When We Feel Forgotten

God has not forgotten you. 

Many of us feel as though He has. We think to ourselves, certainly, if God loved me, He would have removed my suffering by now. God has stopped listening to our prayers, we think. Things haven't turned out the way that I have desired them, so God has chosen to be done with me. If God truly cared he wouldn't have allowed this person to die, that job to be lost or my spouse wouldn't' have left me. 

Oh, how I wish I could peek into the heavenlies. I wish I could see the Master at work, orchestrating His plan for our lives. I wish that I could see the great cloud of witnesses cheering me on saying, "Don't give up!" "Persevere!" "Fight with the Lord Jesus!"(Heb 12:1-2). I wish that I could, but I cannot. I must exercise trust and faith. I must choose to believe in the sovereignty of God, even though I do not know when God's deliverance will come. 

I truly believe that some of us were on the brink of our deliverance, but we gave up. We became wearied of the battle so we stopped fighting. Truth is, maybe we were fighting not in God's strength, but in our own. We prayed fervently for days, weeks, months or years and God didn't answer our prayer the way we wanted Him to so we stopped praying. Yet, maybe our prayers are being hindered, because of unconfessed sin or disobedience in some aspect of our lives(1 Pet 3:7, Mark 11:25). We never did stop and think that maybe God had answered our prayer, it just wasn't in the way we wanted it. God always answers prayer and we must be wise to discern His voice. 

True discernment takes a listening ear that is ready to sit in stillness before the Lord. Our culture is full of distraction and busyness. Our minds are so clouded by entertainment and demands that we have a hard time hearing from God, because we have not conditioned our minds to be free from clutter and distraction. We walk around wishing God would answer, wondering where He is, when all this time He's been shouting the answer at us. Yet, we are too busy to hear His voice. We would rather scroll through our phones, numb out our minds, be entertained by mindless games and videos instead of hearing from the living God. 

God has not forgotten you, but often, we have forgotten Him. Amidst the busyness of life, we go on, 100 mph and forget to be still before the Lord and wait patiently for Him. We grow angry, we become people we don't even like, but we never pause to sit in the presence of God. The place we experience true transformation. 

Do not give up, but fight with the Lord Jesus for your deliverance. Those who have gone before you are cheering you on in the heavenlies. You cannot fight or win your battles alone. Only God can bring victory. Take up your stand in prayer, don't give up, but take your place in God's army and watch as your Captain leads you into victory in Jesus name! It may not be the victory that you expected or in the timing you would have liked, but we must trust that God knows what He's doing and He will work all things together for the purpose of His will. 

"Be still before the Lord, and wait patiently for Him"- Psalm 37:7