Acceptance

Lord if You will You can make me clean

Luke 5:12 ESV

We follow a Lord that can do anything and we must always remember it’s not if You can, but if You will.  As broken a flawed people, who are terribly impatient, we feel that when what we ask God for doesn’t come quickly that He just isn’t listening.  Some even feel that maybe they didn’t pray right or enough.  We feel that our request is good (we want it) and that there may even be scriptural references that we can come up with why God should provide the answer we want.

But what happens when he doesn’t answer us in the timeframe we determine that he should?

How do we feel when He doesn’t answer us in the exact way we think He should?

How do we feel when He doesn’t answer us at all?

Do you accept that a sovereign, all knowing and omniscient has decided that he will answer you in the way He feels best?  Not your timeframe but His.  Because you may not have been ready and couldn’t truly appreciate His provision yet.  Not what you asked for but what He knows you need, the best for you. The truth that He didn’t provide it because you didn’t need it or He may have something better for you in His timeframe?

Not yet

Not that, but this

No…

Is God still good when He doesn’t answer the way we feel best?  Is he the Lord of our life if we don’t trust His decisions as best?  Who serves who?  Who knows best?

I’ll use the word loosely, but with maturity and time we can see that God knows best.  And like children see that their parents aren’t as dumb as they think we can also begin to see God as wiser and more capable of seeing what’s best for us.  With time, we become wiser, certainly not wise but wiser.

… but the upright enjoy acceptance.

Proverbs 14:9 ESV

The original Hebrew word for acceptance in this passage is Rotsown/ raw-tsone'. At its most basic meaning is pleasure.  Are we truly taking pleasure in the interactions we have with God?

Preparation

This morning in my time with God I was surprised by the direction and focus He gave me.  Preparation...  I don't feel like I'm preparing for anything right now and truly feel I'm prepared for what I'm doing but being open to following God's direction I’ve focused a little deeper on the word he gave me, preparation.

My "scheduled" passage of NT scripture this morning was Luke 5:1-11.  It's a familiar story of Jesus calling his first disciples and having meditated, study and taught on the passage numerous times in the past, I had some thoughts going into it about its meaning.  My thoughts on this area have always been of being ready, obedience and provision.  But preparation has never been something I gave much thought to.

“Master, we toiled all night and took nothing! But at your word I will let down the nets.” And when they had done this, they enclosed a large number of fish, and their nets were breaking.

Luke 5: 8-9 ESV

For the first time this old passage meant something new to me given my focus on preparation, I saw this as way of Jesus preparing these men to follow Him.  He had never met them and they had no reason or basis to place any trust in Him but fulfilling a specific need they had obviously got their attention.  They had fished all night and had nothing to show for it but at a simple direction from Jesus, they had more than they could take into the boat.  See, Jesus knew that for them to be obedient to His call to follow Him, He would have to create a basis for that trust.  Imagine how easy it was for those men to drop what they were doing to follow Christ now.  Now that He had prepared them properly and they knew that doing as He said and leaving their profession behind would not leave them without provision. Jesus knew He must prepare them to trust Him.

Now what does preparation mean to me?  I’m going to spend some time working that out but I know one thing for sure….

For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.

2 Corinthians 4:17-18 ESV

No matter what we are going through God is preparing us for something.  We just need to be open to hearing His voice and being obedient to follow.