There are times in your Christian journey when you might have prayed, fasted, offered tithes and supported the Church gloriously, And yet the King Uzziah in your Business and life refused to died. There are times when you might have attended Church services, night vigils, crusades and retreats, yet the fruit of your labor refused to yield increase.
There are times when you might have preached and labor fervently in God's vineyard and sow seeds, yet the seed refuse to germinate. There are times when you might have cried, sobbed, wept bitterly and soak your pillow with tears unto God, yet the answers to your petition refused to be granted. What Is Going On?
- Does it means God is dead, deaf, blind, and dumb or hated you?
- Does it mean you're a chief sinner and God doesn't forgive sin?
- Does it mean God is no more merciful and gracious in compassion?
Then what thou heck is going on? You and i have prayed and exploited various means in order to received answers to our supplication yet, it all turns as silent graveyard. What can you do? No!; the Lord God of Israel never sleep and neither slumber but rather working something great for your life.
Do you know the greater the delay and horror your wilderness experiences, the greatest and overwhelming shall the sound echo of your testimonies shall shock the brick walls of the church. Hence, inasmuch the Lord is awake, why are you also awake in your worries and troubles? Please kindly activate a sleeping mode and get some rest because your God is on watch. So take a nap and allow him to do what he knew how to do, because he is never too late.
WHAT TO DO WHEN ALL IS GONE
Never be troubled except you come to the place where you know that God is gone from you. There will be times of pains. The kind that raises your pulse hyper. The kind that takes sleep and food away from you because of certain loses, failure or still, the lost of loved ones, property, labour, investment of cash, skill, energy, resources.
"Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices." Luke 13:1. Such moments will come no matter how prayerful you are. It is the time of Jacob's trouble. We all have such moments, when our experience is complete opposite of what God promised or we pray to happen. Lot and Job know what it means to lost all acquired in a single moment.
The fact remains that when all is gone, will God remain with you? God can't remain if he hadn't been there when all is there, when the painful unprecedented hasn't happened. There are painful moments we won't be able to account for. Black and dreadful moments when we are ready to let go even our dear life for the pain.
Then we feel life don't worth it. Black moments that all that keeps flowing from you to God is rhetoric and praises full of dilemma and unexplained surprises and the fate to submit to the painful will so linked to God. Actually, these moments are critical but admist all God remains God.
If you look at the ordeal more critically, even in the heat and center of the loses, God is left. God is not lost. Although the situation may affect your attitude or disposition to his word. Never come to a situation when God is too slow to be, trusted, esteemed or waited for.
There is nothing as dangerous as things satanic injected negative sensations or resolution. Don't allow one painful experience or moments separate you and God. Time will go, God will remain, and eternity remains endlessly. The momentarily pains can't just be compared to the glory that is awaiting. That's is why l feel that man is miserable if he misses God after his woes and pains on the earth.
When all is gone, God is left and he is the point you can start over picking up your broken marbles. Money won't remain forever, neither influence power, nor beauty but your relationship with God does. When all is lost that is what remains. So your values and hope should be placed in God and not in things.
Life is more relational that it is possessive. In fact, a hard lesson we must learn is that a time will come when it will clearly dawn on you that, the more you own in life, the less you should possess. Therefore, the influence and relationship we build with God, relatives, friends, colleagues, superiors, bosses, protégés, etc are deadness.
They should be esteemed above the uncertainty of nothingness men call life. Substances that are nothing and which give one nothing else to show for a life well lived. God does not will us pains but painsis out of life. We should never think not expect it, we should pray and fast against it as much as we could but never be taken aback when it show up.
Can job explain what you and I saw about the mystery of his predicament? It was a divinely bargained recommendament and approval. It is necessary in order to prove he not just faithful to God but strong to the devil. All Job knew about the situation was "The thing I fear the most and guard against has happened to me" but you know the rest of the story on the side of eternity.
Job never knows. Did he? No, he didn't. Yet his responses was "Naked I came, naked I shall return... afterwards, he blessed God" This account reveals what is man's plight and how he can respond to it in such carefulness that his relationship with God is not tampered.
