Isaiah 25:1 “Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.” Today's episode talks about how important it is to praise and exalt the Lord. It touches on how important it is to have a faith community around you, and ends with the fact that God has our lives planned out for our good and we can either cooperate with that life, or not. Music:"Adding the Sun" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Things Planned Long Ago
Isaiah 25:1 “Lord, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.”
I saw this verse on Facebook today and I really liked it. It reminds us of several important things. First, it reminds us to exalt and to praise our Lord and Savior. I thought I would look up the world exalt as it is one of those words that I kinda know what it means, but if you asked I wouldn’t be able to give you a definition. In case this is you too, according to Oxford dictionary, exalt means to hold (someone or something) in very high regard; think or speak very highly of. This makes sense, we definitely should be holding God in high regard as He is the creator of all heaven and earth. He is the creator of the whole universe. We should definitely exalt the Lord. The one part of that definition that I wonder if we do enough, or even much of at all is to speak highly of Him.
Do we speak highly of God? I mean to speak highly of Him means we are speaking of Him and are we doing that? When do we talk about God? When are we talking about Him and telling others about Him? I think praising God is easier because we can do this on our own. We can sing praise songs, we can say in our minds or out loud how amazing He is and we can thank Him for all He does. I guess we could exalt Him on our own too. We could speak highly of Him to ourselves I guess too. When we are praising Him we could be saying how amazing He is.
I think it would be great if we could figure out how to exalt the Lord more to other people. Who do we feel like we could talk to about God? Who would want to hear us talk about the amazing things God has done for us? Do you have a group of friends you can talk to about God? Do you have people who love to hear about the way God is working your life? This verse is a great reminder to do this. If you don’t have friends who want to hear about it, this verse could be a prompt for you to find some. A great place to find people open to hearing how God is working in your life is at church, a bible study, a Christian women’s group or men’s group, a prayer group.
Having a faith community is so important, even if it is just online. I am part of a Christian mentoring group and it has been so helpful over the years. It is great to have people to reach out to and they support you with prayers. Because it is a Christian group they help you solve your problems and they offer support in a way that is inline with the Christian way of living. If you have a fight with your husband and you ask for prayers they aren’t going to be telling you to leave your husband. They will offer suggestions of things they have tried when they struggled. There is nothing like having a great group of fellow believers surrounding you. This also provides lots of opportunities to exalt and praise the Lord with others who do the same.
The next part of this verse says, “For in perfect faithfulness you have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.” This reminds us that God is faithful. I think we can forget this at times when it seems like nothing is going our way. When we ask God for something and He doesn’t answer our prayers the way we want Him to. The Bible says when we ask God answers and sometimes we think this means He gives us everything and anything that we ask for. This is not what that means. God does not ignore any of our prayers or our requests. However, His answer is sometimes no and also He sometimes says not yet. These can be hard for us to hear and since His ways are higher than our way and His thoughts greater than our thoughts, we usually don’t understand why the answer is no. This can cause us to doubt His faithfulness. This can cause us to believe He is not listening to our prayers.
This verse reminds us that He is faithful to us. He has heard every one of our prayers and He has answered every one of our prayers. If we haven’t seen how the prayer has been answered than maybe the answer was no or maybe is was not yet. Either way, we might have a harder time seeing those answers to our prayers. We also may not like the answers to those prayers. This is when we have to remember that God knows the whole picture and we only know the part we have lived already. God has the benefit of hindsight because there is no time limitations on God. He can see the past, present & future all at the same time. I know this is not really something our brains can comprehend but it is how God works. All we see is the no that God gave us, we see that closed door and we are devastated. What we don’t see is the better door that He is going to open when we get there. It wasn’t actually a no, it was a not yet.
The last part of the verse says, “You have done wonderful things, things planned long ago.” I think we often forget that God had our lives planned out long before we were even born. There is nothing that we do that surprises God. There is nothing we could do that He didn’t already expect us to do. Sometimes when amazing things happen we think that we were just lucky. We “thank our lucky stars” that the vice president just happened to leave at the exact same time that you were being looked at for a promotion. Guess what, God knew when you were going to be looked at for a promotion and arranged an amazing job opportunity for the Vice President at that exact time. God knows our needs way before we know what we need. He also knows what we don’t need long before we know. God knew I didn’t need to be with a jealous man for the rest of my life and gave me the strength and wisdom to break up with my high school/college boyfriend. He also knew who I did need to spend the rest of my life with and made sure I was available when I met him.
God knows the desires of your heart, He put them there. He knows what things we need and what things we don’t need. He knows what jobs are good for us and what jobs are not. He knows what people are good for us and which ones aren’t. I wish that meant that we never made mistakes because we just let God lead all of our decisions. However, that isn’t the case, we sometimes don’t want to hear what God has to say, or we don’t like what He has to say. I knew in Sept of my sophomore year of college that I would need to break up with the boy I dated for the last 4 years. God put it on my heart when we were at a Labor Day party with his family. Although I knew we needed to break up in Sept, it took me until March to listen and to actually do it.
Sometimes we know what God is telling us, what He wants us to do and yet we don’t want to listen. God is so patient with us and sometimes He will wait for us to come around to our senses, other times, He will do something to wake us up and get us to listen to Him. Not only is He patient with us when we don’t listen to Him or go against what He has planned, but when we come back He uses all that happened for good. God has amazing things planned for our life and they are things that He planned long ago. It is not as if God is on the edge of His seat waiting to see what you are going to do. He knows what you are going to do and He has planned in advance for it. There isn’t anything we can do that is a surprise to Him. He does wonderful things for us and He planned those wonderful things long ago!
Dear Heavenly Father, I ask you to bless all those listening to this episode today. Lord, we love you and we are so grateful for all you do. We are grateful you look out for us and you protect us from ourselves. We are grateful you made plans for us long ago and that you have done wonderful things in our lives to keep those plans. We are sorry for all the times we failed to listen to your promptings or turned away from you and we are grateful that you find a way to use all that happens for good. We love you Lord and we ask all of this in accordance with your will and in Jesus’ holy name, Amen
Thank you so much for joining me on this journey to walk boldly with Jesus. I look forward to spending time with you tomorrow. Remember, Jesus loves you and so do I! Have a blessed day!