God’s Timetable for His Promises

Today marks the beginning of my fifth year of posting daily devotions. Little could I have imagined back on June 24, 2020, when I sent out my first devotion, that I would still be producing daily devotions for so long. But the Lord has been faithful and I pray that these devotions have proved a blessing in your walk with the Lord. With the Lord’s help I plan to continue posting daily devotions and providing you with fresh manna as you begin each day with the Lord. So here goes my 1,463^rd devotional!

Throughout the Scriptures we see that God had a timetable before His promises came about. For example, while God promised Abraham and Sarah their promised child (Isaac), they had to wait 25 years before that promise was fulfilled. When God said He would destroy the human race during the time of Noah because of mankind’s great wickedness, He said He would fulfill this promise in 120 years. And when Israel followed the “bad report,” given out by the ten spies, rather than enter into the promised land, God promised that the entire nation would have to spend 40 years wandering in the wilderness.

In all three of the above cases God had a different timetable that He used to fulfill His promises. But the key takeaway is that God always fulfills what He promises. But the greatest promise of all is future oriented. And this is the promise that when we die in Christ we will inherit eternal life.  

The great thing about the Bible is that it is also full of promises for us. While many of the promises are immediate, like peace and joy, when we choose to obey His will and His commands, others take time, like the salvation of loved ones, as we offer up persistent believing prayer. I firmly believe that prayer is our most powerful weapon to seeing those on our prayer list come to salvation.   

And to give you an example of persistent believing prayer and salvation, I would like to close by sharing a personal testimony from the life of George Müller. Müller today is best remembered as the founder of Christian orphanages in Bristol, England during the 1800’s and for his complete trust in God’s provision for the orphans under his care. And instead of soliciting funds for his orphanages from the community and government he relied solely on prayer to supply their needs. In his later years Müller traveled the world preaching the gospel and testifying how prayer was the key to having God supply his orphanage’s every need.

“In November 1844, I began to pray for the conversion of five individuals. I prayed every day without a single intermission, whether sick or in health, on the land, on the sea, and whatever the pressure of my engagements might be. Eighteen months elapsed before the first of the five was converted. I thanked God and prayed on for the others. Five years elapsed, and then the second was converted. I thanked God for the second, and prayed on for the other three. Day by day, I continued to pray for them, and six years passed before the third was converted. I thanked God for the three, and went on praying for the other two. These two remained unconverted.
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“Thirty-six years later he wrote that the other two, sons of one of Mueller’s friends, were still not converted. He wrote, ‘But I hope in God, I pray on, and look for the answer. They are not converted yet, but they will be.’ In 1897, fifty-two years after he began to pray daily, without interruption, for these two men, they were finally converted—but after he died! Mueller understood what Luke meant when he introduced a parable Jesus told about prayer, saying, ‘Then Jesus told his disciples a parable to show them that they should always pray and not give up (Luke 18:1).’”1

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1 https://www.georgemuller.org/devotional/george-muller-persistent-prayer-for-5-individuals#comments