An MBA graduate's thoughts from a place of prayer, study and waiting on God…
Exodus 33:11 Joshua is such a great Bible character that the Holy Spirit thought it worthy to dedicate an entire book in the Bible to Him. The first time he comes up in the Bible was in Exodus 17:9 and it happens to have been when Moses instructed him to go fight the Amalekites. The … Continue reading When Joshua wouldn’t leave…
God didn’t intend for the Israelites to spend 40 years wandering in the Wilderness. In fact, God thought them ready to possess the promised land within 2 years of leaving Egypt. But right at the border of receiving the promise, the people succumbed to fear, rebelling against God, disobeying Him and lacking faith to step forward. Oh what a shame - right at the border! In God’s eyes, this was an exceedingly great sin and not only were the people who doubted destroyed, but the people were made to wander in the desert for another 38 years. 😞 In this note, I explore why it's important to understand the reason for our life's wilderness seasons and the importance of responding correctly while in them, so that we don't unduly extend the time that God may have allotted for that season.
The cultivated mind is the measure of the man. An ordinary mind, well disciplined, will accomplish more and higher work than will the most highly educated mind and the greatest talents without self-control.
It’s quite surprising how the siblings, Laban and Rebekah, were so innately deceptive. In fact, Rebekah’s deceptive spirit was so deeply engrained in her heart that when Jacob worried that his father could find out about their trick, she said “Let your curse be upon me, my son...” 😮 I therefore wondered where she could have picked up this terrible heart of deception from. 🤔
Jeremiah 29:11 says God wants to “give us a future and a hope (i.e. an expected end - KJV)”. 🤔💭 Trying to make sense of this I noticed that NKJV/NLT equate KJV’s “expected end” with “a future and a hope”. But why, what could these mean? There is surely an end i.e. a future that God has planned for us, but God gives it to us through hope. The future and hope come hand in hand, like the fist to a glove. It is an end that we actively expect, a future that we hope towards. God gives this hope to us. He puts visions of the future He desires for us into our heart and wants us to hope, long and work towards it. This is corroborated in Phillipians 2:13, which tells us that when we walk with God, the desires of our heart and our resulting actions are of Him. Faith’s definition in itself is substantiated in hope (Heb 11:1).
Why did the cloud and pillar of fire keep moving all over the place during the Israelites’ journey in the wilderness? Studying it, I found that in our wilderness seasons, God tells us when to move and when to stop. Whether it was two days, a month or a year that the cloud/fire remained static, the Israelites also remained in place and did not journey. Each movement or stopping was done at the command of the Lord. (Num 9:23). Better said, the wilderness period is intentional of God and His children must root themselves in Him so they know the reason for the season and what to do therein.
Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been praying to God for something, it looks as if it’s all coming together but then you end up with nothing? Sometimes it takes the form of there being a lot of activity which looks as if God is finally moving but in the end you still end up disappointed?
One of the questions we often ask as we go through life is what should I be doing right now? For example, we could be believing God for something and we have such tremendous faith that we see the vision so clearly. The question then becomes what should we be doing in the interim? Pray, fast and just watch? Looking at a series of examples in the Bible, what is clear is that God often comes to people when they’re in an active state. In other words, they’re not simply lying idle and sucking their thumbs.
Perhaps the first thing to think about is: what is a lamp and when do we need one? A lamp in Biblical days is probably synonymous to what we call a lantern or torchlight 🔦 today. They’re used amidst darkness, to give a little light. Better said, the light from a lamp is sufficient enough to help us take the next step but never enough to completely clear out the darkness. In the dark, you must rely on the lamp to know the right step to take i.e. any step you take without it would likely be the wrong one. This also means that if you've been walking without a lamp, just start using it and you'll find your way back to the right track no matter how far off you had gone, but you need to use it consistently. Another analogy to use in thinking about this is the lights of a car.
The first time God used the word Be was in the creation story. “Let there BE light and there was light”. Be is an instructive word that calls into immediate or instant existence something that wasn’t. Be is a current state of existence. Be is real and solid. Be is now, not in future. All that God called to Be forever exists. The world may rotate and darkness may exist in places but the sun is forever shining. God calls us to BE. In Psalms 31:24, we are again told to Be...”Be of good courage”. Does this mean there is bad courage?