Previous Challenge Entry (Level 2 – Intermediate)
Topic: QUESTION (S) (05/30/19)
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TITLE: Just Like Sarah | Previous Challenge Entry
By Jenny Miller
05/30/19 -
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I am a single mother. That’s not the issue, although raising two young kids can feel like an impossible task at times. Deep in my heart, I have longed for a husband and I’ve worried that I may never find lasting and Godly love again. Over the years, I’ve pushed the longing down and told myself over and over I didn’t want it. Every time it came up in conversation with friends, I would say, “I’m not interested in or looking for a relationship. I have no desire to even consider it.” After a while, that lie became my truth.
To my surprise, I recently felt the Spirit’s leading, “You need to begin to pray for your future husband.” Initially, I laughed at the possibility. What future husband? I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it’s never going to happen. Yet out of obedience and slightly out of the fear of the Lord, I half-heartedly prayed. I prayed even though I didn’t believe it to be something I could put hope in. But, “whatever God,” I muttered laughingly to myself.
Oh, how He knows our every thought...
A few days after the initial prompting, I began to feel ashamed that I didn’t trust Him to bring about what He told me to pray for. I still didn’t believe it, but as I repented for my doubt and terrible attitude, I felt a question come up in my spirit.
“Hope is…?”
I didn’t know! I knew that faith was the substance of things hoped for, but I had to look up the definition of hope in the dictionary. Hope was defined there as “a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen.”
So, hope is a desire and an expectation for that desire to come true; it is essentially a dream. And in the words of Cinderella, “A dream is a wish your heart makes…” I told someone what was happening and confessed my hesitancy to pray for what I didn’t believe would ever come. My friend said that if I wanted, I could be alone, but they posed a question I deeply felt was from the Lord.
“What if God wants more for you than to be alone? What if it is His plan to redeem that which you thought was lost?”
I’d never thought about that, but was skeptical. So, I asked the Lord to confirm this to me in His own way.
Ask and you shall receive...
Later that week, a statement passed through my mind while I was at work: “He owns the cattle on a thousand hills.” So? I thought. The seemingly implanted thought continued, “He has a choice bull for you.” Now I laughed out loud. It is only fitting that He would declare such a hilarious statement to confirm what my friend mentioned.
It just so happens that the day before this statement occurred, a man who owns cattle had come to my office and chatted with me about the process of selling “beeves” and slaughtering them. Disgusting, yet humane I must add. Yet again, I laughed contemptuously at the thought. God had to be joking.
His loving kindness leads us to repentance...
The next day, He asked another question. This time it put me in my place. He asked me this: “Does you not believing I will do what I say I will do make Me a liar?”
No, Lord. Let God be true and every man a liar. He had humbled me. How low I felt! But He went one step further to really drive the message home. He said to me gently, “You laugh like Sarah.” I could do nothing but bow to His all-knowing majesty. Oh God, forgive my doubt!
I’m learning that God doesn’t question me to learn my answers; He knows every one. In asking, He is showing me myself that I might see my broken ways, let go of my will, and follow Him to the life abundant that He died and rose again to give me. I can feel the Lord breaking down my defenses through His gentle and specific leading, and as I delight in Him, He is planting His desires in me and will bring about the promise in due time. I’m not totally there yet, but He has given me hope and I know that hope does not disappoint.
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