Anticipating God's Good and Perfect Gifts

Today on the Embrace Prayer Line the devotion was about anticipation.  It’s Christmas and for most of the world we celebrate the time by giving gifts to each other. The speaker described how as a child, she and her sister anticipated opening the gifts that were under the Christmas tree.  She described what most of us might remember ourselves – the waiting with held in breath, the receiving and the tearing into the package because you can’t wait to see. Sometimes it would be something that you wanted and the excitement continues. Other times you would be disappointed because that is not what you desired and it would be like a pin stuck in an inflated balloon.

 

What are you anticipating?  What are expecting to happen this Christmas?  Or maybe you are living in the state of disappointment because what you expected to happen didn’t occur.  Maybe for you, you anticipate not hope but more doom and gloom. Maybe your expectation is that nothing good will happen now or in the next year.  Maybe you have found that for you, the only thing that you think comes is misery and pain.

 

May I tell you something?  I know of someone whose gifts are always good and perfect.  I know of someone who gives you just what you need.  You guessed right if you said God.  He is the giver of all good things. The bible says in the book of James 1:17 that “¹⁷ Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” 

 

If we put our hope in God, we will never be disappointed. We can anticipate His good and perfect gifts and know that He will deliver.  I urge you however, not to say what He didn’t and then make Him out to be a liar.  Sometimes we put a time line on when He should deliver.  God has told me many times that He is not a Genie.  It is not in our timing but in His perfect time that what He says will be accomplished.  His words are true.  So go ahead and hope again; go ahead and anticipate His goodness, His perfect peace, His strengthening Joy, His perfect will and definitely His good and perfect gifts.