Monday, March 9, 2009

When God Speaks: Redeem The Time (Joel)

When God Speaks: “Redeem The Time”
February 21, 2009


"I'll make up for the years of the locust, the great locust devastation-Locusts savage, locusts deadly, fierce locusts, locusts of doom, that great locust invasion I sent your way.You'll eat your fill of good food. You'll be full of praises to your God, the God who has set you back on your heels in wonder. Never again will my people be despised. You'll know without question that I'm in the thick of life with Israel, That I'm your God, yes, your God, the one and only real God. Never again will my people be despised.” –Joel 2: 25-27

When you get a chance, read the entire second chapter of the Book of Joel. God had brought destruction on Israel and they didn’t know what to do. Over and over again, His instructions to them were clear: REPENT AND COME BACK TO ME! And that’s exactly what they did. All of the Children of Israel set aside a day of fasting and repentance to God for their actions. They were sincere in their request for forgiveness; and God went to work on their behalf. He restored their land and all their belongings and gave them the best of what He had for them. But He also did something else, particularly magnificent, for them: God made up for the years they lost!

Have you ever looked at something you’ve done and been disappointed that you can’t get that time back. Maybe you went to school and majored in something you wanted to major in and not what God said. Now you’re ready to do God’s will for your life but the thought of having to go back to school and take a completely different set of courses is stopping you. Maybe you were in a relationship that you know was not in God’s perfect will for your life. The relationship is over and you’re looking at all the time you’ve wasted. You’ve even contemplated going back to it because it’s easier to stay there than to wait, patiently, on God’s promise for your life. Maybe you’ve ran from the call that God’s placed on your life and now you’re ready to say yes but have become disappointed with all the years you’ve spent running. Fear not, beautiful people. God can and will redeem the time.

The beauty in the Savior we life for is that His correction is never truly about punishment. If it were, we would have never been introduced to grace and mercy. No, God’s correction is about charting us back on the right path for His glory. Don’t concern yourself with the classes you’ll have to take. Don’t worry about the fact that you’ll have to reemerge into life “single”. No sleep should be lost over how many years you could have been operating in God’s call for your life. You’ve given yourself to Him and He will give you all of those years back and then some. Sit back and thank Him for that. The Devil really thought he was doing something, didn’t he? Little did he know you were getting all that time back and had the wisdom, this time around, to use it the way you were supposed to in the beginning. My, how time flies when you’re living right!


©BirthRight, 2009

No comments:

Post a Comment