God's Timing and Provision

Jacob, the man who wanted to get something from God without his natural will submitted to God. In doing so he tried to gain from God what was already pre-ordained of God. Everything he so desired and that which God had made clear to him was his, he with his natural ability, tried to gain.

The more that God reveals to us of His purpose, the more we need to be submitted to the purpose of His will. Otherwise we will seek to accomplish, by natural will and natural plans, what ought to be left to God’s timing and God’s provision. They always go together—God’s timing and God’s provision. If this is not our experience, it will always produce restlessness.

The more active our minds are in seeking and gaining the knowledge of God’s Word, the more the need for us to be aware of the natural will involved in doing so. It can be not so much refusing or not understanding the will of God, but in attempting to promote self and to gain it by our own efforts.

God allows us to find out, by sorrowful experience, the fruit of our own plans. The purposes of His love for us never varies or changes. He uses the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in, to find out that He and He alone is the only One who can and does bless by His grace without the experience of sorrow.

Even knowledge of God’s Word, as necessary and wonderful as it is, will amount to nothing, unless I absolutely and continuously depend upon Him. That’s why faith, absolute dependence upon who Christ is and what only He has accomplished, ALWAYS comes before knowledge. In this way only I stay connected to God, and I experience true knowledge, and true knowledge increases dependence.

True knowledge keeps me in the freedom that is ours in Christ. If I love God, I know Him experientially. His love for me feeds me and my love feeds my knowledge; otherwise “knowledge puffs up”.

1 Cor. 8:1-3= Jhn. 15:1-5; 1 Jhn. 4:10,19; Gen. 22:8.