Stafford Horatio lost all to the great Chicago inferno. To cope with it, he sent his remain and survival, children and wife to England. Guess what happened? They sank, everyone died, his six daughters, except his wife who escaped. Don't ever think those daughters didn't die. They did yet from that ugly shore, he wrote and sang "It is well with my soul”.
What is out consolation? "Many are the afflictions of the righteous but the Lord delivers him". Mark, the lord was there. He didn't live. Apostle Paul wrote “The pains of this moments can't be compared to the impending glory... There is no such temptation that you experience that is not common to man.
Solomon added" There is no new thing under the sun." Think about all those scriptures for moments and ask where God was when evil happens to good people? I answer, where he was when Job lost all, when Jesus was nailed and Apostle Paul beheaded. Jesus noted in Luke 13 1-5 "And what about the eighteen people who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them? Were they the worst sinners in Jerusalem?
Our life is represented in our time. When we lost our acquisition, we lost a part of our time and life. Why? Our life represents our acquisitions in materials values, such as, our labor, property, certificate, schooling, relationships, creative works or productions, etc. All these can be lost but when any or all is gone, God is left.
That is why it is expedient you develop value for certain things amongst or amidst other things you paste for. Therefore, develop value for God, a strong one. Develop value for your parents, for your mentors and trainers, for your friends, for learning and the acquisition of skills, knowledge from books or lectures, experiences. All these are invaluable.
If you at a snap of finger lost all you ever labour for, sleepless and studious years, periods of tireless labour , etc, God is left, the relationship you build remains . So, amidst the woes, remember God and the gathering you roam and home. Pick up the shackles, the broken tiles, and then continue amidst the turmoil. Winners never quit and no quitter will ever emerge a winner.
Manage your pains, cast it upon God, never on impulse or grief destroy the remaining things. Take courage, and start afresh. I will never forget, the 5th day of November, 2017, it was the day I lost all. After, five days when God told me my life will be filled with surprises.
I have had other painful moments, but this rank high in the rank scale. "who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God." 2 Corinthians 1:4 . How do we receive such comfort if we hadn't suffer any ache?
A burden can be defined as something carried; a weight; or something that weighs heavily, as responsibility or anxiety. For many people, life has become a burden. When life becomes a burden life becomes cruel and oppressive. People who attempt or commit suicide do it because life has become a burden to them. When life becomes a burden to a person he becomes a desperate being full of anxiety and worries.
LIFE HAS WEIGHT
Let’s be honest. You will agree with me that life has weight and none of us can bear the weight of life on our own. That is why the Bible admonishes us in Psalms 55:22 with these words: “Cast your burden on the Lord (releasing the weight of it) and He will sustain you: He will never allow the (consistently) righteous to be moved (made to slip, fall, or fail)” (The Amplified Bible).
When God created you He did not plan it that the life He gave you will become burdensome to you. From the beginning God had planned that as you walk the paths of this life He would help you carry every load that comes with it. People who have this understanding will not need to hold on to life’s burdens so tightly.
That is why the Bible says to “release the weight of it” and cast it on the Lord. In Chapter 5, Verse 7 of his first letter to the church Peter the Apostle writes: “Casting all your care upon Him, for He cares for you” As long as you are willing to carry that load by yourself God will not help you carry it. God will only help you carry it when you learn to release it to him.
Whatever you have released to God will no longer be heavy on you and as a result you will no longer worry about it. God has promised to sustain you if you would release that burden today. When life becomes burdensome it could be as a result of oppression from the forces of wickedness. Many people are suffering from burdens that are imposed on them by wicked spiritual forces.
For people in this condition and indeed all of humanity, Jesus Christ is the only hope of salvation, deliverance and restoration. Jesus says in Matthew 11:28-30 “Come unto me, all ye that Labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn of me; for I am meek and lowly in heart: and ye shall find rest unto your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light”
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Jesus says “take my yoke upon you and learn of me and you shall find rest”. When you take upon you the yoke of Christ by accepting Him as your Lord and Saviour you become supernaturally empowered by Christ to win in life and there’ll be no place in your life for the enemy to place his oppressive yoke. And as you make a commitment to follow Christ and learn from Him you are sure to find rest for your soul.
