Friends in Christ Message for September 17, 2011

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Friends in Christ Weekly Message
September 17, 2011

There in the desert they started complaining to Moses and Aaron, “We wish the LORD had killed us in Egypt. When we lived there, we could at least sit down and eat all the bread and meat we wanted. But you have brought us out here into this desert, where we are going to starve.”
Exodus 16:2-3 (CEV*)

When the Israelites followed Moses, they had no idea they were signing up for 40 years in the wilderness. By the time this passage recounts, they were pretty discouraged and impatient. They had lost faith.

When I am following where the Lord leads, things seldom turn out as I had expected. It is easy to get discouraged when I am not seeing what I had hoped to see when I had hoped to see it. There's always a temptation to lose faith.

But when I truly look for the Lord's presence in the situation, I can find signs of it. Not usually something as dramatic as manna every morning, which the Israelites got after their complaining, but something. When I do this, it gives me strength to persevere.

The Israelites didn't know how things were going to turn out. Eventually they came into the land of milk and honey, but only after generations had died. The Lord was faithful, but the people needed to trust the Lord even though they didn't know when and what would happen.

This is an archetypal story because this is they way it normally is. Things do not go exactly as we hope. We need to have faith that the Lord is in our story, and that we can trust God's faithfulness without knowing how things will play out. Are you living in that faith?

Bill Samuel