Hope deferred makes the
heart sick,
But desire fulfilled is a tree of life. (Proverbs 13:12
NASB)
Unfulfilled expectations can sap you
of your spiritual stamina and deplete your ability to persevere in trusting God. Trying to live by faith without hope is like
endeavoring to drive a carriage without a horse. You can crack the reins but you are not going
anywhere. You are just going through the
motions.
If you have been a believer very
long, no doubt you have had experiences where heavenly vision did not translate
into an earthly reality. You were sure
that you had heard from God, but the promise from Him did not seem to come to
fruition. It may be possible that you
just misread God, but it could be that the promise was from God but you assumed
a timing for it’s fulfillment. The
promise may have been genuine but you assigned a time for God to act based on your
circumstances or what seemed reasonable to you.
As we read our Bible we can see that God’s timing does not always
coincide with ours. Many people in God’s
Word, such as Abraham, had to wait, humanly speaking, past realistic periods of
time to receive the promise.
Most people in the USA have tasted a
piece of Hersey’s chocolate. Hershey Chocolate Company was founded by Milton
Hershey. In 1876 Hershey started a candy
business in Philadelphia, but despite six years of hard work, it failed. He moved to New York City and started another
business based on caramel. It also
failed. He moved back to his native
central Pennsylvania and started another caramel-based business. This time it was successful. He used the proceeds from this enterprise to
perfect (taking years of trial and error) a process for making milk chocolate
and mass-producing it. And the rest is history.
What if Milton Hershey had stopped
after his first or second failure? The
world would never have known the Hershey’s Kiss, not to mention many acts of
philanthropy. He would have died an
obscure and unknown man. What if the patriarch
Abraham had not persisted in believing God past the biological possibility of
conceiving the son of the promise? How might the history of God’s people been
different? How will our lives be
different if we continue to believe God in spite of failure, disappointment,
and delay?
As they say in the theatrical world,
it ain’t
over until the fat lady sings.
On many occasions in God’s kingdom, it isn’t over even when the fat lady
sings. It only over when God says it’s
over.
Ken
Barnes, the author of “The Chicken Farm and Other Sacred Places”
YWAM Publishing
Email: kenbarnes737@gmail.com
website: https://sites.google.com/site/kenbarnesbooksite/
Email: kenbarnes737@gmail.com
website: https://sites.google.com/site/kenbarnesbooksite/
