Daily devotion – the winter swells eventually arrive each year.
Jas 1:2 My brethren, count it all joy when you fall into various trials,
Jas 1:3 knowing that the testing of your faith produces patience.
Jas 1:4 But let patience have its perfect work, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking nothing.
Finally, the autumn swells have arrived at Secret Harbour after one of the longest periods of no waves this summer that I can remember.
Patience is one of the most difficult lessons for many of us to learn, I am sure. As a new Christian I was so impatient for the things of God. I wanted certain things to happen immediately in my walk with God. I was full of zeal and full of ‘good’ ideas!
But I needed to grow, to mature and to learn to wait on God to work how and when He wanted. Not at my beck and call. The times I ‘made’ certain things happen was a sad indictment on my faith in the Lord and an overstretch in my own talents and desires.
Maybe like this past summer your life has been flat in answered prayer. You have awakened each day only to find nothing changed. But the swells always come, and they stay.
So too does God in answering our prayers. He will answer them, and He will answer them in His time and in His way. A frustrated Christian is a believer who has not yet matured or learnt to trust and wait on the Lord. They live the exact opposite of how Paul greets every church in his letters with the words, grace and peace!
If your life and your walk with God is in a time of frustration, then God will delay His answer until you have grown to wait and trust in His timing.
This week, continue to give your prayers to God, but when you get up off your knees, live your life in grace and peace, knowing His answers will come just like every year the autumn and winter swells arrive on our beaches.