Where are God's blessings?

They will name him Emmanuel (Hebrew for "God is with us") - Matthew 1:23 (Message)

In Christ God is with us in our life's situation now. This is very hard to realize when the car breaks down, the children are sick, the job is floundering, and more sometimes all at once.

The fact is we must see our lives and circumstances as the place of God's blessing, the place of service, and the place of our current calling. The Holy Spirit through the apostle Paul said,

"we know that all things work together for good to them that love God ... called according to his purpose." - Romans 8:28

We must hold tight (in spite of opposite feelings) to the knowledge that God is at work through the good and difficult - not that all things we experience are good things but that God is using all things, even the unwanted, for our good.¹

"God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being “right,” we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life."²

- fritz


^{1 - see also: "Escapism in the Bible" (June 4, 2010)
2 - The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, published by HarperCollins, copyright 1998}

God in the Circumstances

And [God] said unto him, I am the LORD that brought thee out of Ur of the Chaldees, to give thee this land to inherit it. - Genesis 15:7

Abraham lived in Haran when he heard God's call on his life.¹ Terah, Abraham's dad, had years before moved the family there from Ur, about a thousand miles away.² As far as Abraham was concerned his faith adventure started in Haran, but not according to God.

Ur was from where God said he brought Abraham from, not Haran.

The circumstances and events in our lives are not random events until we find Christ; from our very beginning, God is actively involved orchestrating our character, composition, and desires to bring us to himself.

"God ... separated me from my mother's womb, and called me by his grace" - Paul (Galatians 1:15b)

- fritz

^{1 - Genesis 11:31-12:3
2 - Link: Where was Abraham's UR?}