God Makes A Way

There’s a moment in childhood when something ordinary suddenly becomes sacred—when a simple scene, almost too small to notice, ends up whispering a truth big enough to follow you for a lifetime. For one little boy, it happened in a corner drug store, standing on tiptoe, staring at a glass jar filled with bright candy.

He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about theology; he was thinking about sugar. But God sometimes hides His lessons inside moments so ordinary that only the humble can see them.

The store owner noticed him looking. He leaned down, smiled, and said, “Go ahead, son. Take a handful.”

The boy didn’t move.

“Go on,” the owner said again. “Help yourself.”

Still nothing—he stood there frozen, not in fear but in calculation.

Finally the owner reached his hand inside the jar, scooped out a generous amount, and poured it into the boy’s pockets.

When they stepped outside, his mother asked, “Why didn’t you take some when the man said you could?” The boy grinned the kind of grin that belongs to a child who knows perfectly well he’s been clever.

“Because his hands are bigger than mine.”

In that moment, without knowing it, the boy captured the truth that sits at the heart of this message and at the heart of Genesis 22. If we reach for life with our own hands, our own wisdom, our own strength, our own imagination—we end up with handfuls. When God reaches in, He fills the pockets of the soul.

The message today is not simply that God provides. Most believers accept that. The message is that God provides better, deeper, wiser, and with a love that knows what we need before we know what to ask. His hands are bigger. His heart is larger. His knowledge is fuller. His timing is perfect.

Genesis 22 is the place Abraham learned this—not in a classroom, not during a blessing, not during a miracle of abundance, but during the hardest walk of his life. It wasn’t revelation given in comfort; it was revelation forged in obedience.

When Abraham climbed that mountain with Isaac, he wasn’t climbing to learn a fact about God; he was climbing to discover the character of God. And it strikes me that Abraham had already walked with the Lord for decades. He knew God was powerful. He knew God was holy. He knew God was faithful. But for all that knowledge, Abraham had never used the name Jehovah-Jireh before that day.

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It took the hardest test of his life to open his eyes to the tenderest truth about God.

And maybe that’s why this story still lives in us. We don’t learn God’s heart on the easiest days. We learn it when we’re walking up hills we never asked to climb. When Abraham lifted the knife, he wasn’t proving something to God—he was learning something about God. He discovered that trust is not the absence of fear but the decision to walk with God even when fear is loud.

When God stopped his hand and showed him the ram, Abraham didn’t simply breathe a sigh of relief. He named the place. He marked it. He said, “This mountain is where God provided. This mountain is where God showed His heart. This mountain is where I learned that God sees ahead.”

That is what “Jehovah-Jireh” means. Not simply “God gives,” but “God sees.” God sees ahead. God sees the need before we climb. God sees the ram before we arrive. God sees the path before we step on it. God sees the fear before it reaches our chest. God sees the ache long before we feel it.

And then He provides.

You and I know this truth, but we learn it the same way Abraham did—by walking into places that stretch us, frighten us, confuse us. Our faith doesn’t grow at the bottom of the mountain. It grows in the climb. It grows where obedience costs us something. It grows where trust asks more of us than we expected to give.

People sometimes think testing is about proving faith, but testing is about shaping faith. It isn’t God checking on us; it is God forming something in us. A soldier isn’t shaped by standing around a base camp; he’s shaped when the training becomes real and the pressure reveals courage he didn’t know he had. A ship isn’t proven when it’s tied to the dock; it’s proven when the wind howls and the hull holds.

And faith isn’t proven by affirmation; it’s proven by surrender. Anyone can believe God exists. The question becomes: What happens when that belief must walk into the unknown? What happens when God calls for your Isaac—not to take it from you, but to give you something deeper, truer, stronger?

Abraham reached that place, and the Scripture tells us he believed that if Isaac died, God would raise him. That’s not poetic; that’s faith standing on its toes, lifting its eyes to possibilities beyond the natural. Abraham didn’t know the details. He didn’t know the timing. He didn’t know how God would do it. But he knew God’s heart, and that was enough.