Day 77

 

God's Timing

 

When he heard this, Jesus said, "This sickness will not end in death. No, it is for God's glory so that the Son may be glorified through it." Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus. Yet when he heard that Lazarus was sick he stayed where he was two more days.

 

                                     John 11:4-6

 



We were supposed to go on our mission trip to Honduras in July but the political situation there made it impossible. The airport in Tegucigalpa was closed and our flight was cancelled. We rescheduled for early September and things worked out this time, just the way God planned it.

We did medical clinics in the village of Lapairique. We saw 2,700 patients in 3 1/2 days. There were 161 professions of faith in Christ. It was a great week. We could sense the hand of God in bringing things together to accomplish what he wanted to do.

A woman came to the medical clinic with 2 small children. Both of the children were very sick. The youngest, just a baby, was only a few days away from death the doctors said. The children had impetigo, a skin disease that is treatable but if left untreated can lead to death. The children got the treatment they needed and their lifes were saved. If we had not been there the baby, without treatment, would have died in a few days and the older sibling might have lived for another week.

We had been disappointed when our trip had been postponed from July to September. It meant some of our team would be unable to go. God's timing was at work though. If we were there in July we would have not been in the village when the children were sick. By coming in September we were there at just the right time.

In John 11 Jesus was on the eastern side of the Jordan river with his disciples when he received a message that his friend Lazarus was sick and needed his help. Lazarus and his sisters lived on the western side of the Jordan river and a couple of days journey from where Jesus was at. From the details of the story and the distance between Bethany and where Jesus was we know that Lazarus must have died shortly after the messenger left Bethany to find Jesus. Jesus couldn't have possibly arrived before Lazarus' death. It was okay the message arrived "too late" because it was all in God's timing. God had something bigger in mind than healing a sick Lazarus. God wanted Jesus to raise a dead Lazarus back to life! The outcome of all this, Jesus tells us, was to bring God glory.

Where we saw the delay of the mission trip as a problem, God was at work. It was his timing to bring us to that village at just the right time. The end result: lives saved to the glory of God.

 

Upon Further Review:

 

Read John 11:1-16

• Where the disciples receptive to the visit to Judea and to God's timing?
• How can we reconcile the statement that, "Jesus loved Martha and her sister and Lazarus" with his waiting two days before leaving?
• Did Jesus know something the rest of them didn't know? And if so, what?