FBC Daily Devotional – November 17, 2021

Well, a good Wednesday morning to you. I trust your week is going well. We're in the middle of our work week already and getting over the hump. So today we're reading in Acts chapter 7 and this is really kind of a hard passage to read in the sense that you know what's coming.

I mean if you read it before you know what's coming. Now today's reading only covers the first 29 verses of Acts 7 where Stephen is standing up before the Sanhedrin, the judges who are going to eventually stone him.

He's standing before them and delivers a kind of like a rehearsal of Israel's history. So this part of the passage is really you know pretty good because we're being reminded of what's happened in Israel's history to this point.

Waiting for God's Promises in Stephen's Speech

But let me ask you this before we look at that passage. Do you ever get a little frustrated or impatient with seeing God's promises fulfilled and maybe you're you're praying for someone you've been praying for for a long long time and you're just not seeing anything happen.

Now I don't we don't know what's going to be the outcome of a particular prayer request or person we're praying for. But sometimes we know what God has promised. We know what God intends to do for his people.

But it seems a long time in coming. You ever get impatient with that and some of the things you realize God has promised we may never see. You know the Word of God promises Jesus is coming again and the Word indicates that that coming is imminent.

It means it could happen at any time. Well, I think maybe the older we get and the more decline we see in our culture in our society, the more we long for that, the more we're crying out with John at the end of Revelation, you know, even so come Lord Jesus and we can become a little bit impatient.

Now the reason I I went down that way down that road is that in the course of Stephen giving the rehearsal of Israel's history, there's this one verse that really struck me. When God comes to Abraham, Stephen says, you know, the Lord came to Abraham when he was still Abram dwelling in the land of Haran and he told him to move.

And it says that God gave him no inheritance in that land of promise to which he was taken him. He gave him no inheritance in it. But he said he promised to give it to him this land of Canaan for a possession and to his descendants after him.

All right. So God comes to Abram and says to him, I'm going to take you to a land that I'm going to give to you and to your descendants after you. Okay, so there's the promise. But he goes on to say, and this is the thing that's kind of sobering, he goes on to say God spoke in this way, that his descendants would dwell in a foreign land and that they would bring them into bondage and oppress them 400 years.

400 years. And then he says, and the nation to whom they will be in bondage, God says, I will judge and after that they shall come out and serve me in this place. All right. Now, here's the thing. If you're that generation that is delivered from the bondage, if you're the generation that watches God bring the judgment upon the oppressive Egyptian slaveholders and deliver you, the ones in bondage, deliver you from that bondage.

Well, I mean, that's a pretty exciting thing. I mean, can you imagine the thrill of that? And you know, you eat that Passover meal and and then the next night you're, the next day you're told, get out, leave, and you go and then you watch God do this miraculous thing at the Red Sea and it parts and you cross over and you look back and you watch the Egyptians get, you know, drowned in that river.

That's all a very exciting, thrilling thing to happen. If you're that generation that is delivered from bondage and sees the fulfillment of this promise begin to occur, that God judges the oppressor and brings you out of bondage.

That's thrilling. That's exciting. But what I want us to catch is that God gave the promise to Abram that that would happen 400 years prior, more than 400 years prior to their going into captivity. So there's all these years that go by.

The promise is held out there, but the people who are living during this time of bondage and oppression, they're longing for that promise to come and to be fulfilled and it's not happening. It's not happening.

They get up every day. They go out and work and making these crazy bricks. They're getting beaten by the slave holder's whips, the foreman's whips and all that kind of stuff. Make more, come on, get at it.

And at the end of a long, grueling day, they go home, they collapse to sleep and they get up the next morning. They do it all again day after day after day and they have children that are born into this kind of a life and they watch as their children grow up and then they pass off the scene and their children are living under this same oppression and their children have children and they grow up under that same thing for 400 years.

All the while,.

There's this promise held out there that your descendants are going to have this land and yet generations come and go and they never even see that land. So what I want us to take from that is to learn to be more patient than we are, to realize that just because we're not seeing the fulfillment of some of the promises of God doesn't mean God isn't faithful to his word and his promises aren't going to be fulfilled.

The promises of God are often slow in coming and we need to be okay with that. We need to trust our God in that, that he has a purpose and a plan and he has a timetable and he operates according to his timetable and we need to submit to, willingly submit to his timetable and learn to have a measure of contentment, to be content with where we are in that timetable.

I'm not suggesting for a minute that that's always easy, but I am suggesting that it's important.

Learning Patience and Contentment While We Wait

So,.

Let's learn this from that one statement in Stephen's message to the Sanhedrin, moments before he's going to be executed, that we need to be patient for the promises of God to be fulfilled in their time, in his time.

So Father, I pray help us with this because it's not always easy. We can often get agitated, we can get anxious, we can become impatient. Help us, O Lord, I pray, to wait patiently upon you. To know, to learn how to be content, even as we wait.

And this we pray in Jesus name. Amen. All right. Have a good rest of your Wednesday. God bless you in it.