G OD SPEAKS to people in many ways — sometimes through the Bible; other times through people, through dreams, through visions or through an inner intuition we know as the still, small voice.
However it comes, when a person receives a promise from God, there is usually an interval of time between the promise and the manifestation or fulfillment of that promise. Whether it is a day or years or a lifetime, waiting for God to come through with your miracle can be an
The Interval Between Promise and Miracle
agonizing struggle. God is not forgetful, and He’s not too busy to attend to the things concerning you. He has a definite purpose for all that He does, even for the delays. So it is important that we know how to respond to God in the interval between promise and miracle. Here are a few things to remember:
God’s clock doesn’t seem to operate like mine. I always want to see the answer immediately. Sometimes that happens, but it’s not the norm. I’ve come to learn that there is a difference between what I mean when I say now and what God means when He says now. For God, now is the point He speaks or wills something to be done. It makes no difference whether it has happened in our realm of reality or not. If He wills it, it is so. It is as good as done. For us, now is not until we see the physical manifestation.
How God’s foreknowledge and His predetermination factor into the outworking of His will in our lives is beyond our knowing. Some have said that, for us, it’s like watching a grand parade through a knothole in the fence. We see all the bands and floats go by one by one. But for God it is as if He sits atop the highest point and looks over the fence to see the entire parade from beginning to end — all at once. For the eternal God, the whole parade of history is now.
It’s difficult for me, one who lives totally within this world of time and sequence of events, to understand God and His timing. Yet I know there is an appointed time for all things.
Paul in his sermon to the philosophers at Mars Hill said that it was God who “determined their [the nations’] appointed times, and the boundaries of their habitation” (Acts 17:26). He also said: “He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed” (Acts 17:31, italics added).
Part of the reward for Christ’s suffering was that He
would be made Lord of heaven and earth and that at His judgment seat every knee would bow. That is without a doubt a promise from the Father that, from God’s perspective, is already done. But God has fixed a day on which the actual event will take place and the fulfillment of the promise to the Son shall be manifest.
God also has a time appointed for the fulfillment of the promise He has made to you. If God has promised it, in a very real sense it is already done.
God HAD AN APPOINTED time for the fullness of Abraham’s promise. When Abram was seventy-five years old, God gave him a promise — that from him would come a great nation (Gen. 12:1-3).
But time went by, and there was no child.
The promise was repeated again in more specific terms:
THEN behold, the word of the Lord came to him, saying, “This man [Abram’s servant, Eliezerl will not be your heir; but one who shall come forth from your own body, he shall be your heir.”
Genesis 15:4
Perhaps at that time Abram was tired of believing for the child and was willing to settle for something else and rationalize that it was God’s answer. The Lord said, “No, it’s going to be a child of your own.”
More time passed — twenty-four years to be exact — and still no child. “I am the God Almighty,” the Lord said the next time He spoke to him.
Abram may have thought, Yeah, I’m Abram, and I’m ninety-nine years old. I thought I was going to be a father.
At this meeting God changed Abram’s name to Abraham, which means “the father of a multitude” (Gen. 17:5). It was a strange name for a man almost one hundred years old with no children.
The people who knew Abram, who now called himself
Abraham, must have been snickering in their tents, “The old man now calls himself the father of a great multitude.” It would seem that the struggle of faith in the interval period had finally gotten to old Abe.
The Lord appeared to Abraham and repeated the promise for the third time. He said:
Is anything too difficult for the Lord? At the appointed time I will return to you, at this time next year, and Sarah shall have a son.
Genesis 18:14
The miracle had been for an appointed time all along. But as far as God was concerned, it was already done, because He had already willed it, spoken it and even foreseen it. For God, Abraham had always been the father of a multitude.
God has His timetable, and His appointed times are probably not affected very much by our begging and pleading. Abraham, in his frustration over God’s timing, tried to make the promise happen by conceiving a son with his maidservant Hagar. You would think that God would have speeded things up to keep Abraham from making such a mistake. No, God had His time, and His time had a purpose.
Solomon said it most beautifully:
There is an appointed time for everything. And there is a time for every event under heaven —
2 A time to give birth, and a time to die;
A time to plant, and a time to uproot what is planted....
9 What profit is there to the worker from that in which he toils?
10 I have seen the task which God has given the sons of men with which to occupy themselves.
n He has made everything appropriate in its time. He has also set eternity in their heart.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-2,9-11
Most of us would like to run to heaven’s bank to cash in on a promise before the day is done. Why does God make it so difficult? Why doesn’t He make things happen sooner? Why must we struggle through this interval between promise and fulfillment?
There’s a good answer to that, but you may not like it.
It is to perfect our faith and to give it endurance (see James 1:2-4; 1 Peter 1:6-7). If we all said what we thought, many of us would reply, “I don’t care about having my faith perfected. I just need a miracle, and I need it right now!”
