God wants your cooperation, not your help. Helping God is like jumping off a cruise ship to swim up behind it and push it along. Not only is this futile but you create more problems as you yourself will need to be rescued by the ship you are trying to push along. That sounds like a ridiculous scenario, but it is no different to what happened when Abram and Sarai tried to push God’s plan along in their own way. Not only was it futile but they only created more problems from which they needed to be rescued later on. By Genesis 16, eleven years had passed since God had promised them a child. Seeing that she was still not becoming pregnant Sarai decides to help things along. She gets her servant, Hagar, to become a kind of surrogate mother for Abram’s child. So, Abram sleeps with Hagar who gives birth to Ishmael. It doesn’t turn out well for Abram, Sarai, and certainly not for Hagar and Ishmael. Here is the moral of the story: Don’t help God! Let God unfold his own plans and put yourself in the position of responding to what God is doing. Don’t try to do it for him. Don’t try to ‘take control’ of difficult situations and assume that you know which way to take things. Let God work his plans out. Don’t second guess him. If things are dragging on, then respond to the challenge and keep seeking God’s will and resolution. If you want to work with God you must be patient because God is never in a hurry.
Think about whether there are areas in your life where you have tried to ‘take control of the situation’ and force change out of impatience and unwillingness to wait for God.
Read Genesis 16
