God Loves Processes

When God puts something in your heart, not everyone will understand the vision God has given you or the project God has placed in your heart. And if you share it with the wrong people, people of little faith, they will kill God’s dream in your life. We must be very careful about whom we share the great dreams and miraculous visions in our hearts with.

People can help us up to a point, and we need them. We must seek allies and the cooperation of others, but we must also have a private dimension, a space where we shut ourselves in with the people who are truly sharing our struggle and who believe in the powerful God we believe in. We need them to strengthen our faith, to pray with us, to encourage us in the vision God has given us. Because when we spend our time trying to convince those who do not believe in the legitimacy or validity of our visions, we often lose time and squander precious opportunities to focus our energy on what truly matters.

There is something else about this miracle: it involves a great deal of process. It takes time and effort. They have to look for vessels everywhere, transport them, and bring them home.

And then it says that Elisha tells the woman, “Shut yourself in with your sons and pour into all the vessels, and when one is full, set it aside.” Verse 5 of Second Kings 4 says, “The woman went away and shut the door, enclosing herself and her sons inside. They brought her the vessels, and she poured the oil.”

Do you see how, in this case, Scripture takes time to describe the whole process, everything it involves? Because God loves processes. Often miracles will not happen in a sudden, overwhelming way; God will take His time. Sometimes the physical healing we are asking the Lord for will come through a process. God may even use doctors, or He may bring about a gradual healing or a partial healing.

Many times, the miracles the Lord Jesus Christ performed were like the case of the blind man on whom He spread mud made from earth and saliva. After the first application, the Lord asked him, “Well, what do you see?” And he said, “Well, I see men moving about as though they were trees.” And He saw that the miracle needed one more round, so He prayed for him again, and then the man saw clearly. Sometimes the Lord’s miracles are like that: they are gradual, they happen little by little, and we must have the faith to keep seeking, to keep asking until God completes His work.

God is a God of miracles, and sometimes His vision is long-term. When the Lord brought the Hebrews into the Promised Land, they had to fight many battles. We see there in the books of Exodus and Joshua how long it took to clear Canaan of the enemy tribes, and God did not remove them completely, either. God sometimes killed the wild beasts little by little, driving them out little by little as the Jews occupied the land, because God had His strategy too. He wanted—or rather, He did not drive out the enemy tribes completely so that the land would not be left uninhabited and overrun by wild beasts. He drove them out little by little; they won battles little by little, because God has His plans.

I say that God often works supernaturally through natural means: through nature, through human processes, through interventions. Look at how God has worked over centuries and centuries to carry out His plan of salvation, using history, using people, using nations, using political and economic events to carry out His process.

God’s children who are intelligent and discerning understand that God’s processes are often long, complex, even tedious. Imagine this woman: every time they brought her a pot, she had to pour oil into it. She had to have the patience to trust God, and she had to follow instructions too; she had to be obedient. God’s prophet gave her very clear instructions: Go, look for pots, bring them back, shut yourselves in, then pour the oil into them one by one. All of this had to be part of a process.

In fact, the number of pots she brought determined the magnitude of the miracle. How interesting, isn’t it, that when the pots were all filled with oil and there were none left, the miraculous flow of oil stopped. I imagine that if this woman had understood how God’s miracle was limited by the number of pots she could get, she would have gone to other countries to borrow pots so she could have even more oil.

How often do we, by the way, limit God because our vision is narrow? God wants to bless us in great and extraordinary ways, but our vision is narrow, and so God confines Himself to the scope and breadth of our vision. Let us not put obstacles in God’s way; let us not limit God through our lack of faith. Let us envision great things, and when God tells us, “Go for it,” then, look, go for it with everything you have. Throw all the wood you can on the fire God is going to kindle in your life, because perhaps God wants to do something absolutely extraordinary, far beyond what you dare to imagine.

This woman received her miracle through her diligence, her obedience, and also her patience in watching it unfold little by little. In the same way, we too need that kind of persistent, ambitious, long-term faith. God bless you. Until our next meditation.