Lessons from Lazarus

Chapter 8 talks about something that most of us struggle with at some time or another…. the waiting game. We have a need and we ask something of God and we devote extensive time to prayer but then, what we want just does not happen. And then it still doesn’t happen or it may not happen the way we believe that it should have happened. And at this point when this happens it is so easy to give up hope and just think that God doesn’t care. But really that’s just what the devil wants you to think. God has a plan, it’s just not possible for us to understand or even conceive His ways and how He can use things to bring Him glory. In this chapter the author talks about the story of Mary and Martha and their brother Lazarus. Lazarus is sick and he is dying and Mary and Martha send word for Jesus to come heal him. But Jesus doesn’t come as fast as they would expect him to, He waits. The bible tells us why he waited to come to Mary and Martha, so that we could see the glory of God. The author gives us 5 lessons that we can learn from the story of Lazarus as well as a couple of God’s grammar rules. The author goes into detail about each of them but I will only highlight a couple things:

1: God’s will does not always proceed in a straight line.
2: God’s love sometimes tarried for our good and His glory.
3: God’s ways are not our ways, but His character is still dependable.
4: God’s plan is released when we believe and obey.
5: The “end” is never the end; it is only the beginning.

Grammar rule #1: Never put a period where God puts a comma.
Grammar rule #2: Don’t put a comma where God puts a period.

I like the quote by Ray C. Stedman as he talks about the hardest problem he deals with as a Christian, “what to do when God does not do what I have been taught to expect him to do; when God gets out of line and does not act the way I think he ought. What do I do about that?” We all have had times when hard questions that we throw at God surface up. We cry out to God and ask him why and we can feel like we never get an answer. I believe that it’s just not time for me to know the answer; it may just be something that my human logic can not follow. I am content in knowing that my whys can be answered when I make it to my real home in Heaven. Even then I probably won’t even know what my questions were. We can look no further than the bible to see that Jesus understands what we are going through. The author has a nice shaded box at the end of this chapter that is titled, “Jesus Understands.” She has compiled a list for us to see that many of the heartache and emotions that we go through Jesus experienced when he was here on earth. He knows, understands and wants to show us the glory of God. A question from the back of the book asks which lessons from Lazarus have you found to be the most true in life? Have you ever experienced the reality of these lessons?

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