Chinese depiction of Jesus and the rich man (Mark 10) – 1879, Beijing, China (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Someone once told me that Jesus is recorded as lying in John 7.
He isn’t.
But he certainly does say something to influence the behaviour of his disciples, which turns out to have effectively misled them.
In short, Jesus was getting put under pressure to go to a party so that he could tell everyone that he was God; he said ‘No, I don’t feel like going right now, you go on without me,’ so they do. Then Jesus goes later, in secret. Why the u-turn? Jesus knew that if he went with the gang he’d probably end up in the centre of some riot, and that wouldn’t be a good thing.
Back in November we felt confident that a house we’d looked round was the right house for us to put an offer on; the timing was perfect, independent Christians who knew nothing about our situation spoke words over us telling us to take it, and everything was just falling into place. Lovely.
Then, after five frustrating months, the house move fell through! God, did you make a mistake?
Well, no of course he didn’t, and now we’re back on track with a different property it’s easy to see that God had something better planned for us, and just wanted us to relax and focus on our little boy rather than on house moving for a while.
So, in effect, I’m quite happy to say that God told us to pursue this house, knowing all the while that it wasn’t going to go through.
Have you been in a situation where you’ve felt like you’ve followed God, only to be disappointed and disillusioned? Had you written it off as God’s mistake, or Satan’s victory, or your folly? Perhaps God’s actually still in control and knows more about everything way better than you or I ever could.
