Daily In The Word – Feb. 19 – The Reward Is Worth The Wait
I have spoken many times about how much we hate to wait and how I (as Paul says) am ‘the worst of these’. We are so used to instant gratification in modern society that the very concept of not seeing instantaneous results bothers us to no end. But why? Everyone has their own reasons but I think in my case, it’s because while I wait for something to happen, I worry about how it will happen and whether or not it will keep happening after it happens once. For example, if I wait for weeks to hear the results of some test, even if the results are good, I worry that it may not always be good. Or if I have a good thing that happens once and then I have to wait a long time before it happens again, I worry that it won’t happen or will happen in a different way. The truth is, God guides our lives in every detail and he has planned well for what we need. When the Israelites were learning the “Laws of Moses”, God introduced a year called “The Year of Jubilee” that occurs every 50 years (7 years time 7 years and it lasts for a year) where the people were not allowed to do any work for a whole year, they relieved debts and such. People were worried about how they would eat and God cleared that one up: “If you want to live securely in the land, follow my decrees and obey my regulations. Then the land will yield large crops, and you will eat your fill and live securely in it. But you might ask, ‘What will we eat during the seventh year, since we are not allowed to plant or harvest crops that year?’ Be assured that I will send my blessing for you in the sixth year, so the land will produce a crop large enough for three years.” (Leviticus 25:18-21, NLT). So what does this have to do with your worry? Well… sometimes we may have to wait for a long time to see the results of God’s work (remember, time as we view it does not exist to God) but if we do it right, the results will be massively better than anything else we could ever want.