Investing in Futures

I don’t know if this has ever happened to you before, but tonight I was talking on the telephone, and I heard myself say something I hadn’t really known that I knew before. It was a situation in which not only was the Lord speaking through me, but also to me.

This woman has got about the biggest marriage mess you’d ever want to see. I mean, it has everything. Money, sex, violence, former spouses, kids from prior marriages, illegal activities, and who knows what all else. They are currently not living together—in fact, he is not legally allowed to even have contact with her—but within three weeks she must make the decision of continuing in the marriage, or getting a divorce.

On the one hand, she has her Christian friends who are telling her that, as a Christian, she cannot get a divorce. Some have even told her they will not continue to be her friends if she does. She wants to please the Lord, and is more than a little bit frightened by the thought that divorce could be a sin. Some of these same friends are telling her they’ve seen worse cases than hers (although that frankly seems unlikely) in which the Lord has miraculously restored the marriage.

On the other hand, she has people who have known her husband for years, who are telling her that he hasn’t changed a bit, and that he’s a very smart, bad man, and she should get out as fast as she can. She has lawyers telling her that her only legal protection from him is divorce. She has the evidence of her own experience with him, which is pretty much all bad.

What decision is she going to make?

She wanted help making that decision, but, of course, she is in a world of confusion right now because she has already asked far too many people to help her make her decision. And it was at the point that the words came.

She cannot make her decision based on the past, nor can she make her decision based on the present, because God can change everything in one instant. She must make her decision based on the future.

As the words came out of my mouth and hit my ears, I thought, wow. That may sound far out to you, but it’s true! All our "heroes of faith," listed in Hebrews eleven, based their decisions on the future. Had they made their decisions because of the past or the present, those decisions would have been far different.

But here is the catch: we don’t know the future. I told her to stop listening to all of her friends’ opinions, and spend time with the Lord, because He alone knows the future.

You can turn off the news, you know. You don’t need to know someone’s opinion about the present. All you really need to know is God’s opinion about the future.

That’s the only opinion that counts.

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