Have you ever looked at your life and wondered how on earth God is going to tie all of your chaos together to make a story that works?

Some days it can feel hard to believe that God is somehow able to juggle the enormous complexity of billions of lives, and in this week’s episode we delve into Luke 2, where we see how God brings together the bigger picture, and I teach you a tool that you can use to help you have faith when you can’t see how everything could possibly work out in the end.

Show Notes

• [01.44] God’s infinite capacity

• [03.27] A view from the Old Testament

• [05.14] A God of promises

• [06.22] Zooming out

• [07.42] God’s plan

• [08.18] A suitcase picture - a quick tool for you to use

• [10.57] The importance of faith

Quotes

“God is the master, weaving together the seemingly impossible to make his plans come to be.” – Lisa Linfield

“God has a plan.” – Lisa Linfield

“Each one of us needs to believe that he IS going to fulfill the promise that he has for you.” – Lisa Linfield

Related posts and episodes

• Why God isn’t answering your prayers

• The Humbling Discovery that’s shifting my focus

• The God of the impossible

• It's not over

• Surviving life's big changes that are thrust on us

• Deep Grooves: Launching my book

Subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or Spotify

Please do Subscribe to our Podcast on iTunes or Spotify and leave a review.  This helps the podcast to rank higher and therefore makes it more visible to others browsing podcasts in the hope they too may benefit from our content.

Get my book - Deep Grooves: Overcoming Patterns that Keep you Stuck

• You can get the first two chapters of my book FREE here

• If you want a paperback copy and you’re in South Africa, visit my site LisaLinfield.com

  If you want a Kindle copy or a paperback anywhere in the world, visit Amazon

TRANSCRIPT

Have you ever looked at your life and wondered how on earth God was going to tie it all together - all the bad decisions you’ve made, the hurt and pain you’ve experienced, the different people that fill your story, the bad politics of your country, the corruption and crime in the world, and the absolute craziness of social media, fake news, and a world that’s gone mad- to make a story that works, that’s so good, that it fulfils his promises to you?

Today we’re going to look at what Luke 2 shows us about God’s bigger Picture.

I don’t know about you, but One of the things I struggle with is the fight between what God’s already decided will happen, and what I influence and do.  To be honest, day to day, I’m just trying to survive juggling my kids, my work and my life – and don’t really have time to think about such deep things.

But it’s clear that God is somehow able to juggle the enormous complexity of billions of lives (Christian and non), multiple governments (good and bad), and my own decisions (a few rooted in God but most in my own selfishness) to weave them together to make sure that in each tiny weeny moment, my life is exactly where God wants it to be.

And whilst I, with my tiny human brain, may struggle to grasp God’s infinite capacity, it does bring me great comfort that

He’s got a plan for me and a plan for you, right?  A good plan.

But, in the hectic moment of the day, when we look at the facts before us, the tough things we are experiencing, we often forget, or can’t see that God is the master of weaving together the seemingly impossible to make his plans come to be.  Yet, with a few years of time and space from an incident, we can look back on our own lives and see things differently – those times when, in the moment, you had NO idea why such a difficult situation was bearing down on you … yet, as you look back, you see how God took what life, bad people, and our bad decisions gave him to work with, and crafted something good for us out of ashes?

Sometimes the plan seems contradictory

Now, the old testament Jews were just like us… they lived in tough, violent times, under significant oppression from bad governments… yet had received many prophecies about the Messiah that when put on paper seemed contradictory and all over the place.  The royal dignity of the messiah verses the least of these – a servant.  Just look at Matthew to see that even where he came from is not clear

·         Matthew 2:15 quotes Hosea 11:1 – “out of Egypt I called my son” which

·         Matthew 2:23 says “So was fulfilled what was said through the prophets that he would be called a Nazarene”

·         But most people at the time believed that Jesus, being from the line of David, would be born in Bethlehem.

How can one person be from 3 places?

