It is in the nature of our world for things to go down. Water flows downhill. Heavier, colder air settles in the lowlands. Drop a hammer? It always lands on our toes.
Gravity reacts on everything around us, including the filth of this world. Rising waters during a flood? Our only solution is to get things above the murky maelstrom.
We lift them up.
Hagar the Egyptian had been put in the most heinous of situations. A bondswoman, she had little say in the matter of her son’s birth. Yet, that birth caused her to be ejected from Abraham’s household, along with Ishmael, her son. Genesis 21:9-21 tells the story of that terrible day.
She sat in the desert, with her son under a shrub, and all her water was gone. She leaned over him, and she cried, for without water, both of them would soon die.
God spoke to her, saying, “Lift up the lad.”
What? There was no water rising around her feet. The great flood had already come and gone. Hagar was in the desert, and it was the lack of water that was her problem.
Lift up the lad?
There was a deeper meaning to God’s words. It wasn’t a flood of water that was about to consume Hagar and her son. It was the inrush of betrayal, the prospect of death, and the certainty that all hope was gone.
Hagar had been blinded to the truth.
God opened her eyes, and there was a well of water nearby, ready to nourish both Hagar and Ishmael.
What do we need to lift up before the Lord? What do we need to look beyond?
When we lift our needs before God, he will open our eyes, and he will answer our most desperate pleas. Just ask Hagar. Her son became the patriarch of a great nation.
What we lift up before the Lord, he will make into something we never imagined possible.
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Code: FGO.D.21.14a.vp