After my older brother got his driver’s license, he was sometimes drafted to drive me where I needed to go.
When our Indiana streets were covered with snow, my brother loved to terrify me by pretending he was losing control of the car. He’d let his hands frantically slide all around the steering wheel and then start screaming something like, “It’s out of control! We’re gonna die!”
Teenage boys—you gotta love ’em.
It scared me every single time. Every single time, I thought this might be THE time when we’d actually careen off the road.
It’s pretty scary to feel like the one who is supposed to be in control, isn’t.
I think many people are feeling that way right now. The world seems to be on fire and we’re beginning to feel the heat of the flames right where we live. We wonder if God or anyone else can put the fire out before it burns us up.
Following the recent mass shooting in San Bernardino, Calif., the New York Daily News ran a headline that said, “God Isn’t Fixing This.” Inside the paper, a column blasted Republican presidential candidates for saying they would be praying for the families of the shooting victims, and that column began with this sentence: “Prayers aren’t working.”
Oh, really? I thought when I read this. How exactly do you know prayers aren’t working?
We sure can be quick to pass judgment on God when we don’t understand what He allows or does. How we rush to condemn Him when we ring our little bells and He doesn’t instantly appear to do our bidding, as if He were our butler.
“For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” God plainly tells us in Isaiah 55:8. That means our relationship with Him will always be fraught with uncomfortable mysteries, but it doesn’t mean He’s sleeping on the job.
The truth is He’s always at work to accomplish His good will for this world and for our lives. He is not the problem; we are. We think our plans are better, so when ours collide with His, we point our little fingers at Him and declare Him to be unfair and uncaring.
We say things like, “Prayers aren’t working.”
I love this quote from author and pastor John Piper: “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”
Isn’t faith really about trusting God for those 9,997 things we can’t see?
“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see,” and “we walk by faith, not by sight,” we read in Hebrews 11:1 and 2 Corinthians 5:7.
The idea of faith is easier than the reality, so we demand to understand God’s ways, even though a God we could completely understand would be too small to worship.
God’s one loving goal for our lives and for all creation is redemption. He is trying to save as many as will be saved from the devastations of sin, even as He is orchestrating world events toward this ultimate end: a new heaven and earth, free from sin, tears, sadness, pain, and death.
Nearly 30 percent of the Bible communicates God’s prophetic plan for this world. Many of those prophecies have already taken place, exactly as predicted.
Jesus Christ fulfilled hundreds of specific Old Testament prophecies about His first coming. Everything about the birth, life and death of Jesus affirms that God, indeed, knows and controls the future.
God would say to us today what His angels told the shepherds in Bethlehem all those years ago: “Fear not.”
Things aren’t spinning out of control, they’re falling into place.
God IS fixing this.