Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
There are times when God fulfills His purposes in us in ways we would never have guessed. Just when we think we have gripped a fuller understanding of His will for our lives something happens that makes us wonder if we have grasped anything at all. Many prayers for direction in life are answered with circumstances that seem to make no sense. God’s will rarely takes us on what we would consider a neatly linear journey towards its fulfillment. Most seasoned Christians can relate stories about how they were sure they knew where the Lord was taking them only to discover some unexpected twists and turns along the way.
A woman is certain that her fiancée is the soul mate for whom she has prayed so long and hard, only to have him suddenly end the engagement for no apparent reason. After a long, dark night of grief, and doubt about her prospects of ever marrying, she truly surrenders her hopes to the will of God for the first time. A few months later she meets a man who is better for her in every way than the previous one. They marry and go on to have one of the most enduring and successful unions in their church.
A man convinced he has found God’s will for his vocational life asks for a well-deserved promotion. His outwardly genial new boss turns out to really be an intimidating bully with a grudge, and fires him in a fit of anger. The next day he returns to to pick up some personal items. Meeting his hostile ex-boss he verbally stands up for himself; overcoming great fear in doing so. A few days later he calls a friend fired by the same employer months before, just to commiserate. Unbeknownst to him the friend then phones a sympathetic member of the organization’s board of trustees. The unfair boss ends up being fired himself. The man is ultimately reinstated with both the position he wanted and a raise he did not expect.
These unexpected trials turn out to be integral to God’s perfect plan for answering both His children’s prayers. Neither the woman nor the man expected them, and neither understood why they were going through the adversity at the time they went through it. Only afterwards they realized that God had granted them their requests, while at the same time profoundly refining aspects of their character through the fire of the trial . God’s agenda is often larger then our own desire. It is not that the desires to marry or be successful in one’s work are wrong; if so the hand of providence would have not ultimately fulfilled them. But God often has other, sometimes higher, purposes for sanctifying the people who bear His name.
When well prayed for and seemingly God-ordained blessings appear ready to fall on us only to seemingly end in disaster we must remember that God’s ways are not our ways. We cannot completely anticipate how He will answer our prayers because His work is often not completed according to our expectations. In our Lord’s sovereignty He may sometimes seem inscrutable; but He is never unkind. God will not ultimately withhold any truly good thing from His children that is within His will. All we need is the faith to ask and then continue to trust even when, for a season, things may not seem to make any sense.
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