Most of the time when we struggle with God it is because we don’t see things from His perspective. The quality and enduring nature of our faith is of relatively little value to us, compared to the supreme importance God places on it. It is to Him more valuable than our good works, our comfort or even our lives. It was Abraham’s faith that was counted as righteousness (Gen. 15:6). It is our faith that brings us salvation and all the promises of our inheritance.
We are always in a hurry to get on with God’s plan for our lives, but God’s first order of business is dealing with our faith. It is through these intervals, the periods between the promise and the miracle, that this “most holy faith” is perfected (Jude 20).
Abraham was not the only person in the Bible to have his faith operated upon. Jacob waited many years for the promised birthright. His efforts to speed up the process by stealing it from his brother accomplished nothing to speed up the process. He should have learned that from his grandfather’s example.
Joseph had to wait and endure much as an Egyptian
slave before his dreams came to pass.
There were many years and a lot of troubles between the time David was anointed as king by Samuel and the day he actually came to sit on the throne.
Each of these biblical figures received a promise but went through a lot in the interval. They were all changed in the process and prepared to receive the promise. That may not be very important to you, but it’s the highest order of business to God. In fact, it’s the most important thing for you, too. It’s just that often you don’t realize it.
King Sennacherib of Assyria invaded Judah during the fourteenth year of the reign of Hezekiah, king of Judah. Sennacherib’s messenger, taunting Hezekiah, said:
Now therefore, come make a bargain with my master the king of Assyria, and I will give you two thousand horses, if you are able on your part to set riders on them.
Isaiah 36:8
That Scripture passage has for years stuck in my mind because it reminds me of one of the first principles I learned concerning the kingdom of God. That principle is: If you just learn to ride, God will give you a horse. In other words, if you will prepare yourself for God’s promise, He will bring it to pass.
When I WAS ONLY four years old, God gloriously came into my heart and saved me. By the time I was ten years old, I knew that I was called to be a preacher. I began to prepare my life for that great event.
At the age of thirteen I would go out in the woods and preach from the tree stumps. I remember the time when
I got my buddies together in one of the old buses at my dad’s church and preached a sermon complete with an altar call. Some of my friends were saved that way.
I remember going into the church auditorium, locking the doors, turning on the public address system and preaching to the empty pews. One day I forgot to lock the back door. A man who lived on the street saw the lights and walked in. He saw that no one was there listening to the preacher; but since he had nothing else to do, he sat down and listened to the message. When I gave the altar call, he raised his hand to be saved. So I said, “I want all of you who raised your hands to come forward, from the left to the right, from the front to the rear of this building.” The man stood and came forward to receive Christ along with my multitude of imaginary converts.
I would often go down to the mission and preach to the alcoholics and transients. That’s one of the reasons why I love those people so much today. I was just a kid, not a minister or a preacher. I was learning how to ride, even though I didn’t have a horse.
When I was sixteen years of age, I held my first revival in Seminole, Texas. Some might say that is when my ministry began. Actually, it began at ten years old when I received the promise. But during the interval between the promise and the manifestation, I was learning how to ride. Pretty soon God gave me a horse.
You may feel God has spoken to you about getting married. Even if you don’t know who the lucky person is, prepare yourself. Read books; go to seminars; prepare your finances. Whatever the promise may be, do something to put your faith into action. Prepare yourself by learning how to ride.
It can be terribly disappointing to spend years believing for a promise only to find that it was not God’s prom
The Interval Between Promise and Miracle
ise to you, but something you just claimed for yourself. We must be careful how we claim promises.
The Scriptures record what God had to say to certain people in the context of their situations. Those words often contain promises that a Christian can claim and apply to his or her situation. However, it’s helpful to get advice from pastors and other mature Christians concerning which verses or promises you should accept as a promise from God for yourself. In the end, however, you alone are going to have to discern what God is saying to you.
One of the ways the callings and promises of God are confirmed is in the process of learning to ride without the horse. If you think God has spoken to you and given you a promise, do something as an act of faith. If you believe He’s told you that you will go to the mission field, in the interval while you are waiting for the open door, study foreign culture and language, reach out to the internationals in your city, and pray for the nations. If you go to the mission field, you know you’ll have to clean out that sock drawer. So go ahead and clean it out.
It would be foolish to do something like quitting your job presumptuously. Many people have made mistakes because they got ahead of God’s appointed time. But do what you can until God opens the door to take a further step.
Many people are waiting for a promise but not preparing for it to come to pass. The rudder on a ship does no good unless the ship is moving. It is in the process of doing what you can, stepping out in faith and learning to ride that God’s calling and promises are either confirmed or redirected in your heart.
The interval between the promise and the manifestation can be a difficult struggle. But remember that God has His appointed time, and if He has said it, it will surely come to pass. In this interval of time let God do His perfect work in your faith. As for you, get busy learning to ride.
THIRTEEN