Receive your Promise!!
In verses 15 on, God paints a picture of what the curses look like: confusion, disease, fever, inflammation, defeat, tumors, sores, the itch, madness, blindness, oppression, hunger, thirst, failure in everything you do.
But there is good news – there is a way to get out of the curses and into the blessings! In Deuteronomy 28, right in the middle of the curses, we find this powerful little secret. Moses told the Israelites:
You will become slaves to your enemies because of
your failure to praise God for all that he has given you. (Deuteronomy
28:47)(TLB)
Years
ago I was reading over the curses, and I thought, “some of the things I deal
with are actually what God calls curses.”
I had never thought of bad circumstances as curses before. Then I read verse 47, and I began to wonder: could my situation be reversed by simply starting to praise? What did I have to lose? I tried it as an experiment.
For every
curse I saw in my life, I began to praise God for the opposite thing. For example, in areas that I was being treated
unfairly, I felt that was a form of oppression, and so I praised God for deliverance
and freedom. In areas that I failed at,
I praised God for success.
Since that day until now, this is
how I’ve put my faith to work. I simply
praise Him for the opposite thing that I see.
And I’ve seen a lot of answered prayers – enough to make me think there’s
power there. I’ll be honest; it’s not
easy when circumstances look bleak, but it’s really no different than when
the Israelite's came across the Jordan River and stepped foot into
the Promised Land.
God had told them that once
they came into the Promised Land they would have large, flourishing cities
they did not build, houses filled with all kinds of good things they did
not provide, wells they did not dig, vineyards and olive groves they
did not plant. (Deuteronomy 6:10-11)(NIV)
And when the Israelite's first
stepped into the Promised Land they could see the cities and see the houses but
there was a problem- they weren’t exactly theirs yet…There were people still
living in them, and some of those people were giants. So did God give them their blessings or not? He did! He said, basically,
Here are your blessings: your houses, your cities, your
wells, your vineyards, and your olive groves… Just go
get them!!
And the Israelite's started with the city
of Jericho and the rest is history! 2
Corinthians 1:20 tells us that:
no matter how many promises God has made, they are "Yes" in Christ. (NIV)
That’s a really cool promise, that as
soon as we make the choice to believe in and follow Jesus, we’re “in Christ,” and
we have been given every blessing there is.
All that’s left for us to do is go get
them. We “go get” our blessings by faith
- by believing that we have them, and praising God for them. Deuteronomy 28:2 says that “All these blessings will come upon you
and overtake you.” (NIV) I love the picture this verse paints. It makes it sound like the blessings are sitting
around waiting for the signal from us to take off running into our arms!!
Let’s look at Abraham, the father
of faith. God gave Abraham the promise of a son, but Abraham didn't receive the promise for years. Like the Israelites entering into the Promised Land, he had to do something in order to receive.
In Romans 4:18-24, we see that when God gave Abraham the promise, Abraham did four very important things:
1) He “against hope believed in hope, … according to that which
was spoken,” …
2)“…being
not weak in faith, (Abraham) considered not his own body now dead, when he was
about an hundred years old, neither yet the deadness of Sarah’s womb…”
3) “…He
staggered not at the promise of God through unbelief; but was strong in faith,
giving glory to God…
4)
he was... “fully persuaded that, what (God) had promised, he was able
also to perform.” (KJV)
What a powerful
encouragement to us! Abraham was given a promise by God that he would
have a son. At that point, Abraham and Sarah were so old they were both
nearly dead, yet what did Abraham do with that “circumstance?” He
CONSIDERED IT NOT!!!! He didn’t consider the circumstance, but
what did he do?
He said, “I’m going to have a
son? I believe that!!”
And then he started giving God
glory - He started rejoicing that he was going to have a
baby!!! He took his eyes off his circumstances and focused on the
promise even though the promise remained "invisible" for the next 13
years!!
I have a friend who is my hero in the faith. When
we first met, she lived in a very dangerous apartment complex. She was a
single mom and she had just recently gotten saved. Whenever I would ask
how she was doing, she’d smile and say, “Oh, I’m blessed.”
She didn’t look blessed to me. She didn’t have a job, she
was scared of her neighbors; her circumstances looked bleak indeed. But
she kept right on telling everybody that she was blessed. She was simply
believing God's promise to us when He said, “You will be blessed when you come in and blessed
when you go out.” (Deuteronomy 28:6 NIV)
Slowly, things began to change. She was offered a job working for the apartment complex. Little by little, the blessings began to flow. And she kept on telling people, “I’m blessed.” She did so well in her job that the managers started to notice. Pretty soon, they offered her a raise, a promotion, and a better position. She was able to move to a safe neighborhood. And the blessings kept flowing.
My friend, like Abraham, saw her
circumstances. She knew the
realities of her life, yet at some point she made a choice to believe God’s word instead of what she saw with
her eyes. God said she was blessed, and she, by choosing to believe it, declare it, and give God glory for it,
recieved the promise and became blessed.
For
no matter how many promises God has made, they are “Yes” in Christ. And so
through him the “Amen” is spoken by us to the glory of God. (2 Corinthians 1:20 NIV)
It is written: “I believed; therefore I have spoken.” Since we have that same spirit of faith, we also believe and therfore speak... (2 Corinthians 4:13 NIV)
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