Do not Consider …

When someone promises you something, tell me, what do you do? If say you’ve been promised a brand new shirt by someone, do you go ahead to set aside money to buy that shirt? Of course not!

However, many of us have come upon God’s promises, and then we either set aside money to achieve those objects, or work our way around getting those things. God has promised us more than shirts. He’s promised all things that pertain to life and godliness. He has promised us houses filled with beautiful things that we didn’t build. Our work in all this is not to help God fulfill His promises. It is to believe!

Now, things are usually easy, when the promise we are believing for we can live without, or does not contribute much to our present living. When the thing we are believing for is contrary, and becomes a matter of life or death, that’s when it gets hard.

It’s easy for faith to be mediocre when we have jobs, but only want a promotion. It’s far different when we have been laid off and unemployed for sometime. Our faith finds itself in the heat of testing. It’s easy to brush it off — not to be pushed to the edge — when a man has had a girl and a girl and a girl. The comfort that he has 3 girls at least will push Him to say “Maybe God wills no boys for me.” But to a couple that hasn’t had any biological child for close to two decades after trying everything, their faith is at another level. Their situation has completely distorted the humbleness of their faith, and has turned them into the violent who take it by force.

Having a car or a house already, always comforts a person who’s believing for another car or better house. But for a person who’s been using boda bodas (taxis but on a motorcycle) all their lives, or has been renting for years, their faith is under more fire.

The flaw about being in a harder place, is that one can either give up (by stopping to believe and accept it as the reality) or one could get too desperate that they wonder what they can offer to God in order for Him to bless them. The latter causes them to either be tricked into, or be deceived by the enemy that the more amount they give of their offertory or tithes or first fruit, the more God be coerced to stop for those He’s been paying much attention to, and come to them!

Sarah tried that option indirectly. But God wasn’t pleased. This is because she had considered her womb. She had no extra ovaries, so, she borrowed Hagar. It was the right seed — wrong womb. Right ingredients, wrong oven.

Abraham however, even if he falls in the category of the more desperate, did not consider his body. Of course we can let him off the hook since, well, he wasn’t completely impotent. But even research says that after the age of 35, sperm count of men begins to reduce immensely. By 80, Abraham must have been nearly out. That’s 45 years after the researched statistic.

He didn’t fall for the trap of what he could give God to quicken the process howbeit. God even rebuked him when he tried to present the head servant of his house, Eliezer, as his potential heir earlier.

That meant, the true heir had to come. Abraham had to eliminate all other factors and behold only and only God — from whom the promise came. The body wasn’t promising. Eliezer wasn’t. All eyes were on God now. To whom nothing was too hard. He was fully convinced that only God could.

Romans 4:19-21 says “And not being weak in faith, he did not consider his own body, already dead (since he was about a hundred years old), and the deadness of Sarah’s womb. He did not waver at the promise of God through unbelief, but was strengthened in faith, giving glory to God, and being fully convinced that what He had promised He was also able to perform.”

That’s when Isaac came. Abraham had to share this secret with Sarah. That she shouldn’t consider herself nor her state either … but have her eyes completely on God.

Hebrews 11:11 brings a new narrative, saying that Sarah too had to see that God was faithful to fulfill what He promised as opposed to checking whether her womb was faithful enough to being a child:

‘By faith Sarah herself also received strength to conceive seed, and she bore a child when she was past the age, because she judged Him faithful who had promised.’

That’s evidence that she had learnt from her lord.

What this patriarch and matriarch teach us, is to consider nothing of our own accord.

Many have received God’s promises and disqualified themselves. This is because they’ve considered their backgrounds, their skin, or the ‘third-world-countriness’ of their nation. They do not know that disqualifying themselves doesn’t disqualify the decree that came out of God’s mouth from following them. Though it follows them however, it might not be effective until it is believed and embraced.

Until they accept that that promise out God’s mouth was for them, and that it would not return void to Him, that’s when the fruit it was meant to manifest will bud.

Others still consider their old natures, they consider the sin they did earlier in the day, and it is those small tares the devil sows that keep many away from fully conceiving the seed of any promise. Others are deceived that God couldn’t love them that much to give them vineyards they didn’t plant. Well, if He did not spare His only begotten son for them, surely, how can’t He give them all those ‘vineyards’!

I pray that from today forth, you may consider one thing and one thing only, and that is God and His promise. May His word be your boundary and constraint. Consider that adage, that He is not man that He should lie. Consider the seas He parted. Consider the men in the past that He promised and fulfilled. Consider the time when He said “let there be” and there was.

Do not consider your shortcomings. He said that as far as the east is from the west was how far He TOOK your sins from you!

Consider that He that promised you, was, and is, and will forever be FAITHFUL.

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Isaiah 55:11 So shall My word be that goes forth from My mouth; It shall not return to Me void, But it shall accomplish what I please, And it shall prosper [in the thing] for which I sent it.

Numbers 23:19 “God is not a man, that He should lie, Nor a son of man, that He should repent. Has He said, and will He not do? Or has He spoken, and will He not make it good?