To Encourage You

Philippians 4:19 “And my God will supply every need of yours according to his riches in glory in Christ Jesus.”

I was listening to a message by the late Elizabeth Elliott the other day (thank God for such wonderful Christian teachers), and in her teaching she shared some insights on the verse above that really helped me.  She mentioned the element of time with respect to this wonderful promise of God. Isn’t it wonderful that God has said that He will supply our every need!  It doesn’t say He can, or He might, but He will.  That’s why no Christian need ever worry about anything.  Our God loves us. He knows what we need, and He has promised us He’ll most certainly meet each and every  need.  But that’s where the time element comes in.  So often we think we need this or that.  We pine away and worry that we don’t have something.   But we forget that if God has said He will supply every need, then if we don’t have something we think we need, we should remember that in God’s view we don’t need it yet.  In God’s view, and His is the perfect view, if we really need anything, God knows not only that we need it but also when we need it and it is then, and only then, that He has obligated himself to supply it. 

While God will supply every need, He is also at the same time continually working to mature us in our faith. Sometimes He withholds things for a time because He wants us to learn just a little better than we now do that we can trust Him all the time with everything. At other times He may withhold something we think we need because He knows that we don’t really need it, and to get that thing would be worse for us than not to get it, for don’t we all know that saying “Be careful what you wish for!” 

May God help us to believe what He has said about meeting our needs. What peace there is in this. What a release from worry.  God knows what we need better than we do, and He knows when we really need it, better than we do.  God will meet every need of every Christian.  May He help us to rest in that truth, even when we haven’t yet, at this moment, seen Him act as He has told us He will, for as the psalmist has reminded us “My time is Your hands (i.e., your time and my time)” (Psalm 31:15).  How wonderful it is to know this.  What peace is available to us in the promises of God’s Holy Word.