No one likes to go hungry.
By the same measure, we don’t like to live in antiquated housing, drive junker cars, or wear out-of-fashion clothing.
It’s just not cool.
More than that, it can be unsafe, undependable, and damage the Lord’s credibility.
How’s that? These things damage the Lord’s credibility?
Certainly. He tells us he knows what we need. If he provides for the sparrow, will he not also provide for us? That’s found in Matthew 6:25-26.
So, if he knows, and we don’t have adequate housing, decent transportation, or presentable clothing, how it God fulfilling his promises?
Let’s look to two women in the Bible who endured a time of famine.
Ruth 1:1-5 tells us:
“In the days when the judges ruled there was a famine in the land, and a man of Bethlehem in Judah went to sojourn in the country of Moab, he and his wife and his two sons. The name of the man was Elimelech and the name of his wife Naomi, and the names of his two sons were Mahlon and Chilion. They were Ephrathites from Bethlehem in Judah. They went into the country of Moab and remained there. But Elimelech, the husband of Naomi, died, and she was left with her two sons. These took Moabite wives; the name of the one was Orpah and the name of the other Ruth. They lived there about ten years, and both Mahlon and Chilion died, so that the woman was left without her two sons and her husband.”
No one likes to go hungry, but this was a fortuitous famine. God had a plan, and he needed to get Naomi and her sons to Moab. He had a woman there who would become part of the lineage of the Christ. That couldn’t take place, however, until Ruth, Naomi’s daughter-in-law, reached Bethlehem.
For ten years it seemed nothing went right for Naomi. Her husband, dead. Her two sons, dead. She had no prospects and must have felt abandoned by God.
She wasn’t, however. It was a fortuitous famine that had brought her to Moab, and it was by the hand of God that Ruth returned with her to Bethlehem, for there Ruth met Boaz, and the rest is history.
Jesus fell into the line that ran from Ruth to the Cross, and we can claim our salvation because of those divine events so many centuries ago.
When we feel abandoned by God, maybe we’re in God’s fortuitous famine. Maybe our Boaz is in the next barley field, and when we step out on the promises we’ve received through the Word of God, our time of renewing will become our time of feasting on the goodness of God.
We must never forget that God loves us, and he cares for his own.
What we’re going through today is only a stepping stone to the majesty God plans to give us tomorrow.
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