The Hand of God
(Share my story bout contracting Malaria in Malawi.)
Couldn’t see what was going on inside my body
Even though I was unaware of the virus that was attacking my vital organs, destruction was occurring.
So much in life is like that.
Often so blind to what is really going on.
Just as I couldn’t see that virus and just as I couldn’t see the antiviral drugs working, so we can’t always see the hand of God working until after he has orchestrated His plans for our lives.
Two weeks ago as I was reading a portion of scripture in Luke 4 it made me think about the hand of God. How he works behind the scenes and how he cares for you and me.
I was reading from v. 38-44 Follow along please as I read.
After leaving the synagogue that day, Jesus went to Simon’s home, where he found Simon’s mother-in-law very sick with a high fever. "Please heal her," everyone begged.
4:39 Standing at her bedside, he spoke to the fever, rebuking it, and immediately her temperature returned to normal. She got up at once and prepared a meal for them.
4:40 As the sun went down that evening, people throughout the village brought sick family members to Jesus. No matter what their diseases were, the touch of his hand healed every one.
4:41 Some were possessed by demons; and the demons came out at his command, shouting, "You are the Son of God." But because they knew he was the Messiah, he stopped them and told them to be silent.
4:42 Early the next morning Jesus went out into the wilderness. The crowds searched everywhere for him, and when they finally found him, they begged him not to leave them.
4:43 But he replied, "I must preach the Good News of the Kingdom of God in other places, too, because that is why I was sent."
4:44 So he continued to travel around, preaching in synagogues throughout Judea.
As I was reading this portion of scripture I found myself thinking about how incredible it must have been to see Jesus in action.
To see him heal everyone that came to him.
There must have been hundreds of people from all the surrounding villages who showed up at Peter’s house.
Can you see the picture?
The sun is going down and droves of people are pushing and shoving to get close to Jesus, just to have him lay His hands on them.
And then every time someone was healed, gasps or shouts of joy and amazement at being healed and seeing people healed.
Those who were blind could all of a sudden see again.
Those who were deaf could all of a sudden hear again.
No more cancer, no more Alzheimer’s, no more arthritis or hepatitis, you name the disease and Jesus took care of it! He put an end to it!
What I would give to be able to go back in time to see it in real life!
Not one movie made has ever been able to capture just how wild and crazy that night must have been.
Everyone was in awe of Him and could hardly believe their eyes.
It was like God himself had come down and showed them just how much he really loves them!
If only they knew – God truly was in their midst!
It’s like He just couldn’t resist taking care of their physical ailments!
- He loved them more than they could ever understand.
As I was reading this portion of scripture and pondering the wonder of living while Jesus was around, I found myself wondering: “Just how much do I truly believe in Jesus’ concern about what I am going through.”
I sat there and I talked to God and I said to Him: “God, are you truly still in the business of healing people? Intellectually I have never doubted it, but on an emotionally level I recognized that I was struggling with it!
“Did my problems really concern Him?”
“Was he going to heal my heart and help me get through the problems I was facing from day to day?”
I found myself wishing that Jesus would just appear again in person and take care of my problems the way he took care of all those people’s illnesses.
I wasn’t asking for a miracle! Just a little help.
Do you ever wish for that?
That your problems would just go away – that life would just be simpler, with fewer worries and heartaches?
I think we all do. I know I do.
But many times it’s hard to know how God is working and we can begin to doubt whether or not he is working on our behalf at all.
One thing I’ve realized about myself is that there are many times when all I want is for God to show up at my house, knock on my front door, come in and heal my heart and take care of all my problems, just like Jesus showed up at Peter’s mother-in-law’s house and instantly healed her.
But my God doesn’t always seem to work that way.
Sometimes I can feel like He doesn’t even show up and I can feel so lonely and distant from him.
Have you ever felt that way?
I have and it has forced me to grow in my understanding of who God is and how he works in my life.
Which begs the question: “How does God work? And is He still concerned with our physical and emotional well-being”?
Well I wish I knew all the answers to those two questions but as you can imagine, I don’t. The quick and honest answer is: Yes I believe He does, but I don’t always see it at first and I don’t always feel it at first – sometimes all I can do is simply believe.
Over the last 10 months my family and I have faced some really tough times and we’ve asked God many questions and He has already answered many of them. Essentially as we’ve struggled, when we filter it all, our prayer requests have come down to one simple prayer: “God give us a better life!”
Not next year, not next month, not tomorrow, but today. And if not today, then tomorrow will do!
And then when the better day didn’t come, week after week, month after month, the realness and depth of our faith began to be severely tested. And that is, I believe, when God begins to do His thing – heart surgery.
But it seems as if though there are no guarantees as to how long some episodes in our lives can take. Some are short, others are long!
Think about Joseph, Moses, Esther, David, and so many others.
Each and every one of them went through turmoil.
Joseph was sold into slavery and spent 4 years in prison before his life finally turned around for the better.
And look at what he concluded as he looked back upon what happened to Him. He says to his brothers who sold him into slavery: “…don’t be angry with yourselves that you did this to me, for God was behind it. God sent me here ahead of you to save lives.
If there ever was bitterness in Joseph’s life over what happened to him and I suspect there might have been, there wasn’t any bitterness anymore! Instead he recognized that God was at work in his life and that God had worked it all together for the good as Romans 8:28 says.
Do you believe that God cared about Joseph’s life?
During those 4 years, if you new about Joseph’s situation, it would’ve been hard to believe that God was working it all out for the good! But he was!
When you look at your life right now, it might be hard to see what God is doing, but God wants us to trust in Him that he does just what he says: that he works in all things for the good of those who love him?
