Secret Weapon to Frustrate Our Worst Enemy

Do your problems seem to gang up on you at certain periods of your life? I've been feeling in a whirlwind of real problems of late. Let me give you a bit of scene-setting and then share an insight that came to me yesterday while trying to encourage someone else in this predicament also.

The last week of February I began correspondence by email with a woman refugee from the Ukraine, who had managed to get to the small country of Georgia, with her two teen-age children. She has a job in a small restaurant and they are able to live there, and allowed to eat the leftovers at the end of the day. But all three of them have health or medical issues, and she doesn't have enough to meet these bills. I spent 3 days over the end of Feb/start of March to send them what funds I could spare, and finally it appeared that I could send it directly to her bank account via MoneyGram.

Yesterday I discovered it had NOT gone through. I contacted MoneyGram's support, and was told to call an 800# to talk to a live agent. But once he found out that I had never met her in person, only by email, and because they had found people fleecing North Americans from there via MoneyGram,they cancelled the transaction.

I was still feeling devasted about this after supper when I got an email from as pastor in Africa who travels a lot about his country conducing evangelistic and revival meetings. He unloaded his burden for his national people, and how he couldn't keep up with all his opportunities to preach because of the travel expenses.

I wrote back to sympathize with his need, and promised to pray, but as I wrote I began to share some extra notes, that came to me as I wrote. I explained that instead of begging God over and over again for miraculous provisions, we should give our problem to the LORD GOD, and then leave it up to Him to decide how He was going to solve our problem. I pointed out that if God told us ahead of time how He was going to meet our need, Satan might overhear or read that over our shoulder, and that would give him just the cue to run ahead and meet us at the pass, and still prevent us from receiving the blessing God has ready for us.

Yes, I know! I wasn't finished yet when I realized that this was exactly the advice I needed to apply. I went on to say that when Jesus died on the cross Satan must've just about been killed himself with laughter; the Son of God, Jesus, was dead! He had won! Now imagine his shock when on Easter morning, the tomb was found empty - Jesus was alive!

(I once read that Satan can overhear what we say aloud, or read what we write, but what we pray silently in our spirit is kept from him. Not sure if there is a Biblcal reference for this). But this concept helps me to realize that God may deliberately hold back answers to our prayers until the last minute, to thwart our enemy. But this does mean we have to exercise some faith in our GOD and HIS awesome powers!

So this morning I took time to make a list of my current problems, and commit them to the LORD for solutions, and not to fret or try to solve them all by myself - rather to keep pushing myself into a posture of true faith! In each situation.

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