Joel 2:25-26(NLT)
25 The LORD says, “I will give you back what you lost to the swarming locusts, the hopping locusts, the stripping locusts, and the cutting locusts. It was I who sent this great destroying army against you. 26 Once again you will have all the food you want, and you will praise the LORD your God, who does these miracles for you. Never again will my people be disgraced.”
Whenever I read this verse, the first five words always stop me in my tracks. It reminds me that if God is giving us back what we’ve lost, we had to have lost it first. That’s not a good feeling. Then I read further, and God reassures us that He’s the One who does miracles for us, and He can make it so that we will never again be disgraced. That’s good news indeed! However, we can’t get to the second part if we overlook the first part of this verse. It’s the reality that God will restore what we’ve lost. Many of us are holding this promise in our hearts, as we should be, but as it relates to relationships, we may need to examine it more closely.
Some of us are looking for God to restore something we’ve never had. In this passage in the Book of Joel, God’s people had once enjoyed the bounty of His blessing, but they lost it. We, too, are enjoying God’s bounty, but not so much in the area of relationships with men. We’re praying for restoration, but for some of us, we’ve never experienced the kind of quality relationship with a man that God wants us to have. So, it was never taken from us; therefore, it isn’t something we can get back. This seems relatively obvious, but our thinking around it isn’t always in line with faith and believing. Some of us are asking God, “What happened to the blessing?” When the truth is the relationship that we’re wanting to get back wasn’t the blessing we thought it was. It did more harm than good.
We’ve seen others have wonderful relationships with their spouses, and even though we’ve been in relationships during our lives, we’ve never had a quality loving and lasting one for ourselves. We need to stop and think about that for a moment, because it really is time to leave the past behind.
Exodus 6:9(AMP) sheds a little light on the mindset of some people that have been traumatized by their past, and because of it they refuse to move forward. God told Moses to tell the people that He is the Great I Am, and that He would free them from oppression and rescue them from slavery, but they would not listen to God. This verse says, “Moses told this to the Israelites, but they did not listen to him because of their impatience and despondency, and because of their forced labor.” They were impatient, and instead of believing in the power and goodness of our Heavenly Father, they rebelled in their minds. They saw their oppression bigger than God, and this is an offense to Him.
The reality for many modern Christian women is that oppressive relationships with men is all they’ve ever known. We either chose the wrong man, or we didn’t know enough of God’s Word to walk in wisdom and maintain the relationship with faith, patience, and endurance. We didn’t know then, but we had certainly better make it a priority to know now. God is not in the business of restoring things that we have grown out of. He’s not going to pull old dead and worn out things from our past and bring them into the future. We shouldn’t want that for ourselves either.
God told His prophet, Habakkuk to write down the vision He had given Him. He said in Habakkuk 2:2(NKJV), “Write the vision and make it plain on tablets, that he may run who reads it.” God had given His prophet a vision, and it wasn’t just for the period they were living in during Old Testament times, it was for us as well. God told Habakkuk to write it down so that those of us living today could read it, gain faith from it, and run the race that God has set before us. You must have a vision of what God has in store for you. In other words, you can’t have the memories of your past dancing all over your thoughts and believing, keeping you stuck in the wilderness like the Israelites.
It’s not relationships with the men of your past that need to be restored. It’s your attitudes, thoughts, and beliefs about who you are in Christ and the blessings that God wants to give you; this is what needs to be upgraded. So often we allow the past to rule over us, but we’re different women today. Get it into your mind and heart that never again will God allow you to be disgraced. Pray that He will enlighten the eyes of your understanding about what is possible for you. Write the vision down and holdfast to it, because God is preparing you for a blessing that you will never lose.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
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“What Happened to the Blessing?”, written by Kim Times, edited by Reverend Fran Mack for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2023. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.