Notes compiled by Marty Zide and Steve McAtee
All of our circumstances in life fall under His control, poverty or riches, sickness or health, good times or bad times, length of life. Things do not happen in a vacuum. All of our experiences fall under His providential care.
This doesn’t mean we should not make plans and preparations for the future. We should live like the Lord will return at any moment, but plan as though He may not return for years. When we make plans we do so with the understanding that He may interrupt them.
James 4:13-15 - Come now, you who say, Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, and spend a year there and engage in business and make a profit. Yet you do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away. Instead, you ought to say, If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.
Rom. 1:10-13 - always in my prayers making request, if perhaps now at last by the will of God I may succeed in coming to you. For I long to see you so that I may impart some spiritual gift to you, that you may be established; that is, that I may be encouraged together with you while among you, each of us by the other’s faith, both yours and mine. I do not want you to be unaware, brethren, that often I have planned to come to you (and have been prevented so far) so that I may obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles.
Joseph, who was sold by his brothers is a wonderful example of coming to the realization that all his circumstances were under the providential hand of God.
Gen 50:20 - As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.
Gen 45:5-8 - Now do not be grieved or angry with yourselves, because you sold me here, for God sent me before you to preserve life. For the famine has been in the land these two years, and there are still five years in which there will be neither plowing nor harvesting. God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant in the earth, and to keep you alive by a great deliverance. Now, therefore, it was not you who sent me here, but God; and He has made me a father to Pharaoh and lord of all his household and ruler over all the land of Egypt.
Comments