First, the back-story:
This Fall, I've been working through the book of Leviticus, but recently I've veered away from that book and sought out reassurance from Paul's writings as I struggle to trust God to provide for us. This morning for my personal devotions I decided to return to Leviticus, however, and I found that I had left off at chapter 25.
Leviticus 25 describes the instructions God gave the Israelites regarding the Sabbath year and year of Jubilee. Every seventh year, the Israelites were to abstain from planting or harvesting on their fields, and give the fields a sabbath rest. Also, every fiftieth year, land was to be returned to its original owner, and slaves would be freed. All of this, it struck me, would take a definite dose of confidence in God to provide. But God answers this response in verse 18-21,
Follow My decrees and be careful to obey my laws, and you will live safely in the land. Then the land will yield its fruit, and you will eat your fill and live there in safety. You may ask, "What will we eat in the seventh year if we do not plant or harvest our crops?" I will send you such a blessing in the sixth year that the land will yield enough for three years.So God acknowledged that the human temptation would be to worry that if we plan a year when we don't work the land, we will starve. And here's the part that I never noticed before... He didn't just tell them not to worry. He explained that He would provide three-fold during their harvest on the sixth year, so that before that year of rest, they would already have what they needed to walk forward confident in God's provision.
So I was reading this and thinking about my own struggle to trust God for His provision during the coming months as Derek and I have relinquished our primary incomes and will be moving into full-time support raising. And I asked myself, "has God done for us, what He promised to do for the Israelites in their season of increased dependence?" And the answer I came to is, yes, He has. Not only has God provided enough financial partners for us already to meet the basic needs we will have over the next several months, but He has also provided us with some investments which we can liquidate if we need to - and some of which we were thinking we'd go ahead and take out in the next couple of days. God has provided ahead of time.
But then another thought jumped into my mind. The car. Wouldn't it be awesome, I thought, if God also arranged for us to get a really great return from our car insurance company for our vehicle that was totaled at the end of October? That would sure be some nice extra padding in the bank! (Explanation: the claim was still outstanding, so while we were pretty sure we would get something back for the car at some point, there seemed to be little progress to that effect in the past month and a half)
Ok, now fast forward to this afternoon when Derek got a call from none other than our insurance agency!! It turns out that in the next few days we will receive a check for way more than we ever thought we'd get for the car. In fact, we're getting almost what we paid for it five and a half years (and 70,000 miles) ago. No need to liquidate investments now. No cause to worry. Praise the Lord!
Praise the Lord Who provides for His people!
Praise the Lord Who always has perfect timing!
Praise the Lord Who can even speak through crazy weird books like Leviticus! :)
No comments:
Post a Comment