Listen to God even when it’s difficult
Are you amazed and incredulous? Don’t you believe it? Then go ahead and be blind. You are stupid, but not from wine! You stagger, but not from liquor! For the Lord has poured out on you a spirit of deep sleep. He has closed the eyes of your prophets and visionaries. All the future events in this vision are like a sealed book to them. When you give it to those who can read, they will say, “We can’t read it because it is sealed.” When you give it to those who cannot read, they will say, “We don’t know how to read.” And so the Lord says, “These people say they are mine. They honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. And their worship of me is nothing but man-made rules learned by rote. Because of this, I will once again astound these hypocrites with amazing wonders. Isaiah 29:9-14 NLT
What God is telling the people of God from the text is that they will not always understand Him, but despite that they can always trust Him. If we get surprise with trouble in life, God will also surprise us with the joy He will bring out of that trouble. We may struggle to believe that right now but what seems so impossible is the very thing that God specializes in. There are times that the greatest breakthrough that can happen in our lives might be when we hit a brick wall. The most constructive thing that might happen to us is when our world falls apart. Sometimes God has to work this way to humble us for we need that especially when we think we have God figured out. It is true that we do know something about God because He has revealed Himself to us (Isaiah 28:26), but unintentionally, we can slide into the feeling that if we know God at all, we should be able to explain everything. The truth is we cannot explain everything. Sometimes, how God works do not make sense to us. This is why His call to us is to humble ourselves and admit it. If we refuse to accept this, we risk what we do know. We risk ending up with nothing. When God surprises us that we cannot see through what God is doing in our lives and into the reason behind it, let us learn to accept instead to let God be God and we are not God. This is when we encounter Him at a new level of understanding. We also learn and discover what it means to trust and surrender to God rather than taking control of our circumstances.
Blessings,
