Date: 7 May 2018 Comments: 0

Today brought a great positive in the midst of fear and worry. My wife and I are set to close on the sale of our house in Noble this week. Because our house appraised lower than we thought, we ended up having to bring over $2200 to closing out of our own pocket. Despite our attempts to keep things going, we just didn’t have the funds ready for that. It all hinged on us getting a specific deposit earlier than we expected but we were not sure if it would happen so we were both sweating bullets.

I looked today and found that the money is already there, a few days ahead of closing so we should be good. As this is all going on, I was doing my reading for today and it brought out a salient point… it’s easy for us to forget what God has done for us in the past when we face opposition in our lives. Yet, in those moments, we most need to lean on God to deliver just as he has before. In the situation that I just described, that is exactly what God did.

Forgetting what God has done is a common theme in the bible. Every time Israel starts to forget about God’s providence, something terrible happens and then the Israelites have to find their way back to God. The same thing happens with early followers of Jesus… think back to the road to Emmaus. The two men were downcast and sad because of Jesus’s passing and then Jesus appeared right there with them. They lament about the loss of Jesus (not realizing it is him) and then Jesus exclaims : “You foolish people! You find it so hard to believe all that the prophets wrote in the Scriptures. Wasn’t it clearly predicted that the Messiah would have to suffer all these things before entering his glory?” (Luke 24:25-26, NLT).

The prophets had this AMAZING ability to show God’s work and message because they never forgot what God did for them. For instance, one of my heroes of faith has always been Elijah. He didn’t forget how God brought fire from Heaven to beat the servants of Baal (1 Kings 18:38). Later on, when Elijah was being threatened by servants of the evil king Ahaziah to come down from a hill and he called down fire TWO times and burned up 50 men each time before they finally realized that he would do it a third time if they didn’t quit. (2 Kings 2: 9-13). Elijah never doubted that God would come through for him. If we could only remember all the times God “called fire from Heaven” for us (Whatever that might look like in our lives), we’d be less worried about these little fears that we run into.