That my will may be done ...

Psalm 139: 5 says, "You hem me in behind and before; you have laid your hand upon me." Its a familiar feeling for many who have times of contradiction and frustration in their lives.

For seven years He held me up and blocked me, seemingly from every side, whilst I wrote - six books thus far - and prayed and cried and walked the hills and implored Him in the face of mounting problems on all sides. Today I asked myself, what would I have done had He given me the resources to move on .... I guess I would have moved on. I would not have had the inclination to be still and know Him as God. 

Moses was sent away for fourty years, David for about twenty, Paul for eight, Jesus for thirty. Why does God do such things? In some cases, He lets us run, knowing that our wilfulness will bring us to our own pigsties, sooner or later.

On other occasions He simply holds back because He has work to do in our lives ... and maybe that is the toughest alternative, because it is so ambiguous and barren.

However, there is a third way. Many of us believe that "if only God will give me this resource or that gift", we will be okay, the way Jacob said, "if you will be with me, I will make you my God". Thus we bargain with Him, often to the point of promising to bless others once we are blest or to give so much percentage of what we get back to the Kingdom, in return for the favour. Need I say, He does not work like that and we would do well to stop thinking that He thinks like us. 

Because He loves us and sees the bigger picture, He will often hold back and not meet our more urgent needs, simply because if He was to fuel our wilfulness we would crash and burn out. Time after time I see people agonising over God's seemingly unanswered prayers, when in fact He is simply keeping them from doing what would derail all that He is perfecting in us. The instinct to get ahead of ourselves is so strong and  that sometimes all He can do to keep us from harm, is to stem our resources or to use pain to get our attention.  My personal observation is that whenever He does that, He is later proved right.

At the root of our wilfulness is a sinful nature that contends with God and seeks, as Satan once did, to usurp His throne. It is also caught up in all kinds of identity issues, which drive our urgency to achieve or perform - but anything that is motivated by a flaw, is itself flawed. The only valid antidote for all of these issues is to surrender - for He only wants to do good in us, not to harm us, something that only faith can see. 

(c) Peter Eleazar @ www.groundwon.blogspot.com