Proverbs 27:17

Proverbs 27:17

Tuesday, June 21, 2016

What Should I Do While I’m Seeking God’s Will?

What Should I Do While I’m Seeking God’s Will? 


This Bible study has been taken from chapter 18 of LIVE BEFORE YOU DIE
 
Actively Ask for God’s Direction 

How often has God stood by ready, willing and able to help us, but we never turned to Him or gave Him an opportunity to intervene and bring glory to Himself through our crisis? As a result, we have often forfeited peace and struggled under the load of unnecessary burdens—all because we did not inquire of the Lord. What’s worse, an opportunity to bring glory to God was lost.

What is so amazing is that Asa makes the very same mistake again only three verses later: “In the thirty-ninth year of his reign Asa was diseased in his feet—until his disease became very severe; yet in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but relied on the physicians. And Asa slept with his fathers, dying in the forty-first year of his reign” (2 Chronicles 16:12–13 AMP).

Can you see the pattern? The author is trying to communicate a moral through this story that is of utmost importance. Asa called upon the help of foreign armies instead of the Lord, and as a result, he inherited perpetual war. He called on the aid of doctors instead of the Lord when he became sick, and as a result, he inherited death. God wanted to help Asa. God wanted to deliver him from his enemies. God wanted to heal him from his diseases. But for some strange reason, like so many of us, Asa ignored God in the issues that mattered most, and as a result, he sealed his own fate.

The final verse of the chapter sums Asa’s life up with an almost contemptuous caption: “And they buried him in his own tomb which he had hewn out for himself . . . .” (2 Chronicles 16:14 AMP). In essence, Asa dug his own grave and put the final nail in his own coffin because he insisted on calling upon the arm of flesh rather than on the Lord. God was insulted by Asa’s disregard and gave him over to that which he feared most. Jeremiah 17:5 NAS says, “Thus says the Lord, ‘Cursed is the man who trusts in mankind and makes flesh his strength, and whose heart turns away from the Lord.’”

If you are seeking God’s will for your life, it means that you are actively praying about it, waiting before the Lord, and listening for His direction. Perhaps you have not heard an answer because you haven’t asked the question. Perhaps you have asked, but you haven’t been listening. Maybe it’s time to turn off the television, put away the video games, and spend some time on your knees before the Lord, reading His Word and listening to His voice. His promise is, “You will seek me and find me when you seek me with all your heart” (Jer. 29:13, NIV).






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