Written by Fiona Monaghan One of my favorite movies is “Serendipity” starring John Cuzak and Kate Beckinsale.
“Jonathan Trager and Sara Thomas met while shopping for gloves in New York. Though buying for their respective lovers, the magic was right and a night of Christmas shopping turned into romance. Jon wanted to explore things further but Sara wasn't sure their love was meant to be. They decided to test fate by splitting up and seeing if destiny brought them back together... Many years later, having lost each other that night, both are engaged to be married. Still, neither can shake the need to give fate one last chance to reunite them. Jon enlists the help of his best man to track down the girl he can't forget starting at the store where they met... Near-misses and classic Shakespearean confusion bring the two close to meeting a number of times but fate will have the final word on whether it was meant to be.” (From imdb)
We love stories where “against all odds” love wins out, right? What if we have the greatest Script Writer in the universe working in our lives to bring about those changes and life altering meetings?
Providential Relationships have a way of entering our lives and making way for some change in one way or another. People and circumstances being God-led, happen, seemingly random and sometimes not, but a change is set in motion that will change the course of a life.
We see it all the time in the stories of the Bible where people have a life changing encounter. Some are love stories and others are the means to put someone on a completely different life path: Ruth and Boaz, David and Bathsheba, Saul and Stephen just to name a few.
For believers we have the idea that when we allow God to direct our circumstances there is no such thing as coincidence. Oswald Chambers wrote:
“The things that happen do not happen by chance, they happen entirely in the decree of God. God is working out His purposes.”
Psalms 40:5 says: Many, O LORD my God, are the wonders you have done. The things you planned for us no one can recount to you; were I to speak and tell of them, they would be too many to declare.
So, isn’t it awesome to know that God, your own personal author, takes great care in how your life story will turn out? Give it a try. Turn it over to Him to write your story from this point on, allowing for those providential relationships that can change your life direction.
He has guaranteed that we will be in for a thrill and no matter the hair- raising encounters and jaw-dropping occurrences, we will arrive at the end of our lives with such a story to tell.
n this series “Five Things God Uses to Grow Your Faith” we’ve been looking at the ways God uses to grow our faith. The first way is the teaching we receive from God’s Word for our personal lives. The Bible is called the “Living Word” because, if you put it to the test, it will have relevance for your day to day lives, just as if it was written personally for you.
When Jesus makes the statement in John “I am the Light of the world…” could it be he is speaking of that ability to makes sense of things and people and things that happen to us?
He doesn’t want to be an afterthought- turned to only when everything else has failed. He wants to be first and foremost in our lives. He wants to be Provider, Savior, Best Friend…all of it. When He is truly in that place then we have the ability to prioritize all others in life correctly.
The Lord tells Samuel that a time of discipline is coming for the house of Eli. Many times God had warned Eli about the actions of his sons (known for being scoundrels and not respecting God or their duties as priests) yet they had persisted in their wayward actions. He had been patient, but now the consequences would follow.
We find Nehemiah in exile from his homeland, Judah (possibly being of the tribe of Judah,) and working for the Persian king, Artaxerxes. His served the king as a cupbearer which would have been quite a high position allowing him access to communicate directly with the king.
Judges begins Gideon’s story with him threshing wheat in a winepress – why would Gideon be separating the edible grain from the inedible chaff in a place used to make wine? Threshing wheat in a winepress conveys the idea of someone hiding and doing something in a place unexpected because usually threshing wheat would be done out in the open. Well, during this time the Israelites were being hounded by the Midianites (because once again they had turned from the Lord) who would rampage through the area, steal their food, their livestock and terrorizing everyone. So Gideon was hiding his crop from the Midianites hoping that it would be spared from pillaging.
He is directed to destroy the altar to Baal in his own father’s house and take down the Asherah fertility pole next to the altar. Then, make an offering of his dad’s prize bull on an altar with the wood from the fertility pole. He decides to do this at night with 10 servants to help. The next morning everyone in town is aghast! “Who did this thing?” They want his head on a stick. Funnily enough, his dad Joash steps up and states, “What is all the fuss about? What kind of god is Baal if he needs defending, let him fight his own battles!” Score 1 for Gideon!
What questions do you have for God?
One of the stories that I have recently been studying is the story of Deborah in Judges. At the beginning of her story the Israelite people were following the familiar cycle in the Old Testament, falling into disobedience once again and had begun to worship local gods forsaking their allegiance to the one true God of Moses. As a result, they had been allowed by God to be oppressed under Caananite rule for the past 20 years.