We’re on the phone, someone else rings in, and we are put on hold.
And we hold… and we hold… and we hold…
The thing about holding is that we never know when it’ll be over. The waiting seems interminable. We want an answer now. No waiting.
How about those years waiting to find our perfect spouse? Or that perfect job? Or reconciliation with our children? Or our renewed health?
Some of us are still waiting… and waiting… and waiting… and we feel like we’re passing the deadline we’ve set for ourselves.
Isn’t it nice to know, to have an end date in place? How would it be to buy a car, and the finance company gives us a good payment, then tells us our loan will pay off… sometime. No way, we’d cry.
What about with God? Does he give us a payoff date, a deadline he must stick to? He did in Jeremiah 29:10:
“For thus says the Lord: When seventy years are completed for Babylon, I will visit you, and I will fulfill to you my promise and bring you back to this place.”
Here was the catch with God’s payoff date: He didn’t give his people a date that he would vault them into riches, move them into a MacMansion, or offer then a chauffeur-driven limousine. He told them that after seventy years, he would bring them right back to where they’d started seventy years earlier.
What if we don’t like where we are? Do we really want God to return us to our first job, our troubled marriage, to that house with the moldy basement? Don’t we want better?
Daniel 12:1 reminds us:
“At that time shall arise Michael, the great prince who has charge of your people. And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time. But at that time your people shall be delivered, everyone whose name shall be found written in the book.”
Can we get a happy thought? We don’t have an exact payoff date, but we have the promise we won’t be right back where we started. That’s a pretty good thing.
How can we find our name in the book? Easy-smeasy. Let’s look in Romans 10:9 for our answer:
“Because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.”
Let’s quit giving God deadlines. Instead, let’s give him plenty of time so that all who wish to find Christ may come to him.
Copyright © 2017 MyChurchNotes.net
Code: FGO.K.06.16b.vp.esv