Faith For A Lifetime

Faith for a Lifetime

Keep on asking, and you will receive what you ask for. Keep on seeking, and you will find. Keep on knocking, and the door will be opened to you. Matthew 7:7

AS A YOUNG MAN, George Müller applied and planned to be a missionary through the London Missionary Society. Things never quite worked out—circumstances, timing, conviction, opposition from family members—and this German ended up living in England most of his life. Still, God had led him into tremendously fruitful ministry. He served faithfully for years, founding and operating orphanages and schools that had an enormous impact. But his desire to be a missionary—and his faith and prayers toward that end—seemed unfulfilled.

As we’ve seen, faith functions like a seed planted, and sometimes seeds take a very long time to grow to full maturity. Müller knew that dynamic well—his faith was rewarded quite often and tangibly over the years—and eventually those seeds sown early in his adulthood bore fruit much later. He traveled the world speaking about faith, going to places even beyond his early missionary dreams. God had opened and shut doors according to his timing, but he had not let Müller’s faith fall pointlessly to the ground.

Many Christians live with disappointment for years, assuming faith in a particular area just didn’t work out. Perhaps it didn’t, and perhaps it never will in exactly the expected way. But that doesn’t mean God won’t honor it somehow. Disappointment is a middle-of-the-story phenomenon because it assumes an unhappy conclusion before we’ve gotten to the end of the story. That’s especially true for believers, whose end-of-story prophecies and promises are remarkably gratifying. Yes, we may be disenchanted with the way things have worked out; many of us don’t spend our lives walking out fulfilled dreams and expectations. But we still haven’t seen what God is going to do with our faith. We have no business expecting disappointment in the end.

Don’t walk away from the seeds of faith you’ve planted. You may have forgotten to tend to them. God hasn’t. One way or another, they will bear fruit. You may have prayed in faith for a particular season, but God has applied it for a lifetime. And he is still writing a beautiful story with it.

Hope is patience with the lamp lit.