Thursday, March 24, 2011

God is Our Provider

It always amazes me how God provides. He does not have to. He is under no contractual obligation to meet our needs, and yet He does. God's provision points us to his goodness and mercy. Like a patient, loving father, God meets our needs in countless ways...from solving the sin problem to providing us the resources to live and everything in between. We owe it all to God.

This month we are teaching a series at Northwest called Multiply. The basic principle we are learning each week is that God has a way of multiplying resources (time, talent, money) when we give them to him.
How is he able to do that? Because God is the ultimate provider and he has a way of blessing those who are obedient to him.
Why does God operate this way? Because he receives more glory and fame when we depend on him for everything.
What is our role? Trust and obedience. It is not our job to explain to God how he needs to provide. Our job is to trust that he will provide and be obedient to the things he has already taught us.

Here's how I am learning these principles in my own life. For the past several months our team has been praying that God would provide us the necessary office space for the church. For the last 16 months Greg and I have been operating the "church office" out of our house. During this time, all of our needs have been met and we have been very grateful for the loft/extra bedroom. However, with the birth of baby Blanchard rapidly approaching we knew we needed to look for additional office space. As we searched, the following event occurred during the past two weeks:
1. We found a Christian businessman with commercial office space available.
2. A separate businessman donated his company car to the church which had a value equivalent to one year's worth of our office space lease.

I cannot fully explain things like this. All I know to do is to keep on trusting God to be my provider and remain obedient to the things he teaches me on a daily basis.