What Is Best For Us

Isaiah 48:17-19 

Pay Attention

This is what the LORD says— your Redeemer, the Holy One of Israel: “I am the LORD your God, who teaches you what is best for you, who directs you in the way you should go. If only you had paid attention to my commands, your peace would have been like a river, your well-being like the waves of the sea. Your descendants would have been like the sand, your children like its numberless grains; their name would never be blotted out nor destroyed from before me.”

 

How  Wisdom Is Proved Right

¹⁶ “To what can I compare this generation? They are like children sitting in the marketplaces and calling out to others:

¹⁷ “‘We played the pipe for you,
    and you did not dance;
we sang a dirge,
    and you did not mourn.’

¹⁸ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon.’ ¹⁹ The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Here is a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.’ But wisdom is proved right by her deeds.”

"God's ways are not our ways, and in the long run are what is best for us, although in the "short run", we don't see it as such.  We are so often like those children playing in the market place, satisfied with neither this or that. We are contestants is a "no win" game, it often seems, but the blame is ours, although we are blind to it. Isaiah reproaches us< "If only we had paid attention!"  Well, that's what Advent is for: to set aside time to see not only God's plan for the world unfolding, but also seeing God's plan for ME unfolding.  Let us renew our trust that what God wants for us IS the BEST for us.

Bro. Rene