The Lord's Measure of Blessings

May 5

I have a friend who says, “God does not always pay His debts on Tuesday.” What she is conveying in her homespun fashion is the truth that God might not be on our schedule. We have an expectancy when we pray that God will, like a genie in a bottle, emerge from His Throne Room in Heaven, and supply the thing for which we pray.

Indeed, the Word assures us that we may, “Ask anything in My (Jesus’) name and it will be done” John 16:23, so we are not off base when we beseech the Father in the name of the Son, in the behalf of those we love or in order that our own needs be met, therefore it can be frustrating to find the answers to our prayers unrealized.

We tend to forget that God’s schedule may be different from ours. We may be asking for a prayer He desires to grant—it just might not be the right time. Our frustration compounds when we look about us and see others who do not seem to wrestle with our difficulties—even though they do not appear to have the same heart of surrender to the Lord that we think we possess. When we evaluate others, we are succumbing to the comparison that the Word admonishes us against (see II Corinthians 10:12).

But above all, we must be aware that the Lord measures His blessings and the granting of them in the realm of the spirit rather than in the natural realm. While we may anticipate that He will grant us temporal possessions and earthly power, He longs to empower us to walk after the things of the Holy Spirit, for His ultimate goal for us is that we, “…live according to the Spirit, putting to death the futile things of the flesh, so we may live and not die because of the works of the sinful nature” Romans 8:13.