Your life as a prize

Jeremiah 45:5 says that God wants to give us our life as a prize of war.  But we only receive a prize of war when it's over, when the battles have been fought and the field is littered with casualties.

War is tough and life seems more difficult than we can handle at times and true growth hurts, it never comes easy.  The hardships we encounter will cause one of two things to happen... the bumps, bruises and injury we suffer will harden and become tough.  Those layers will desensitize and become calluses that isolate us from those around us.
But Gods plan, the plan that our life is a prize, a life more abundant is callus free.   Those same trials don't create a hardened callus but rather form the walls of a chrysalis. A cocoon to initiate change and transformation.  

And after you have suffered a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, confirm, strengthen, and establish you.1 Peter 5:10, 

No matter what's happening, it won't last forever, this too shall pass.

Acceptance

Lord if You will You can make me clean

Luke 5:12 ESV

We follow a Lord that can do anything and we must always remember it’s not if You can, but if You will.  As broken a flawed people, who are terribly impatient, we feel that when what we ask God for doesn’t come quickly that He just isn’t listening.  Some even feel that maybe they didn’t pray right or enough.  We feel that our request is good (we want it) and that there may even be scriptural references that we can come up with why God should provide the answer we want.

But what happens when he doesn’t answer us in the timeframe we determine that he should?

How do we feel when He doesn’t answer us in the exact way we think He should?

How do we feel when He doesn’t answer us at all?

Do you accept that a sovereign, all knowing and omniscient has decided that He will answer you in the way He feels best?  Not your timeframe but His.  Because you may not have been ready and couldn’t truly appreciate His provision yet.  Not what you asked for but what He knows you need, the best for you. The truth that He didn’t provide it because you didn’t need it or He may have something better for you in His timeframe?

Not yet

Not that, but this

No…

Is God still good when He doesn’t answer the way we feel best?  Is he the Lord of our life if we don’t trust His decisions as best?  Who serves who?  Who knows best?

I’ll use the word loosely, but with maturity and time we can see that God knows best.  And like children see that their parents aren’t as dumb as they think we can also begin to see God as wiser and more capable of seeing what’s best for us.  With time, we become wiser, certainly not wise but wiser.

… but the upright enjoy acceptance.

Proverbs 14:9 ESV

The original Hebrew word for acceptance in this passage is Rotsown/ raw-tsone'. At its most basic meaning is pleasure.  Are we truly taking pleasure in the interactions we have with God?