January 22, 2017. Genesis 30-31.

 

We see in chapter 30 Rachel is tired of praying for a child, she is tired of waiting on God and has grown impatient.  She has watched over and over how God keeps blessing her older sister Leah with children, four sons to be exact, while she is left barren.  Rachel has had it with her situation and pleas with Jacob in the very first verse “so she said to Jacob, ‘Give me children, or I’ll die!”

Being a Christ follower, it is all about letting go and trusting that God has the best for you in mind.  It is all about having patience and letting someone else plan your life for you.  It is about faith, blind, complete surrender, letting everything that matters in your life be in the hands of someone who has the power of stripping it all away, faith. 

Then there is Jacob, a man with so much patience and trust that God will bless him and care for him, that he works for Laban for twenty years with nothing to show for it except his wives and children. He has nothing that does not belong to Laban.  

Genesis 31:

40 This was my situation: The heat consumed me in the daytime and the cold at night, and sleep fled from my eyes.41 It was like this for the twenty years I was in your household. I worked for you fourteen years for your two daughters and six years for your flocks, and you changed my wages ten times. 42 If the God of my father, the God of Abraham and the Fear of Isaac, had not been with me, you would surely have sent me away empty-handed. But God has seen my hardship and the toil of my hands, and last night he rebuked you.”

For twenty years Jacob worked for Laban without complaint.  Talk about a patient man, but he knew who held his future in his hands. Jacob knew that God was with him, and knew that without God on his side he would not be where he was at that moment, with a family and children, flocks of animals, enough to care for his family and break off on his own.  

If you are struggling with where you are at and growing impatient with God not answering your prayers, or opening the doors you think should be opened. Trust that God is in control, and he has not forgotten you.

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