Thought for the Week - 30th August

Vanda Hopkin

GENESIS 50: 20

You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good.
He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.

We are very blessed to have such a stock of rich books giving testament to the glorious power of our living God. Many tell of lives who have known great suffering yet have been deeply touched and transformed.

 

Some of these lives have been in my thoughts. Richard Wurmbrand a missionary imprisoned and tortured, Joseph who was imprisoned, sold, and enslaved, and missionaries Arthur and Wilda Matthews who endured terrible suffering in China. These lives were greatly used by God across different eras. It struck me that the enemy’s tactics throughout all of time has not changed. From Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, and right up to now his schemes to destroy all that is good remain the same. You would think by now we would be wiser to it and yet we trip up again as though it were the first time. We are weak. Man’s weakness and need of a Saviour and redemption of sin has not changed.

 

God has not changed either, He will not change! His mighty power and deliverance in a believer’s life is still victorious again and again. God has continued to deliver lives for thousands of years, and the lives of those mentioned above are just some of the amazing testaments of His faithfulness that show us what can be done when the transforming power of God comes into a life. These were ordinary people, not great men of great position, but ordinary flawed people just like you and I. They weren’t brave or strong, but they all desperately cried out to God in their need.

 

In the agony of tragedy, torture, isolation, captivity, and poverty, these three lives would have had to seek God in every moment. They had to wholly depend on Him for their every need, search for and cling to the promise of their deliverance when all would seem lost, and remain right within their spirit when by sight everything outside looked black. When all this was happening to them and around them, the enemy would have taken his position to attack their thinking, warp their perception and plant doubt. Who but God could help them? They relied fully on Him to see them through. They stood on His promises and lived by hope in their hearts.

 

They couldn’t allow bitterness to take root, their hearts had to be kept soft and right towards others no matter how they were being treated. In their own strength this just wouldn’t have been achievable, any one of us would be hard pressed to love another who treating us so terribly. The missionaries had to trust God with it all and in it all. We can’t be right with God when we are not right towards others. God has a heart full of love and he asks us to be the same. The only way God could do a work in them, bring them through to deliverance and into the place of victory in which they led many lives to Christ, was through their soft and pliable hearts.

 

Keep holding on for your deliverance, stand firm, He is faithful. We can find the deepest riches of Him in the most dire circumstances. Don’t allow the poisonous roots of bitterness take hold within you, keep your heart open to God and He will do a miraculous work within you.

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