God has a way of working
December 8 - 14, 2024 | Always Peachy Devotionals | The Future Week 2
What are your personal patterns of behavior?
Yes, it’s a terribly psychological question for this early on a Sunday morning, but bear with me. If you have any sort of dealings with other people, it’s always a good idea to make an effort to spot their patterns of behavior. It’s something all of us have. Even people who say they hate routine have a pattern of behavior; it’s chaotic, but it is predictable in its unpredictability.
Part of getting to know someone is learning to understand their motivations. What drives them? What dreams do they have that propel them forward every day? What is lacking in their lives that gets them out of bed in the morning?
Now, don’t go out and start profiling everybody you know. That sounds kind of stalkerish. But maybe it’s time we considered making a profile of God, because if He is in charge of our futures (He is, by the way), it might help us to understand what He’s going to do next.
God’s already told us what’s going to happen, like we talked about last week, because He knows the future. But let’s go deeper into understanding the content of our futures by studying God’s patterns of the behavior throughout history.
Monday - Confusion isn’t God’s way (1 Corinthians 14:33)
Tuesday - Guilt isn’t God’s way (1 John 1:8-9)
Wednesday - Shame isn’t God’s way (Job 1:8-11)
Thursday - Independence isn’t God’s way (Jeremiah 10:23)
Friday - Control isn’t God’s way (Romans 4:13-15)
God has a way of doing things that isn’t hard to distinguish. He works in distinct, unorthodox methods in peoples’ lives, and even though His strategies may seem disconnected at face value, they all share a similar theme: God deserves glory.
God wants to be acknowledged. He wants to be glorified. He wants to receive credit and honor for who He is and all that He has done. And when we fully understand all that He has done for us, it makes complete sense that He asks to be recognized.
Beside the fact that He has often been denied His rightful credit over the last several thousand years, He is the only one in all of creation that truly deserves recognition and praise.
When you read the Bible, it’s not difficult to spot God’s patterns. He does the same things repeatedly, usually to get our attention. He might go about things in different order, but He takes the smallest, the least, the most inadequate person and uses them to do great and mighty things.
God loves the underdogs. The poor. The weary. The lonely. The outcasts. He chooses the most unqualified person for a job and supernaturally equips them to do impossible things. And He does it over and over again, not just with people but with nations.
No one with a worldly perspective or mindset could look at men like the disciples (the unlearned and ignorant men Jesus chose as His followers, as Acts 4:13 says) and expect them to turn civilization on its head. That’s not just true in Scripture, but it holds true throughout history as well. God has always used the small, the weak, the poor to challenge forces that are much more powerful.
Maybe this is predictable, but if we’re going to talk about how God works this week, the memory verse we need to learn has to be Isaiah 55:8.
God has a way of working, a way of thinking that expands and extends far beyond anything our finite minds can comprehend. But something that’s important to keep in mind is that even though God’s ways are beyond us, His Spirit is still within us.
His ways aren’t hidden from those of us who have His Spirit (1 Corinthians 2:10). We may not understand all the details, but we can recognize and acknowledge His hands when we see them.
God won’t do what the world expects. God won’t do what people expect. He will go a different route, use a different tool, empower a different person. And if we know that about God and how He operates, what can we deduce about our futures?
Praying for you guys this week.
Amy
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