We live in a space between what has happened and what we’ve been promised will happen. But we wouldn’t know that if not for the Bible. Were it not for these great stories that have been preserved for us for thousands of years, we might be tempted to think that we’re all on our own — at the mercy of the tides, left to scramble and adjust to each random bend in the road.
But the Bible tells us very clearly. The twists and bends are not random. Nothing happens to us pointlessly. God uses each and every circumstance to shape us and form within us the kind of character we were originally designed to bear.
Abraham and Sarah were promised a son, but they waited and waited for years before the promise was finally fulfilled. They may have been tempted to give up, but God was interested in more than just getting things done. God is careful about how He does things.
Joseph was sold into slavery, and his brothers meant to do him harm. God, on the other hand, had a much larger plan in mind, and used Joseph in Egypt to save his family.
Moses spent 40 years as a fugitive from the law, tending sheep in the middle of nowhere. He must have thought that maybe God was through with him. But God was using that time to prepare him for one of the greatest missions in human history.
The theme that begins to emerge from these stories is that God values the process as much as the outcome. In some ways, the journey is as important as the destination. God is not merely interested in taking you somewhere, He intends to make you someone in the process. The twists and turns, the tempests and trials, these are the ingredients He uses to transform you into the kind of person you were intended to be all along.
In our bottom-line oriented society, it’s vitally important to remember. How we get to the end is every bit as important as that we get there, because how we get there — the choices we make and the way we live between now and then — will determine who we are when we arrive.
Prayer
God, I recognise that I did not determine the circumstances of my birth, my abilities, my opportunities, my pathway. It is You who have called and chosen me for Your inscrutable purposes. My times are in Your hands, and during this season of my temporal sojourn as a pilgrim, a wayfarer and a stranger, I know that You are working all things together for my greatest good. You see what I cannot see — the outcome — and You have called me to be faithful to the process and look to You for where it leads. I acknowledge my own powerlessness and my foolish attempts to do things in my own way, timing and reasons. I thank You that I can learn from the intensely realistic characters of the Bible, because human nature does not change. As I read their stories, I realise that they illustrate the stories of Your people today.
In Jesus’s name, Amen
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