disagree with God, look beyond the moment and trust in who He has always been. Keep holding on to that hope.
Photo by Filipe Resmini on Unsplash
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