Can You Trust God With Tomorrow?
Immediate desires demand satisfaction now, but faith looks further ahead. Discover what Abraham teaches us about trusting God with tomorrow.
Have you ever started a DIY project and knocked down an unwanted wall only to discover it was load-bearing—and you quickly searched online to see if the roof would fall down?
Or, have you sold your house and used all your money to buy an expensive camper complete with a bumper sticker proclaiming, “We’re spending our children’s inheritance!”—only to discover a few months later you needed the money you no longer had?
Management guru Tom Peters called this type of behavior, “Ready! Fire! Aim.” You act on impulse, take a decisive action, then try to fix your mistakes on the fly.
For many of us, “Ready! Fire! Aim” has become a way of life. We satisfy today’s impulsive desire and assume we’ll somehow deal with tomorrow’s consequences when they arrive. We give in to immediate gratification’s insistent begging, “Get what you want, now!”
But the still, small voice of faith asks different questions, “What has God promised?” and “Will my choices today serve God’s purposes for tomorrow—even beyond my lifetime?”
When Stephen defended his faith in Jesus, in Acts 7, he invoked the example of the Patriarch Abraham who trusted God’s promise to give him land, even though its fulfillment extended far beyond his lifetime.
Abraham wasn’t trying to secure his descendants’ future through prudent planning. It’s impossible for any of us to secure the future. Instead, he trusted the One who can.
Stephen said that God brought Abraham into the land of Israel. Then comes the startling part:
What did Abraham get from following God?
“Yet he gave him no inheritance in it, not even a foot’s length,”
Not even a square foot!
Yet God “promised to give it to him as a possession and to his offspring after him, though he had no child” (Acts 7:4-5 ESV).
Abraham’s faith looked beyond what he could possess today to what God had promised tomorrow. He could say “No” to immediate comfort because he trusted God with a future that only God could ensure.
And there’s something particularly powerful about Stephen choosing Abraham for this argument. Stephen was speaking to people clinging to what they presently possessed—the land, temple, traditions—while resisting what God was doing in Christ. Abraham, by contrast, was willing to leave what he possessed because he trusted what God had promised.
Today, before you pull the trigger for what you want now, stop and aim at what God says matters most. Trust God’s promises.