But, our God is greater than us, and is able to use all things to achieve his good plan.  Just look at the beginning of Luke Chapter 2

You see, Mary and Joseph lived in Nazareth, in Galilee.  It was their home.  And the Roman Caeser at the time was Caesar Augustus… who was known for issuing Census’s to make sure that each province of the Roman empire paid the right amount of tax – based on the number of people they had.

Now Herod, who governed the jews was an astute politician.  He knew well what their customs and culture needed to keep them happy and not rebel against him.  So, he implemented this decree by leveraging their concept of tribal descendants, getting them to go back to the town of their fathers for the descendants – even though Caeser Augustus hadn’t asked this.…. And in doing so, the Jews could understand this concept – because in the Old Testament, God ordered Moses to count the people in the tribes – it’s the center of the book of Numbers.

So God, by ensuring his Messiah was born to a faithful Nazarite woman at the time of a greedy Caesar when the Jews were governed by a person who understood their customs ensured that he fulfilled the prophecies that he would be both a Nazerene, and born in David’s city of Bethlehem.  Following his birth, the persecution of baby boys led Joseph to take Mary to Egypt.

So let’s bring that back to you and me.

The State of the world and our lives feel at odds with the promises

There are times when each of us look at the craziness of the world, the decisions our leaders make, the violence that happens in the societies around us and wonder – where on earth is God?  We read the bible and see these amazing promises of God, like we chatted about in the previous episode, and we think – Lord, I look at the world, and I can’t see those promises fulfilled.

Yet the origins of Jesus show us that God truly is a God of promises – able to bring together the things that seem SO unbelievably contradictory… like Jesus being from Nazareth, Bethlehem and Egypt at a time when people were not as mobile as we are now and didn’t just fly on planes and move for jobs… and he brought all of that together to fulfil the promises he made about the Messiah.

He knew the full picture.  He knew of greedy Roman Caesar’s, astute Herod, and how they would impact the world of Mary and Joseph and the circumstances of Jesus’ birth.  So when he showed the prophets of the old testament the Messiah to come so they could encourage the Jews – each one of them only saw small pieces of Jesus’ life.

And that’s what happens when we look at our life, our current circumstances, we see only a few of the facts… yet God knows how he’s holding it together… and what the whole story looks like.

And like all good stories, characters that appear early in the story that seem relatively arbitrary at the time – re-appear a few episodes down the track and turn out to be hugely pivotal.  The situations that appear awful as the final episode of the season cliffhanger, turn out in fact to have saved our heroine from an even worser tragedy… a fact we only see months later with the first episode of a new season.

So as you zoom out at your own life - the corrupt politicians, the crime around, the tough economic conditions, the crazy weather patterns, the end of ‘the truth’ as we know it… and then zoom in and see relationships that are broken, financial circumstances that are tough, careers that haven’t gone according to your plan… do you sometimes wonder how on earth God is going to weave all of this together to produce not only a good story, but a great one?

Well, I know he is, because he has a good plan for each of us.  It may not be a comfortable one, it may seem all over the place, but it’s good because God is good.

It's all about looking right way up

And so I want to give you a quick tool to use when you can’t see the beauty… imagine you’re looking at a persian carpet… and all you see are crazy knots, ugly pieces of silk threads going all over the place and some blank spaces… and you’re told that this carpet has just sold for $100m… and you think to yourself, surely not… it’s not even a picture, there’s no beauty, and there’s no way on earth it would sell for $10.

And so, with not much tact, you say to the gentle old man that’s showing you the tapestry – there’s NO WAY in heaven this sold for $100m!!!!

And he smiles gently and says to you, “precious child, you think that because you’re looking at the underneath side of it.”  And he slowly turns it over and you see the most beautiful tapestry you have ever imagined and it takes your breath away – and you understand exactly why someone would pay such a high price for it.

And as you walk away, you slowly work out that that is your life.  From underneath the tapestry, it looks bad, even ugly, and at best, messy.  But God’s plan is sees it only from on top.  And as we learnt last week, “Blessed is she who has believed that the Lord will fulfil his promise to her.”

Draw close to him, and He will fulfil his promise to you.