S05E046, Wood Piles and God's Provision, Andy B 2 Minute Video
I wonder if you’re anything like me and feel like you spend so long praying for God to bless you with something, that you miss the moment when God actually blesses you with the very thing you were praying for.
I think part of this is that we are not expectant enough of what God wants to do in our lives. Perhaps we have experienced false teaching about how blessings are always financial (they’re not) and shy away from expecting good things. Expecting God to be some sort of unlimited American Express Card is very wrong. But thinking God of miserly is equally so.
God really does want to bless us with good things! We just need to understand that what God sees as a blessing often takes us a while to accept as such. We allow our feelings to get in the way of good biblical understanding.
It’s worth noting here that having money is fine: Jesus trained as a carpenter, and that wouldn’t’ have been for free! He also went around with a money pot, which Judas looked after. Paul worked his way frequently.
Making money is right and proper. But we also need to understand that we don’t need a single penny in our bank accounts in order to accomplish what God is asking of us.
Jesus truly is all we need. It took me over a year to accept that the business we knew God was calling us to set up didn’t need a single penny to happen. As soon as I finally accepted that we immediately sold our house and got on with what God had been asking us to do, after we had prayed for Him to teach us faith.
We should be praying to God, but we should do so expectantly. The bigger caveat here is that we should be praying ‘in His will’ which means praying as Jesus would pray, not as we would say.
It’s worth finishing by pointing out that “there’s nout wrong with a bit o brass”. In other words, having money is neither good nor bad. Money is just money. But, what we do with it does matter, and being free to give to others is an important principle to comprehend.
Just a thought...
Andy B
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[00:00:00] So another Andy B 2 Minute Video and yesterday we looked at the idea of tithing and tithing of rooms, tithing of us, of your time. And today I wanted to think about God's blessing of us.
[00:00:17] One of the, one of the consequences of us giving to God in our tithe, whether that's 10%, 20%, 3%, it's about the principle of giving all of who we are to God. That's what tithing is today. But I was thinking about a wood pile in our garage.
[00:00:32] Now a few folks were praying for us with the energy crisis. We've got a wood burner. They were praying for us to have wood to burn. It's quite expensive to buy wood. It would be much better to have free wood. Of course, living in a UK free wood, not quite so easy to get hold of. There aren't many forests that we can go in and use, like perhaps in America you could.
[00:00:52] But we've got a big pile of wood because some people were cutting some trees, I've mentioned this before, and they said we could have these trees. Now these are big conifer trees. There [00:01:00] are huge amounts of wood. And we had a drive full. Our drive is enormous. It was full of wood. Now our garage is full of wood.
[00:01:06] We've processed a little bit of it, and it's this huge mound, and here is a photo of that mound of wood that we are still yet to process. Now that should last us, I'm guessing, for a couple of months at the rate that we use wood in our house. It's a bit hard to tell. It's only our first winter that we're going into here, so I'm guessing. But I'm assuming that's maybe a month or two's worth of wood 'cos we use quite a bit.
[00:01:30] We've got a double, double fronted log burner. But what struck me was that's been a blessing from God because we prayed, people prayed, wood mysteriously arrived, of course not mysterious, it was God's miraculous way. And now we've got this big pile of wood to burn in our fire to stay warm, which is a huge blessing.
[00:01:48] But it got me thinking about have we just, taken that for granted. Have we said, thanks for that, God, we'll deal with it another day. That's what struck me this morning actually, is that we haven't actually cut it up. We haven't actually processed it and God's [00:02:00] blessed us with this stuff, but we have a huge garage, I mean it's a double height garage, one voided space. But we're not really making the most of it because now we've got this massive pile of wood and we haven't done it. We need to buy a saw. We can't afford a saw, but God's blessed us. And sometimes it can be a bit confusing with what God's asking us to do.
[00:02:16] But my thought is simply this. Where has God blessed you that you've missed that blessing.
[00:02:23] I wrote this down. Be careful to be grateful for God's sorry to be careful. Be careful for the, to be grateful for the gifts of God.
[00:02:31] Where has God given you a gift that perhaps you've missed that gift? Looking out for God's blessing when he's already given you a gift.
[00:02:38] Just have a pause and a hush and rethink. Just go back to God and check for the blessings He's already given you.
[00:02:44] Just a thought.