Are you one of the many in an apparently hopeless situation? Years and years of unanswered prayer have all but silenced your faint whisper of hope. You are at the place where you think even God and all His holy angels can't "give thee the desires of thine heart" (Psalm 37:4). You've been praying a long time. It's too late, you feel.
Maybe it's a health problem, or marital, or an estrangement. Maybe you just built your house in Baghdad and it's been shattered by bombs and you have no insurance. Whatever, you are tempted to say goodbye forever to that "desire of thine heart." And yet you have given your heart to the Lord, you keep His commandments including the Sabbath, you are DOING everything He says to do. But just prolonged waiting for prayer to be answered. There's a chapter in the Bible written especially to encourage you:
(a) "Do not let the son of the foreigner, who has joined himself to the Lord, speak, ... 'The Lord has utterly separated me from His people'; nor let the eunuch say, 'Here I am, a dry tree'" (Isa. 56:3). If a man in Isaiah's day had been castrated, that must have been about the most final negative answer to prayer he could imagine. A tree forever fruitless! A man in Israel must have children, especially a boy, or he's a write-off forever. Just endure until death releases you from vain hopes--his was the natural assumption of castrated males. You're simply outside the "family" of God.
(b) But the Lord has a special message for them: "'Keep My Sabbaths, and choose what pleases Me, and hold fast My [new] covenant, even to them I will give in My house and within My walls a place and a name BETTER than that of sons and daughters; ... an everlasting name that shall not be cut off. ... The Lord God gathers the outcasts of Israel'" (vss. 4-8).
(c) That's a renewal of the New Covenant promises God made to Abraham! "Choose" to believe when you think you can't; "hold fast" to the New Covenant promises, and you'll realize a "desire of thine heart" that is BETTER than you had once cherished or imagined.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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