“As for me, I look to the Lord for help. I wait confidently for God to save me, and my God will certainly hear me. Do not gloat over me, my enemies! For though I fall, I will rise again. Though I sit in darkness, the Lord will be my light.” (Micah 7:7-8 NLT)
As a believer in the Lord Jesus, our certainty doesn’t grow out of God consistently meeting our timetable, but out of our trust in His timetable. I’ve learned that when I pray for something to happen by a certain time and it doesn’t happen, it’s because of one of two things: 1. I didn’t need whatever it was by that time or 2. I didn’t understand God’s timing.
There are times the Lord will ask us to do something, but rather than obeying, we try to bargain with Him by saying something like: “Lord, if you’ll do this, I’ll do that.” Rather than obey, we try to divert the Lord’s attention to something else. It doesn’t change His mind, or His instruction, but we seem to think we’re buying ourselves some time.
Sometimes our hesitation isn’t so much based on our inability to carry out His directive as it is on our uncertainty of the reason for the directive in the first place. Let’s say the Lord prompts you to call a friend with whom you haven’t spoken in a while. It’s not that you can’t do that or even that you necessarily don’t want to do it, it’s just that you wonder “why now, Lord?”
So, one of a couple things will happen. You’ll either call or you won’t, right? So, let’s say you get sidetracked and when you finally think about it, it’s bedtime, so, you opt to call the next day. No problem, right? Wrong! The next day you call but get no answer. You continue to call throughout the next week only to find that your friend had had an emergency, and she could have really used your help, but when you didn’t respond to the Lord’s prompting, you blew your opportunity.
Slow obedience is disobedience and to push the Lord’s promptings can prevent us, not only from missing a blessing ourselves, but being a blessing to someone else. Satan will have us questioning whether this “prompting” is just random or from the Lord, but while we wrestle with getting certainty, we miss a divine appointment.
As Phil Wing wrote: “Certainty is not a prerequisite for obedience.” Our certainty needs to be in Jesus, with the understanding that sometimes we’ll get it wrong. I’ve made calls and done other things because I believed the Lord was prompting me and had it turn out not as urgent as I thought it might have been. But I’ve also blown chances to be Jesus to someone because I was second-guessing myself.
So, what’s the answer? As with so many potential “problems” in our walk with the Lord, intimacy is the answer! The closer we get to Him the clearer His voice becomes; the more time and effort we’re willing to invest in His Word and conversation with Him, the closer we’ll be to His heart, which sensitizes us to His still, small voice.
One word of caution: DON’T HESITATE! When the Lord “prompts,” you respond.
It occurs to me that some reading this may not understand what a “prompt” is, so, let’s look at this more closely in tomorrow’s post.
Blessings, Ed 😊
Walking With Jesus 