God's Roadmaps

Did you know that Abraham waited 25 years before he saw any of God’s promises to him come true?  It’s true!  Look in your Bible.  If you read the story of Abraham in Genesis you know that God promised Abraham that he would have many descendants, that he would have land, and that he would have a relationship with God.  Well, ok, I (Aimee) suppose it’s true that he didn’t wait 25 years for everything; he had a relationship with God pretty much right away.  But those other two more tangible promises took a lot of time. 

Genesis 12:4 says that Abraham was 75 years old when God first spoke to him and told him to leave his father’s household and to go off on his own and promised him descendants.  Genesis 21:5 says that Abraham was 100 years old when Isaac was born.  25 years!  Of course we could argue that he had waited even longer than that to be a father, but it was 25 years between God’s promise of a son and the arrival of that son.  That’s a really long time to wait.  And he waited even longer for other things.

How long have you been waiting for God to fulfill his promises? 

I think that in many ways God fulfills promises every day.  They may not always be big promises.  We may not always notice them.  But He is working in our lives every day.  He provides for us, He protects us, He loves us, and that’s true every day.

However, there’s still always the question of those big promises; when will we see them happen?  One of the reasons that Abraham is credited with having so much faith is the fact that he waited 25 years.  If you didn’t really believe that something was going to happen, that someone was telling the truth, you wouldn’t wait around especially for 25 years.  Would you?  I wouldn’t.

But God is faithful!  He is faithful to keep His promises.  Numbers 23:19 says:

                        God is not a man, that he should lie,

                             nor a son of man, that he should change his mind.

                        Does he speak and then not act?

                             Does he promise and not fulfill?

When I was an upperclassman in college God told me that He had different plans for me and that I had to step away from what I knew (or thought I knew) and step out into the unknown.  I did that and I don’t have any regrets.  But I am still waiting for him to show me what his purpose is on this new path.  It’s been almost 10 years.

Along the way I met a man, and several years into our relationship God told me that He had different plans for me once again.  And I had to walk away from that man and have faith that God’s plans were better than my own.  I have no regrets.  It’s been a little over five years and I haven’t met anyone else that I thought I could have a future with.

Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to wait on God’s promises.  It’s very tempting to try and take over and do things our own way thinking that we can make it happen sooner… kind of like when Abraham took Hagar to be his wife and she gave birth to Ishmael.  Metaphorically speaking, I've created a few Ishmaels in my own life.

But God IS faithful!  He will keep his promises.  And His plans are always better than anything that we can come up with.  We simply have to be patient, which I know is difficult.  But if we trust God, and we allow Him to be God, then we can wait.

I pray for patience often.