Faith Awaits God's plans

                                                                                
It came to pass, after a while, that the brook dried up, because there had been no rain in the land.

Week after week, with unfaltering and steadfast spirit, Elijah watched that dwindling brook;

Often tempted to stagger through unbelief, but refusing to allow his circumstances to come between himself and God.

Unbelief sees God through circumstances, as we sometimes see the sun shorn of his rays through the smoky air;

But faith puts God between itself and circumstances, and looks at them through Him.

And so the dwindling brook became a silver thread;

And the silver thread stood presently in pools at the foot of the largest boulders;

And then the pools shrank.

The birds fled; the wild creatures of field and forest came no more to drink; the brook was dry.

Only then, to his patient and unwavering spirit, "the word of the Lord came, saying."

Arise, get thee to Zarephath.

Most of us would have got anxious and worn with planning long before that.

We should have ceased our songs as soon as the streamlet caroled less musically over its rocky bed;

And with harps swinging on the willows we should have paced to and fro upon the withering grass, lost in pensive thought.

And probably, long ere the brook was dry, we should have devised some plan, and asking God's blessing on it, would have started off elsewhere.

Alas! we are all too full of our own schemes, and plans, and contrivings.

And if Samuel does not come just when we expect, we force ourselves, and offer the burnt-offering (i Sam. xiii.12).

This is the source of untold misery.

We sketch out our programme, and rush into it;

And only when we are met by insuperable obstacles do we begin to reflect whether it was God's will, or to appeal to Him.

He does often extricate us, because His mercy endureth forever;

But if we had only waited first to see the unfolding of His plans, we should never have found ourselves landed in such an inextricable labyrinth;

And we should never have been compelled to retrace our steps with so many tears of shame.

One of the formative words for all human lives, and especially for God's servants, was given by God to Moses, when He said: See that thou make all things according to the pattern showed to thee in the mount (Heb. viii. 5).

Moses was eager to do God's work, and the best skill amongst the people was at his command; but he must not make a single bell, or pomegranate, or tassel, or fringe, or curtain, or vessel, except on God's pattern, and after God's ideal.

And so he was taken up into the mount, and God opened the door into his own mind, where the tabernacle stood complete as an ideal;

And Moses was permitted to see the thing as it lived in the thought and heart of God.

Forty days of reverent study passed by; and when he returned to the mountain-foot, he had only to transfer into the region of actual fact that which had been already shown to him, in pattern, on the mount.

Surely some such thought as this must have been in the mind of our blessed Lord, when He said: "The Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He seeth the Father do" (John v. 19).

So utterly had He emptied Himself that He had abandoned even His own schemes and plans;

He lived a planless life, accepting each moment the plan which His Father unfolded before Him;

And being confident that that plan would lead Him on to greater and ever greater works, until the world should marvel at the splendor of the results—rising from Gethsemane and Calvary, through the broken grave, to the Ascension Mount, and the glory of His second Advent.

Oh, mystery of humiliation, that He who planned all things should will to live a life of such absolute dependence!

And yet, if He lived such a life, how much more will it become us;

How much anxiety it will save us; and to what lengths of usefulness and heights of glory will it bring us!
 
Would that we were content to wait for God to unveil His plan, so that our life might be simply the working out of His thought, the exemplification of His ideal!

Let this be the cry of our hearts: Lord, show me Thy way; teach me to do Thy will:

Show me the way wherein I should walk, for unto Thee do I lift up my soul.

~F. B. Meyer~