Psalm 31:15(NLT)
“My future is in your hands.”
The Words of the psalmist in Psalm 31:15 are very simply spoken, but they are meaty and levy a giant piece of wisdom for living a more than abundant life through Jesus Christ. This verse is about trusting God as our Source and Sufficiency. He alone holds our future in His hands, and we must trust that He wants the best for us infinitely more than we want it for ourselves. Our faith in God and our love for Him must outweigh our loneliness. It must be greater than our need for companionship, and higher than our desire to be loved by a man. For some women, this is a stretch too far. They don’t want to hear it. They’ve been praying for too long, and to them, the length of their prayers proves their devotion to Heavenly Father. “What more can He require?” they think to themselves. The thing about faith is that we’re not the ones to decide when it is firmly placed in God. He’s the only One who knows our hearts, and this is a truth we must face.
God requires total trust in the reality that our futures are in His hands. For some of us, this is challenging because marriage is something that we greatly desire. We want to be a wife to someone really special to us and share our lives with him. This isn’t complicated and surely God wants to bless us in this area of our lives, but we have to remember that He is a God of order. He has told us in His Word that He wants us to grow spiritually and become more and more like Christ. He said in 2Peter 3:18(NLT), “you must grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” This is God’s priority for us, and everything else is secondary to it.
In Mark 12:30(NLT), Jesus Christ said, “And you must love the LORD your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength.” This is the greatest commandment and all the other laws hang upon this one. Loving God with all our hearts, souls, minds, and strength is loving Him with all that we are. Even though some of us have been on this Christian journey for a long while, we still don’t have a clear vision of what it looks like to love God this way. Some of us are still holding on to something in our hearts that keeps us from fully loving God. And whether we admit it or not, deep down we’re looking for the new man in our lives to complete us.
For many of us, there were times in the past when our actions conveyed that we put the man in our lives above our allegiance to God, and this is a problem for us as we attempt to have unshakable faith. Our faith in God must be expressed through our love for Him, but right now, many of us are far from this in our minds and hearts. “If he would only ask me…” reverberates from our hearts, because we want to be connected to a spouse. We want to be loved. Rest assured that our Heavenly Father knows this. He’s the One that gave us this desire, so He knows what we’re going through. He also knows that we’re not as spiritually strong as we think we are. We’re still willing to let our relationship with Heavenly Father fall to second place, and this kind of attitude will bring disaster in the long run.
Jesus Christ commands us in Matthew 6:33(ESV), “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” Again, there’s a place within the heart of every single woman that tells God where we stand in our devotion to Him. Faith comes from that place, and if it is not fully persuaded and sold out to God, He is asking us to seek Him, and to ask Him to do a work within our hearts through His precious Holy Spirit. God must be our strength and greatest love, because this is the only way to be blessed. He wants to help us be strong in that place in our hearts, so that we can stand on the authority and power of His Word. Then when satan tries to attack our marital unions, we will have the spiritual strength to guard against it by standing with the Spirit’s sword, back to back with our husbands.
Our Master Jesus said in John 15:16-17(NLT), “16 You didn’t choose me. I chose you. I appointed you to go and produce lasting fruit, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask for, using my name. 17 This is my command: Love each other.” Jesus Christ makes it clear who is in control. We did not choose him first, but he chose us, and we were chosen for God’s purpose. The Father is always willing to bless us and do so abundantly, but there’s a condition to the promise He’s made us. We must bear fruit, the kind that remains. The only kind of fruit that remains is the kind that is produced from the love of Christ. It’s sharing the Gospel and doing the kind of good works that will please God.
If we have a history of not bearing much fruit—the kind of fruit that lasts, that’s an issue that must be addressed with our Heavenly Father. Some of us are expecting the promise but have not met God’s requirement. It’s time to set our focus not on a relationship with a man but on our relationship with God. Often, not loving Him with all that we are is the thing that keeps our blessing from our reach. Rather than thinking, “if he would only ask me to marry him,” we need to think about the reality that God has asked us to love and seek Him first, and when He sees this kind of love for Him in our hearts, doors will open and we will be ready to walk through them.■
Scripture quotations marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., Wheaton, Illinois 60189. All rights reserved.
English Standard Version (ESV)
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version. ESV® Text Edition: 2016. Copyright © 2001 by Crossway Bibles, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.
“If He Would Only Ask Me”, written by Kim Times, edited by Reverend Fran Mack and KLizzie for Sundie Morning Sistas ©2023. All rights reserved. All done to the glory of God through Jesus Christ, our Lord! SMS is dedicated to inspiring and encouraging Christian Women through the Word of God.