Fasting - Trust

Good morning, Five Minute Families. Today we are finishing our series on fasting. We are to the T in our FAST acronym: F - First things first, A - accountability, S - satisfaction, and T - trust. A few questions to kick us off: Would you trust God if you have your life threatened? To have you sold into modern-day slavery? To be thrown in jail under false accusations? To be ignored for years? It seems preposterous that God would allow unspeakable evils to happen in this world. God is a God of love, after all. Yet, how much do we trust Him when the sinful world we live in falls on us? Threats, slavery, and false accusations all exist still today, though we may want to bury our heads in the sand. And, they existed and all occurred against Joseph, the eleventh son of Jacob, son of Isaac, son of Abraham. Joseph was disliked by his brothers, sold into slavery, falsely accused, but still rose to the second highest office of the land in which he lived. As the years marched on, Joseph trusted God to make sense of the evils set against him. And, when he was in a position to save not only his father and closest brother, he also saved all the brothers who were cruel to him, cruel to their father by deception, and more. He said in Genesis 50:20 “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.” Can we say that? How much do we fully trust that God will work ALL things for His glory and our good? I certainly couldn’t see how our losing a longed-for child through an ectopic pregnancy, being in ongoing pain from the surgery that followed, and then losing the house we had waited for for so long could possibly have a positive meaning. It was just suffering, plain and simple. Now, suffering is part of this earthly life and will draw us closer to the Lord. So, I suffered, knowing logically that I would learn something but wondering what on earth it could possibly be. One evening, someone I dearly love who does not believe in God, asked how I was doing. After years of lovingly sharing about the Lord only to rece