Deuteronomy 8:1-3---NIV--Be careful to follow every command I am giving you today, so that you may live and increase and may enter and possess the land the Lord promised on oath to your ancestors. Remember how the Lord your God led you all the way in the wilderness these forty years, to humble and test you in order to know what was in your heart, whether or not you would keep His commands. He humbled you, causing you to hunger and then feeding you with manna, which neither you nor your ancestors had known, to teach you that man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.
Verse 1--We should always be careful to follow the instruction in God's Word. Also, it would behoove us to live close enough to Him to hear Him when He speaks to us. The main reason we should be careful in these areas of our lives is because God fully intends to bring His promises to us to pass. And we don't need to miss on piece of instruction.
Verse 2--Even though it took God forty years, he brought the believers into the land of promise. It took that long because God let the unbelievers die off. Even so today, unbelievers will NEVER receive any of the promises of God. The promises are for the believers.
Sometimes God takes us through times of waiting and testing. He wants us to trust Him and not our own virtues. He also wants to see what is in our hearts. Are we really going to follow Him and trust Him? Are we going to walk in love and forgiveness when times are bad? Are we going to hold on to our faith in His Word when we go through long periods of time where we don't hear from Him?
Verse 3--He also waits to make you hungry for the answer. A hungry heart always gets God's attention. A hungry heart will be willing to lay aside their sins and shortcomings to obtain the promises of God. A hungry heart appreciates what God does for him.
Unlike their unbelieving parents, the younguns DID NOT want to go back into bondage in Egypt. These hungry young adults and their children had a desire for freedom and their own place to live. They longed for the abundance of God's promised land. And they were willing to tough out a small amount of hardship to reach a whole lifetime of abundance and joy.
Instead of moaning about their past, the younguns looked at the miracles around them. These miracles told them that the God of their ancestors had them at the right place at the right time. They had manna every morning and quail every night and didn't have to work for it. They just harvested it. During the day they were sheltered from the heat by a cloud. As the sun sat, they watched that cloud slowly turn into a pillar of fire. When they got up early enough, they would watch the fire turn back into a cloud.
It finally dawned on some of them that a higher power was orchestrating everything that happened to them. It dawned on them that God only had to say it once and those things happened every day for forty years. Surely a God who could just speak a word like that would bring them into their wealthy place just like He promised.
Here's what we need to take away from this short lesson. God is taking us all somewhere, too. He is taking us to what He promised us. However, we delay or completely lose out on those blessings if we continue to live in the past or even the right now. The only thing that the past and the right now means is that we don't have the promise.....YET. It NEVER means that God won't bring us into the promised land.
If we are not walking in the realm of His promises, it means that He's checking out our heart and/or He's waiting for us to get hungry enough. When our heart gets right and we're hungry enough for the things of God then He'll start leading. But it's still up to us to follow Him by faith.
I hope you're like me. I am longing for a realm of God that I have never been to yet. Like the children of God, if I already knew how to get there I would certainly be there right now. Just like them, I have to trust God every day that where ever I am and whatever is happening to me is part of the divine plan of God (Isaiah 55:8-9), God's ways and thoughts are higher than mine.
Lead on, God, I am determined to follow You.
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