I love that we can seek the Lord together! Whether you need a reset in your personal life, marriage, career, finances, family or ministry, we all can seek God together. Now is a great time to start over. Now is a great time to seek the God’s ways and obey.
A great father in the faith and prayer leader used to say, “I Pray. I Obey.” It truly is that simple. We pray to God. We get His answers. And then we obey.
Obedience can be tough, but it is so necessary. We all want our children to listen and obey. It isn’t enough for them to just hear us. If they don’t obey and act on what they heard, they could be injured or suffer harm.
Oftentimes, as parents, we don’t make sense to our kids. (Just ask any teenager! LOL!) They may think we are keeping them from great things when we are just trying to protect and shield them from pathways of pain, heartache or misery.
The same can be true with our relationship with God. His ways don’t always make sense to us. They are contrary to what the world teaches us. He has a unique sense of direction, that doesn’t seem the most logical way to us.
I knew a man who had a lucrative position in the steel mills. Yet, he felt God leading him out. He wasn’t really sure where he was going, but he knew God was closing a door where he worked. He sought counsel with his pastor and elders. He and his family prayed. Everything seemed to be pointing one crazy direction.
So with lots of prayer and support from his church elders, he left that position. God took him out of his Egypt, but it took a while for the Egypt to get out of him. For two years he worked as a laborer, pushing a lawnmower for landscaping company. This new job gave him lots of time to think, to pray, to listen, and to dream again. In that time, God blessed his family. They had joy. He had peace. This family had provision with every bill paid and still able to give to God’s work. At the end of that season, God renewed a dream that he had as a young man and opened the perfect position for him.
I’m sure this man would have loved to bypass the lawnmower – to seek a more direct route to his dream- however God was transforming him from the inside out during that time. He was taking out all the things that weren’t God and filling him with God-sized dreams, goals and ways.
In Genesis, we learn about Joseph. Joseph had a dream as a young man too. He even told his brothers how they would bow down to him. Yet, his path didn’t quite look the way he expected.Joseph first was sold into slavery. Then he was sent to prison. All on his way to the palace.
I’m sure there were days he wondered. “What has happened God?” “But I thought the dream was from You.” “What in the world is going on?”
Yet, in the end, God used that crazy, mixed up way to bring Joseph to a place to save millions of lives, including his own family.
God’s ways are so different than ours. We would like to bypass so much in our lives. God wants us to grow through it. These times become the seeds of our glorious future that He has designed for us.
“Seek the Lord while He may be found, call upon Him while He is near. Let the wicked forsake his way, and the unrighteous man his thoughts; Let him return to the LORD, and He will have mercy on him. And to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways, ” says the LORD. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:4-9
Prayer for Today: Lord I thank You that Your ways are not my ways, and your thoughts are so much higher than mine. Lord, I commit to hear & obey You. I will trust You even when it doesn’t make sense to me. You have the answers. I surrender to You. I seek You. I ask that You would whisper what I need to hear to me today. Open my eyes to see the path You have made for me. Show me the first step of my reset today. In Jesus name, amen!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eD_xQNhBlfM&w=560&h=315]