Not those who are faultless and without sin, but those who put their faith in him, those who love him!
Moses is another great example.
As a young man he didn’t know how to control his anger at the injustices the Egyptians were inflicting upon his own people and he lashes out and kills a man. In fear for his life with the shame of murder over his head, he flea’s from everyone and everything he had ever known - Leaving behind his family, friends, riches and power. Only to find himself in trouble again – this time with shepherds who were harassing female shepherds. Moses stood up for them and protected them and guess who the owner of their sheep were? A Midianite Priest, who had a daughter that Moses would eventually fall in love with and marry.
But during those next 40 years of his life, when he perhaps thought that all his life would amount to was to be a shepherd for His father-in law in the dessert plains of Middian, God was preparing Him.
Instead of learning about the million and one Egyptian gods, he would now learn about the one true God.
But he had to wait 40 years, before it perhaps made sense to Him.
Of God Moses ended up saying in Exodus 15:2: The Lord is my strong defender; He is the one who has saved me. He is my God, and I will praise him, my father’s God, in Him I will put my trust.
As we look back, we can see what God was doing?
He was working in it all for the good of those who love him?
He was working things out for Moses and for the people of Israel and for you and me.
But if you lived in Egypt and heard about Moses after he fled, you would never have imagined that one day he would come back and lead you and your family across the Red Sea out of slavery into a land of milk and Honey!
Then there is Esther.
- The story of a Jewish orphan girl raised by her uncle, Mordecai.
When so many of her relatives and friends moved back to Israel she remained in Persia and eventually found herself stripped of her freedom and locked up in the Kings harem.
Could you imagine the despair and the fear?
Where was her life heading?
What was she doing as a Jewish girl in a Persian harem?
And then the most challenging moment of her life – approaching the King, uninvited, to ask him to have mercy on the Jews.
She had to trust her uncle and then she had to trust God, believing that he had brought her to that point, to stand in on behalf of her people.
Listen to the interaction between her and her uncle:
4:10 Then Esther told Hathach to go back and relay this message to Mordecai:
4:11 "The whole world knows that anyone who appears before the king in his inner court without being invited is doomed to die unless the king holds out his gold scepter. And the king has not called for me to come to him in more than a month."
4:12 So Hathach gave Esther’s message to Mordecai.
4:13 Mordecai sent back this reply to Esther: "Don’t think for a moment that you will escape there in the palace when all other Jews are killed.
4:14 If you keep quiet at a time like this, deliverance for the Jews will arise from some other place, but you and your relatives will die. What’s more, who can say but that you have been elevated to the palace for just such a time as this?"
4:15 Then Esther sent this reply to Mordecai:
4:16 "Go and gather together all the Jews of Susa and fast for me. Do not eat or drink for three days, night or day. My maids and I will do the same. And then, though it is against the law, I will go in to see the king. If I must die, I am willing to die."
4:17 So Mordecai went away and did as Esther told him.
In the end Esther becomes the Queen of Persia and her life becomes one of even greater influence as God worked together for the good in all the things she was going through.
If you knew her while she was still in the harem, you would never have thought that she was going to be so brave and that God was going to use her in such a mighty way.
It would have been difficult to believe that God was going to work through that kind of a set-up, but his hand was in it and he just needed her to remain faithful and trust in Him.
Esther didn’t understand it at the time, but she was faithful when her uncle helped her to see that maybe God was working out a plan.
She risked her life on it.
I could go on and on today, telling you stories about the lives of countless men and women in the bible who persevered, put their faith in God and who in the end, didn’t give up. Men and women whom God used in ways they didn’t understand at first, especially when they were going through the difficult times.
But God worked in their lives and He worked it all together for the good of their lives and the lives of every one they touched in turn.
None of them necessarily knew how God was working, but in the end all that mattered, is that God’s hand was intimately involved in their lives.
Do you believe that God is intimately involved in your life and all that you are going through?
When the Jews, who were being led as captives to Babylon, became discouraged and felt like God had abandoned them, Jeremiah sent them a letter with these words from God: “The Lord says: I know what I am planning for you. I have good plans for you, not plans to hurt you. I will give you hope and a good future. 12 Then you will call my name. You will come to me and pray to me, and I will listen to you. 13 You will search for me. And when you search for me with all your heart, you will find me!” Jeremiah 29:11-13
Here’s our challenge: To believe that God truly cares about us and that He truly is involved in our lives, especially when it seems that he isn’t.
In those moments he wants us to pray to him and know that HE IS LISTENING!
This is his promise: “…pray to me, and I will listen to you.”
God sees what we are going through and he hears the groaning of our spirits and he wants us to know that in all things he works everything together for the good of those who love Him!
When David was in the darkest hour of his life he wrote these words in Psalm 37:3
“Trust in the Lord and do good.”
Sounds easy enough, doesn’t it, but it can be so hard at times!
Nonetheless this should be the motto of our lives: Trust in the Lord and do good.
King David learned this lesson through experience.
He had a lot of bad things happen to him in life.
Much of it was because of his own doing, but most of it was just life’s circumstances:
One of his sons, Amnon raped one of his daughters, Tamar.
Then another one of his sons, Absalom turns around and murders Amnon and sleeps with Davids wives in broad daylight for all to see.
Another son, Adonijah, even tried to overthrow David’s thrown and that is only one part of so many sad parts of King David’s life.
In the midst of it all he writes: “Trust in the Lord and do good?”
When David was walking through the darkest of valleys he didn’t stay down.
He accepted God’s forgiveness for all the horrible sins he had committed and saw that through it all, God was still in control and that God was working all things together for the good of those who love Him!
That is the promise we need to hold onto today, especially when we or a loved one is going through a difficult time.
