Trusting in God’s Timing
January 27, 2025

God is faithful. His promises are fulfilled. However, when God makes a promise, our human nature often wants to help Him out a little bit. We want to help fulfill it. We believe that God will provide, we just always want God’s timing to be immediate. This is exactly what Abraham felt.
In Abraham’s story found in the book of Genesis, God promised him that he would become the father of many nations. However, years passed, and he and Sarah remained childless. Instead of fully trusting God’s timing and methods, Abraham decided to “help” God fulfill His promise.
God’s Timing Tested
In Genesis 16, we see Abraham and Sarah devising their own plan. Sarah suggests that Abraham have a child with her servant Hagar – a culturally acceptable practice at the time, but not God’s intended path. This human solution led to the birth of Ishmael and sparked a chain of painful consequences: jealousy between Sarah and Hagar, family conflict, and heartache that would echo through generations.
The interesting part of this is that God’s original promise never needed human intervention. He had already planned to do something miraculous through Sarah, despite her age. When Isaac was finally born, it was on God’s timing and in a way that could only be attributed to divine intervention. Abraham’s attempt to “help” God actually created complications that could have been avoided by simply trusting and waiting.
This story holds really important lessons for us today. How often do we, like Abraham, grow impatient with God’s timing and try to force outcomes through our own efforts? Whether it’s in our careers, relationships, or personal goals, we might be tempted to take shortcuts or devise our own solutions rather than waiting for God’s perfect timing.
The better path is to remember that God’s promises don’t need our help to be fulfilled. When He makes a promise, He is faithful to keep it in His way and His time. Our role is not to engineer the outcome but to trust and obey. Just as God fulfilled His promise to Abraham through Isaac – in a way that demonstrated His power and sovereignty – He remains faithful to His promises to us today.
Conclusion
Instead of following Abraham’s example of taking matters into our own hands, we can choose to wait with patience and faith, knowing that God’s timing is perfect and His methods are far better than our own solutions. God’s timing is perfect.
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