Category Archives: Trusting and Obeying God

UNWAVERING FAITH

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The faith of Christian lawyer HORATIO GATES SPAFFORD, author of  “It is well with my soul” is as strong as that of Job who lost all and yet did not forsake God. He was even asked to curse God but he refused  in the spirit of God owns “my life and whatsoever he does with it I will neither query Him nor swear against Him.” When his three friends began to blame him, expressing their thought that spoke of Job’s possible hidden sin; he ignored them including his wife’s suggestion that Job should curse God and die apparently because of the serious agony he was experiencing. Job took it stoically but at a time wished he were dead and put an end to the excruciating pain and sorrow. He still anchored his faith in Jehovah.

All is well that ends well. God allowed Satan to lay his hand on Job and got to a point God had to uphold His instruction earlier on, that Job’s life was not to be tampered with. God had Job’s health restored, his loss was replenished many folds more than it was before the test of his faith, and he was commissioned to pray for his friends who had sort of ‘blasphemed’ in the way they judged an innocent man like Job. The chain of disaster and misfortune that HORATIO suffered was enough to make a weak believer or non believer to commit suicide. It was like he hung on to the thread of faith that his redeemer lives.  History puts it that so many rich people committed suicide during the Great Depression of the 1930s The millionaires that woke up to find their wealth had literally flown away resorted to ‘end it all’ via suicide. In other words, Trust in God was amongst people of ages gone by and we in our contemporary society find it hard to change our orientation. Can anyone fault the faith the three young Hebrews  Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego showed in bluntly refusing to worship the king’s gold image. Even though it incurred them the wrath of King Nebuchadnezzar, but did not bulge and insisted on their stand of not disobeying the God of Israel. In the king’s consternation, he said only three men were thrown into the fiery furnace but he was seeing four people  and the forth person looked liked the son of God. WHO TOLD HIM .OR SHOWED HIM THE FOURTH PERSON WAS THE SON OF MAN?

There are more examples of disciples that showed faithfulness during persecution like the records in Acts 5:40-42, Romans 8: 17-18, 2Corinthians 4: 10-11, Hebrew 11: 24-25 (The faith of Moses)

                                    FALL SEASON IN LIFELEAVES FALL FREELY IN FALL SEASON TO STARTWITH FRESH LEAFAGE FORFULL FRESH SPRING FOLIAGEThere is more than seven after six. It is a local saying that assures us that failure is not the end of life. However, life is like a train in transit but has to stop for some passengers to alight at their own destination and still has to bring in fresh passengers whose destination would be ahead. When it reaches the end of the ‘to’ journey, it would return via the same route having to stop at the fixed stations for more passengers to disembark and embark. For seasonal weather, the cyclical journey goes into eternity. Human life is patterned into a mould that fits the train movement until it becomesobsolete, written off and scrapped. We are born to die is a common knowledge that man has been grappling with without solution. He has times of high and low tides in life, so, the seasons can come with hardship or pleasure. No matter what, if one does not allow the heat of sunshine Summer to kill or debilitate him one would transit to fall season where dress code starts changing to accommodate changing weather that will again gets more unbearable if one fails to adapt to winter coldness. As the season of harsh coldness advances it can lead to freezing if care is not taken. Unknown to unsuspecting people, it is cleansing the air of all dirty substances hanging in the air as rain falls. Debris hiding in sewage pathway is being cleared by erosion. By the time Spring season springs in, the air is clean, drainage is free of stagnant water which prevents breeding of mosquitoes and other harmful insects. At the advent of Spring season, life returns with freshness. Nature brings fresh flowers like daffodils and fresh lilies with poppies throughout Antelope Valley at the north end of Los Angeles County which gets celebrated. In other words, man’s life is full of ups and downs. It is only those who cannot re- invent or restructure themselves after a failure or disaster that would sink rather than swim across the sea of problems besetting them that do perish along with their problems. I join all American citizens to doff my hat to the revered President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865) who after vicissitudes in his political career got vote to become the 16th President of the United State in America. The current Nigerian President was once a military Head of State. He was ousted but at the return to civilian government, he started contesting in every Presidential election and was failing since 1999 only to succeed in 2015 Presidential election. He seemed to have favorably weathered the political storm to emerge at the country’s ASO ROCK, an equivalent of the American WHITE HOUSE.So ‘Fall season in Life’ stands for just a chapter in a person’s life. Like the old folks’ song “Nobody knows the trouble I see, nobody knows my sorrows. Nobody knows the trouble I see, Glory Hallelujah: Sometime I’m rich, sometime I’m poor, O yes Lord. Nobody knows the trouble I see; Glory Hallelujah!!!”. Therefore, death is a means to an end and not an end in itself. Man can get to FALL season in his life and go into winter bitter cold; if he remains resilient he would be able to spring back to life’s freshness and buoyancy. “Circumstantial Homelessness” is a fitting scenario. (Ref: ValuPlus Poems: Focus on Behavioral Tendencies. Pg 24 Copyright 2008 by Emmanuel Osindele). In other words, at the end of a dark and cheerless night, there is always the dawn of a new day. 

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Trust and Obey

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The popular hymnal continues to remind Christians that there is joy in trusting and obeying God. “When we walk with the Lord in the light of his word, What a glory He sheds on our way; While we do his good will, HE abides with us still, And with all who will trust and obey, Trust and obey, For there is no other way To be happy in Jesus, But to trust and obey” However great the problem may be, the shortest and surest way to meet man’s need is to trust and obey His holy will. Abraham, Father of faith, did trust in God in spite of having to wait for twenty-five years before God’s promise to him was fulfilled. It is therefore no surprise that he and Sarah were past the age of child-bearing before the promise got finally fulfilled. God tested his faith to see whether his trust and obedience were genuine or not. God asked him to sacrifice the child of promise to Him, Jehovah.  In today’s reckoning, one would probably use constitutional freedom of speech to ask God ‘WHY?’ or at least try to remind God whether HE could recall how long it took him, Abraham, to wait for the fulfillment of the promise. May even require reminding God that both he and his wife were past child-bearing age as if God did not know. Proverb 3: 5-6 says; “Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge Him, and He will make straight your paths”.

Jesus’ first miracle with his mother’s instruction to those who needed to replenish supply of wine for the wedding feast at Cana of Galilee. in John 2: 5 Mary told the servants, Whatever He says to you, do it”. the servants obeyed absolutely what Jesus asked them to do and the result was fantastic. The master of the feast commended the high quality of the miracle wine. (Trust and Obey) Miracles that Jesus performed were not magical, no incantation, no voodoo as well. It is just the word of God that achieved the concrete result, especially to those who trusted and obeyed Him. In Jeremiah 32: 17 and 26-27, it was written, “Ah, Lord Jehovah! Behold thou hast made the heavens and the earth by thy great power and by thine own outstretched arm; there is nothing too hard…Then came the word of , Behold, I am Jehovah, the God of all flesh. Is there any thing too hard for ME? (ASV)”. The passage is all about the Jews who refused to be obedient to The God of Israel and the promised  consequence. They were  carried  into slavery as God told Prophet Jeremiah.

Worries and anxiety of Hannah ended with trusting the efficacy of Prophet Eli’s pronouncement. Hannah obeyed the practices of the Jews by having private commune  with God  over what was giving her untold sorrow in the presence of Peninnah, Elkanah’s first wife. 1Samuel 1:1-18  (NKJV). Hannah trusted God and in obedience she went home rejoicing. She conceived and gave birth to Samuel in answer to her fervent prayer to God.