Hey y’all … I saw this article on Relevant the other day and I just had to share. It really is amazing what our expectations are in relation to God’s timing. He really does know what is best for us … we just need to learn to trust Him more!

I have always struggled with patience and understanding of God’s will in my life. I always expected things to go MY WAY. Sometimes God would let things happen the way I wanted them to and then they’d all go pear shaped and I’d be so sad and wondering why He would let bad things happen to good people.

After some reflection I realized that I was the one who wanted it that way so I did it to myself. I have let things go recently (finally) and things have just suddenly fallen into place. God’s timing really is provident. He understands what is best for us and if we just trust that He has a plan then we will prosper according to His will.

It’s not all about the here and now … sometimes we have to trust in the bigger picture.

~MissCaron

The Most Misused Verse in the Bible

Why do we twist God’s promises—and how can we stop doing so? by: Chris Blumhofer

“Jeremiah 29:11 is one of the most misused promises in the whole Bible!” a teacher of mine once proclaimed. I nodded in agreement when I first heard my teacher say that, but to be honest I couldn’t tell you what he meant. “For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11, ESV). What’s wrong with applying that to our lives?

Here’s how I learned the hard way: I first had the promise of Jeremiah 29 offered to me in a greeting card at my college graduation. Two “Precious Moments”-type figures prayed on the front of a card, and on the inside was God’s promise to give me a future and a hope. Naturally, I knew exactly what God’s future and hope meant for a person in my situation: a job. I had already begun looking for work, and the verse from Jeremiah was a boost to my confidence.

I spent most of the next year trying to find work. I sent hundreds of emails, revised dozens of resumes and cover letters. I perfected the “just checking to see if you received my application and would like to set up a time to talk” phone call. I had a few good interviews but no offers.

In this rather pitiful way, my job-seeking failures evoked a crisis. What was God waiting for? I asked. Where was my future and my hope? And why was God not providing for me? As I waited for answers to these questions, I learned how to read Jeremiah 29 differently and, even more importantly, how to recognize the subtle ways that my view of God had been twisted out of shape.

The real story

Learning to re-read Jeremiah 29 required me to back up and understand the story of Jeremiah, especially chapter 28. That earlier chapter records a confrontation between the prophet Jeremiah and another prophet named Hananiah. They are standing in the Jerusalem temple—which is empty because the Babylonians had ransacked the city—when Hananiah makes a bold promise: God is going to restore Israel in two years. (Two years!) All the things that were stolen, all the people forced into slavery, everything will be better in two short years. The tens of thousands of people living in exile will be coming home soon.

Jeremiah recognized exactly what kind of promise this was. It sounded good in the short term and would make Hananiah and his supporters very popular. Hananiah may even have believed the promise himself. But it wasn’t true. God had no plans to make everything better in two years. Speaking through Jeremiah, God says to Hananiah, “You have made these people trust in a lie.”

Then comes Jeremiah 29. Against the backdrop of false promises about prosperity—about God’s wonderful plan to set everything right in the near future—Jeremiah sends a letter to Babylon that says, more-or-less: “All of you people are going to be in exile for 70 years. You’re going to die in Babylon. Your children are going to die in Babylon. Settle in.”

We often read Jeremiah 29 like it is good news, plain and simple. But to the first people who heard those words, they were a tremendous disappointment. God’s people had suffered terribly. They had lost their land, their throne, their temple. Before Jerusalem fell in battle, the people had given in to cannibalism. They were then force-marched 800 miles and paraded (literally) through a pagan city in which they were now considered as the living symbols of the power of that city’s god.

It was into this kind of despair that Jeremiah offered God’s promise: “I know the plans I have for you … plans for your welfare and not for your harm, to give you a future and a hope.” They were not easy words to hear. Jeremiah promised that God had a plan that was certain and inevitable. But it would not unfold on Israel’s timetable. It would not simply undo Israel’s hardship. Yet the promise stood: God would fully restore His people and bring them out of their desperate situation, but He would not do it in the way any of them would have planned it.

All along I had heard Jeremiah 29 like I was listening to Hananiah—as if God would work out everything for my benefit in the near future and in ways that made sense to me. This is what my teacher meant about misusing God’s promise: we take Jeremiah 29 out of its context and hear in it the promises we want to receive.

God the vending machine

When we realize our interpretation of Jeremiah (or any passage) has given in to such a misreading, we should step back and consider how we arrived in a place where God more closely resembled a vending machine than our creator and savior. It was Martin Luther who quipped, “What the heathen had in their wood, we have in our opinions.” He meant by that saying to remind us idolatry still exists. The form of it changes in every generation, but the tendency for us to exchange the truth of God for a lie continually confronts each person. We have a startling capacity for self-deception.

With that in mind, it’s noteworthy that God speaks in Jeremiah 29:13–14 and says, “You will find me, if you seek me with all your heart … and I will restore your fortunes and gather you from all the nations and all the places where I have driven you.” The blessing (the restoration) is directly tied to being in right relationship with God. And being in right relationship flows from seeking “with all your heart.”

There are many ways to keep in check our subtle tendencies to twist God’s promises and plans into caricatures of what they really are. We can read the Bible with a greater sensitivity to context. We can open our thoughts about God and Scripture to others. Perhaps the most important way, however, is it to recommit ourselves to seeking God. Seeking God will not always result in fixes for life’s problems. Instead, it will cause us to realize we live within a much bigger story—one in which God resolves the disappointments of life in ways that far exceed our shortened sight.

Chris Blumhofer is a freelance writer and lives in Durham, NC, and is pursuing ordination in the Presbyterian Church. He has written for Out of Ur, Leadership and Faith & Leadership.

TRUE STORY.

Last night, while working on my 90 Days With The One And Only I felt an urge to look through my stuff to see if I still had my workbook, Breaking Free by Beth Moore. I don’t know why. Just something popped in my head that told me to look for it.

So, I pulled it out of my stuff and was thumbing through it and thought, maybe I’ll do this one when I’m done with the 90 Days because it will be good to refresh my memory and more important, I never ended up finishing it.

I put it aside and didn’t think much about it until today when I got an email from my friend, Tracy. She said that we would be starting up the church-wide bible study again this year in March and they’ve decided to do Breaking Free.

For reals. I’m not making this up. It’s like God wanted me to be prepared and was giving me a hint as to what I was going to be doing before I even knew it. Plus, this will be right when my personal study is coming to an end. How amazing!

I know that a lot of people don’t think that God speaks to them but I think that people don’t understand exactly how He speaks to us and we just need to be able to read between the lines.

Things like this happen all the time in my life and if I stop for a second and think about it, I realize that it’s God’s way of communicating to me. It’s such a blessing to be able to remember that He is an active participant in our lives even when we think He isn’t.

If you haven’t checked out any of Beth Moore‘s stuff I encourage you to do so. She’s amazing. Her studies are amazing. You will not believe how much you’ll get out of them if you just put in the time.

Okay, that’s all. God bless.