Keeping His promise

         

     As I sit here at 70 reading once again the story of Elizabeth, Zechariah, and John; the tears come unbidden. I remember wanting a child so desperately, with doctors not at all optimistic. I remember each month praying and hoping and then being disappointed. 

     I  recall sitting, unable to keep from weeping, at a springtime clergy wives conference in which someone gave an anointed presentation about Mary. Back in my room, i asked the Lord, “Why was I weeping through her whole teaching?”  I thought I then heard so clearly the Lord promising me that I would have a child at Christmas. The annunciation and birth fell in symbolic line so perfectly with the current month, and I was happy beyond words. 

     However, by the next month I was once again disappointed….and devastated. Not just because I wasn’t ‘with child,’ but also because I thought I had heard Him so very clearly. I began to question whether I had ever heard Him in past times correctly at all. Month after month went by, then another two years, until one day I was sitting in a Bible study with friends and I heard Him (did I?) tell me to ask the group to pray over me for a child. I argued with Him: “Lord, they’ve prayed with me many times before. I don’t want to ask them again.” Silence. Then, “Ask them.”  So with nothing but the tiniest mustard seed of faith, I did.  

     To my ecstatic joy, I found I was carrying a baby soon after. We decided to name him Joshua, “Yahweh is salvation, restoration, and deliverance.”* When my obstetrician examined his turnwheel calendar to give me my expected due date, a huge smile lit his face. “Guess what your due-date is? Christmas!” It wasn’t until months later that it struck me that I had indeed heard Holy Spirit that spring day, and God had indeed fulfilled His promise. I just had the wrong year! 

     In the past few years God has been promising us deliverance from an evil national/international regime, as well as a revival with an incomprehensible billion soul harvest. Most of us, including the prophets themselves, thought He meant that very first or second year. The fact that longer gestation has been necessary to root out the depths of entrenched evil doesn’t mean He will not fulfill His promises. His Word NEVER comes back void. Sometimes we just have the timing wrong.  

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*For those who don’t know me personally, I now have three amazing, Adonai-loving children and 3 beautiful grandchildren. God is so o Good! 

**The name Zechariah means “God has remembered.” The name Elizabeth means “oath” or “covenant of God.” He is always faithful, even when we aren’t. Zechariah questioned God’s faithfulness, but God blessed him anyway. How merciful and kind is our loving Father. 

***Remember, Jesus/Joshua/Yeshua, versions from the Greek and Hebrew….include Rescue, Deliverance, and Restoration, as well as eternal salvation, which are all missions of our Lord in THIS life, not just in the next.