We’re using the summer as an opportunity to re-align our lives to the Lord as many of us step away and rest from the daily routines and demands of life. This week’s devotion helps us evaluate and re-align our timing with God’s timing:

IN WORD Patience is one of the hardest virtues for us to understand. We pray to an omnipotent God. We know He is able to help us at any moment. We know that He who defines Himself as “love” and gave His Son for us is not reluctant to help us.
So when we ask such a God to intervene in our circumstances, why is there so often a delay? Nowhere in the Bible does God promise us instant answers to our prayers. His promises for answered prayer are amazing and reassuring, but none of them includes a timetable. He only assures us that He is never too late. Yet in our impatience, we don’t want an answer that is simply “not too late.”
We want an answer now. We have needs, and we do not understand why those needs must be prolonged.
But God has His reasons. Perhaps our needs are being prolonged because they are accomplishing something in us that nothing else will. Perhaps they are being prolonged because God is doing a necessary work in the life of someone else who is involved in our situation. Perhaps He is teaching us about prayer or perfecting our faith. Maybe He is even letting us identify with Jesus in the fellowship of His sufferings—it is, after all, His overarching purpose to conform us to the image of Christ. How can we be conformed if we have no identification with His pain?
IN DEED Sometimes God will make clear that our answer is delayed because the delay will further His work in our own hearts or in another area. Sometimes He gives us no reason at all. The Christian’s wise response, in either case, is to know that if we are waiting on God, there must be a very good reason. And if we wait in faith and expectancy, the wait will be amply rewarded. His timing is always perfect. “Simply wait upon Him. So doing, we shall be directed, supplied, protected, corrected, and rewarded.” – Vance Havner (in “Walking with God” by Chris Tiegreen)

Aligning ourselves to God’s plans and timing is one of the most difficult forms of obedience in following Jesus, yet it is also one that carries the most blessing, as Jeremiah 29:11-13 reminds us. When we wait on the Lord, we are actually giving up our anxieties and putting our trust in Him. This is what Matthew 11:28 and Philippians 4:1-7 reflect. As Jesus Himself understood, it is not by our will, but our heavenly Father’s.
Whose calendar does your life reflect? Do you run ahead or behind God and suffer the consequences? Take time to reflect on Psalms 127 – 131 this week and ask the Holy Spirit to quiet you like a child in the Lord’s plans and timing. Have a blessed week! - from Magnolia, Pastor Sam