Posted on 08/11/2022 8:20:55 PM PDT by Pilgrim's Progress
“A good man obtaineth favour of the LORD: but a man of wicked devices will he condemn” (Proverbs 12:2).
“A good man obtaineth favour of the LORD,” now, the Lord said that there is none good but God, and so that part is true, but at the same time you do find in the Bible good men. By good man, we are talking about someone that is saved, somebody that is trying to do right, somebody that loves the Lord, and is going forward in his Christian life. He is not always what he should be, and he is certainly not perfect, but he is doing his best to live for the Lord.
Well, that good man obtains favor of the Lord. You might ask, does favor mean money? Well, it might. Does this favor mean blessings? It might. Does favor mean I get to live to be 100 years old? Possibly, but we tend to kind of overrate things that are important to us, and to underrate things that are important to God and what He might mean by favor. We Americans are idolaters, it’s just our nature; and if we are not careful, we will substitute health and happiness, and Caribbean cruises, a nice place, and a lot of money, and a nice retirement and a beautiful wife or a handsome husband or healthy kids for what God intends to bless us with. We tend to confuse are all the things we want with all the things we really need.
Well, it says that “a good man obtaineth favour of the Lord,” sometimes it is easy to underestimate the value of favor.
Now, you can go find a bunch of verses on favor if you want to; but favor is essentially where you abide in the presence of the Lord. Those of us that were blessed to have good mothers and fathers were “favored” with a good family. We weren't necessarily rich, and we didn't get a new gold plaything every day, or anything like that; but we were favored to grow up in a family that loved us. You can’t put a price on that, amen?
Sometimes we want the Lord to bless us. We want Him to answer our prayers, and often our prayers are that material things would come to us that, or that things would work out in our favor in everything, and that we get what we want, or that our car doesn't breakdown and all that good stuff. Sometimes things just don't happen that way. We need to be careful not to overlook favor. Well, in that respect, consider Proverbs 19.
“The king's wrath is as the roaring of a lion; but his favour is as dew upon the grass” (Proverbs 19:12).
Now, you know who the King is, right? It is the King of kings and Lord of lords, the King of heaven. If you are going to say that if there is something that the Bible says that favor is like; the Lord's favor, it's like dew on the grass. Now, dew on the grass is a subtle thing. Dew doesn't come in the middle of a thunderstorm with winds whipping around and thunder crashing and lightning flashing and all that kind of stuff, it comes quietly. Imagine falling asleep on the grass, then then suddenly waking up to find everything is wet without really noticing the process of it.
The surface of something has to be cooler before the dew forms on it. Practically, you will have to be cooler toward this world, and you'll have to once awhile stop and be still: “Be still and know that I'm God: I will be exalted among the heather, I will be exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10), before the dew settles and condenses, and one day you wake up, and you realize in looking back, that the Lord's favor has been upon you.
Again, it's not just about one segment of life; just health, or money, or a raise, and a job. It's a bigger picture and so much more subtle picture, but it says there in Proverbs 12:2, “A good man obtaineth favour of the LORD: but a man of wicked devices will he condemn.
Haven't you found at times that the Lord's blessings are like that? You start looking back and you realize that you have really been blessed?
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God carries us all at one point or another,most don’t even realize it . Footprints in the sand comes to mind. All glory to God.
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