Receiving God's Promises

Each of us has dreams and desires. Some of them are from our own hearts and minds and others are God given. As we pray and seek Him, He will reveal the things that are of Him. It is these dreams and desires that will give way to reality if we do not give up, but trust Him to bring them to fruition.

When the Lord implants a dream or desire in our hearts, it is like a seed being planted in the ground that will give way to a plant. The seed needs time to grow and come to maturation. This is the case with His dreams and desires for us. When He plants the seed, it will take time for the fullness of what He has placed inside of us to fully manifest. However, many of us grow weary in the process of waiting and give up, abandon the things that He has spoken over us. We become impatient with the process of giving into His dreams and desires for us and we do not see the beauty and wonderful things that He has prepared for us.

During that waiting time, the Lord desires to do many things in us. We must surrender to His hand and trust that what He is desiring to accomplish will be completed and will bring to pass His intended purposes and plans.

Some of the lessons that the Lord is revealing to us in the time of waiting are:

1. Increasing our faith

Many times the things that the Lord has promised us are larger than our faith to believe for them. So during the time of waiting, the Lord is stretching us to believe for all that He has promised. When obstacles or hindrances come and they will, our natural tendency is to look with our natural eyes and to say, "I must have heard wrong" or "This is impossible". We give up and become discouraged and even at times sink into hopeless. However, when the promises are of God, the Holy Spirit will come along side of us and encourage us to look with our spiritual eyes ( 2 Cor. 4:18). He encourages us to press forward by reminding us who God is and what the Lord has said to us. He removes the clouds and darkness away, so we can once again see clearly what the Lord has spoken.

2. Renewing our minds

Because we live in the world, most of the time our minds and thoughts are of worldly thinking and reasoning. The Lord does not work in this way. Isaiah 55:8 tells us that God's thoughts are not our thoughts, nor are His ways, like our ways. His thoughts and ways are higher, for greater purposes and glory than ours. Since this is true, another purpose in the time of waiting is to have our minds transformed or renewed, made new, to think and see like He does.

If the Lord were to bring to pass our promises with our old minds and thinking patterns still intact, we would be selfish and self centered with our blessings. We would not see the greater impact of why He blessed us and how He wants others to be blessed out of our blessing.

3. Deepen Trust and Dependency on Him

When the Lord gives us a promise, we become excited and hopeful about what He is going to bring to pass in our lives. We usually do not understand the journey involved in order to receive that promise. The journey involves trekking through valley and mountaintops. The valleys are where we are tested to see what resides within us. It is during those times we see where our trust and confidence is placed. We find out if our trust is in other people, circumstances, ourselves or in God alone.

It is in the valley, where it is lonely and isolating when the Lord strips all earthly comforts away that we see that God is the only one that we can truly count on. It is God that will not forsake or abandon us. He will be faithful to provide what we need in order to complete the journey into the Promise Land and when we reach the Promise Land, we fully understand that it is God alone that made the way. We give glory to Him and see that He has established within us a deep and abiding personal relationship based on love, trust and dependency on Him.

Receiving a promise is wonderful and exciting; however, there is much work to receiving and walking in that promise. We must fully surrender the promise back to the Lord and allow Him to achieve every work that He desires to do in and around us during the journey to receiving that promise. Once we have received, we see that the reward was in the journey, the process of receiving and that the manifested promise was just the bonus!