In 2019 I was offered a voluntary severance package from the company I had been at for nearly 15 years. After a lot of prayer and answers from God, I accepted the package and started my own business. After a few months, things were going well. I was getting steady customers and starting to grow. Just as things were looking up, Covid hit and pretty much shut me down. In that moment I had a choice to make. I could look at my friends from my previous company who were getting a steady check, and I could be upset at God, or I could remember that I heard from Him and trust that He’d always taken care of me in the past. When crisis hits, our natural inclination is to think God has abandoned us. However, I’ve learned that spiritual maturity is built on remembering the faithfulness of God.
In Exodus 17, the Israelites were in the middle of the wilderness and there wasn’t any water. One version says they were tormented by thirst and they began to complain and argue with Moses asking why he brought them out of Egypt if they were just going to die of thirst. These people had just witnessed the plagues God brought on Egypt, the parting of the Red Sea and were receiving daily manna from heaven. Their current crisis had them thinking God had abandoned them and their mind said they would have been better off living in slavery. Moses went to the Lord and God told him to strike the rock and water would come out of it. Moses named the place “Arguing” because they had argued whether God was with them or not.
In Psalm 77 Asaph was going through a tough time and starting to think that God had forgotten him. Then he penned verses 11-12, “But then I recall all you have done, O Lord; I remember your wonderful deeds of long ago. They are constantly in my thoughts. I cannot stop thinking about your mighty works” (NLT). He chose to remember God’s faithfulness in a wilderness season when God was silent. He chose to lift his hands toward heaven anyway. Faith is having a well trained memory that looks at God’s faithfulness over time instead of our current thirst. A good habit is to write down times God has been faithful to you in the past, to share them with others and to read them when times get tough. Doing this will help train your faith to trust in the wilderness.
Devotions by Chris Hendrix 