Cultivate A Positive Attitude And Expectation

We’ve seen that if you want to have authority, you’ll have to cultivate meekness. You know the condition for promotion in the kingdom of God? It’s very easy. It’s abase yourself. Every one who abases himself will be exalted. But on the other hand, every one who exalts himself will be abased. You have the choice. That’s an unalterable law that governs the universe. People talk about breaking God’s laws, that’s not true. We don’t break God’s laws, God’s laws break us if we break them.

Let’s look at the example of David for a moment, another young man who was given tremendous promises of God. And he spent the next fifteen years living as he said himself, like a dog or a partridge on the mountains, running away from the man he was to succeed as king.

Why does God permit that? In fact, why does God ordain that, what is He looking for? In one word, endurance. You cannot bypass endurance and enter into the promises of God. You can come so far but the completeness is only through endurance. And just when it seems impossible to hold up, that’s the time to hold out. Don’t give in. I would like to say that to several of you reading this. You’re in the test, you’re doing all right, just hang in there. Don’t back out, don’t give up. God is faithful.

I’ve been asked sometimes if I had a message to leave for posterity, what would it be? I always say I can give it to you in three words, “God is faithful.”

Waiting causes us to realize more and more our dependence on God. I can’t do anything. I can’t make it happen, I don’t know when it’s coming, I just depend on Him.

Let me give you an example. Sometimes our electricity fails for reasons we can’t analyze. And we’re in the middle of cooking something or somebody is doing the ironing, we phone and we eventually catch up with our electrician. It’s midday, he says, “I’ll try to be there by 4:00 p.m.” So what do we do for four hours? We wait. And by the end of four hours we know one thing, we need the electrician. We’re dependent on him. So, waiting causes us to realize in an altogether new measure our dependence on Jesus.

We’ve arrived at the fourth and last recommendation, which is to cultivate a positive attitude and expectation. We will look at this in our next devotion.