Let me tell you something I’ve learned about God through experience, and from reading Genesis 39 this morning. There are times in your life where God puts you in a place where He knows that you could possibly fail. He puts you in a place knowing beforehand that you will be tempted to give up or give in. Consider it an honor. Because when He does that, it means that He trusts you. He is entrusting you with something. And He believes that you — you and Him, as a team — can win. Even if you lost yesterday, you can choose to win today. But God knows it’s always a choice.
David L. Cain wrote a book called Know Ye Not This Parable? It’s about an angle named Jazzrah who fell from Heaven, had his wings taken away, and tries to reach his evil quota by tempting a woman named Cassandra Lewis. At one point in the story, a speaker at an event comes up to Cassandra and says, “…[R]emember that it rains on the good and the bad. We are all either going into a storm, or coming out of one.”
So whether you’re just going into a storm or coming out of one, every day of your life, you are building and reinforcing the foundations that you build your life on. The storms will test whether or not those foundations are true and hold water. Do me a solid: Make sure you’re building your life on God’s promises. Not good-sounding sayings, or fleeting things you’ve been chasing all your life, but have never quite caught up to, or trying to find out who you are inside by blending in with whatever is happening out there.
Believe God’s promises, His promises about who He claims to be, who He says you are (He is your Designer, after all), and what He says about this world you have all these feelings about.
Believe God’s promises. Take a chance. If He pulls through, great. That’s awesome. Your life will be so blessed. And if He doesn’t, well, let me know; we can go alert all the Christians, and we’ll all go find a different god to believe in. But if you claim to believe in God and what He says, do it with every fiber of diligence that you have, or else stop claiming that you believe Him when you don’t.
So what do you say?
Place your chips.
And prepare for the storm.
