Lift Up Your Eyes

The LORD said to Abram . . . , “Lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are, northward and southward and eastward and westward, for all the land that you see I will give to you and to your offspring forever.”   Genesis 13:14-15, ESV

Have you ever been promised something and it never came? God promised to bless Abraham with a family and a home. Abraham’s faith was stretched to the limit as he trusted God for both of these promises. Years passed without any sign of Sarah’s conceiving a child.

In their old age, when all human hope of conceiving a child was completely gone, God intervened, and Isaac was born. God had fulfilled the first promise. Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau, and Jacob had twelve sons, who became the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.

Abraham obeyed God’s call, leaving the comforts of his home in Ur to go to the place God would show him. But when he came to Canaan, he found that the land was already occupied. It would be some time before God’s promise to give the land to his descendants would be fulfilled.

In Jacob’s later years there was a famine, and it looked like the family would not survive. But God brought Jacob’s son, Joseph, to a prominent position in Egypt, and through him provided for the family when all hope seemed lost. Abraham’s descendants remained in Egypt for the next four hundred years and during that time grew from an extended family of seventy people into a nation of around two million. God fulfilled his promise, even though it seemed impossible.

Maybe you have been waiting on God for something. You’ve even prayed about it, but your prayers have become little more than “worry on your knees.” You say “Dear God” at the beginning and “Amen” at the end, but in the middle all you do is rehearse your problems. When you come to pray, look away from your problems and up into the face of God. God will do everything that he has promised, and his timing is perfect.

For further reading, see Genesis 13