Thursday, June 23, 2011

APPOINTED PART ONE

I love history. I love reading historical novels; actually I can get quite lost in them.  I loved history in school, and I love hearing stories of long ago. I grew up thinking that I was born into the wrong century, that somehow God should have placed me on Earth in the 17 or 1800’s. I just felt out of place like I didn’t belong. When the Little House on the Prairie dresses became popular again in the 1980’s I was one of the first people to buy the Simplicity pattern and make one. Whenever I find a museum in a place I am visiting that will be one of the first places I visit. I imagine what life must have been like back when the museum was somebody’s home and a family lived there.

It wasn’t until I had been an adult for quite a few years that I began to realize that God didn’t make a mistake (not that He could) and that He had placed me exactly where He wanted me to be in history. I was meant to be born in 1962 and although I would have liked to have been born in 1762 or 1862, that wasn’t God’s plan for my life. He wanted me to be born on July 6th, 1962 in Liverpool, Nova Scotia because He had a plan for me.

One of my favourite portions of Scripture is probably familiar to you all, Jeremiah 29:11 says: “For I know the plans which I have for you, says Jehovah; plans of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope.” And we are all familiar with Psalm 139:14-16:
 “I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.  My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them.”

God made me because He had a job for me to do! Me! God wanted me to work for Him! Everything that has happened in my life up until this moment and everything that I have done in my life up till now has prepared me for THIS moment in history. All of those circumstances have prepared me to do the work He has planned for me. Knowing that and understanding and accepting that makes me understand a little bit better why I couldn’t have been born in another time and place: because He needed me now ‘for such a time as this’.

I’m sure very few history makers actually thought they were going to be someone who changed history when they were doing whatever it was that made them famous. They just knew they had a job to do and they did it. In Judges chapter four we read the account of Jael, a housewife who changed the course of history. Jael was an ordinary girl who probably had dreams as a little girl of growing up and marrying and having children. She might have even dreamed of having her own home or being beautiful or a thousand other dreams that young girls dream. But probably nowhere in those dreams was there the idea that she might defeat an enemy of the Israeli people, singlehandedly. She probably would never have imagined that being an ordinary girl she would be recorded in God’s holy Word and that she would become a hero to a nation.

But Jael was created by God to carry out His plans for her life and she did. She was created for exactly that time in history and for that moment. Let me give you a little bit of the background before we read about what Jael did to save her people. Deborah, the prophetess and judge of Israel, called Barak, the commander of the army of Israel to her. She told him that God wanted him to take 10,000 men to hunt down Sisera the commander of King Jabin’s army and free the children of Israel from Jabin. Barak refused to go unless Deborah went with him, which she did.

Barak’s men found Sisera’s army and soundly defeated it but in the fray of battle Sisera escaped on foot and, as we read in Judges 4:17-24: “he fled  to the tent of Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite. For there was peace between Jabin the king of Hazor and the house of Heber the Kenite.  

 Jael went out to meet Sisera, and said to him, Turn in my lord, turn in to me. Do not fear. When he had turned in to her into the tent, she covered him with a rug. And he said to her, Please give me a little water to drink, for I am thirsty. And she opened a skin of milk and gave him a drink, and covered him. 

 Again he said to her, Stand in the door of the tent, and it shall be when any man comes asking of you, saying, Is there any man here? You shall say, No.  Then Jael, Heber's wife, took a peg of the tent and put a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him, and struck the peg into his temple, and beat it into the ground. For he was fast asleep and weary. So he died.

 And behold, as Barak followed Sisera, Jael came out to meet him and said to him, Come and I will show you the man whom you seek. And when he came into her tent, behold, Sisera lay dead, and the peg was in his temple.  And on that day God subdued Jabin the king of Canaan before the sons of Israel. And the hand of the sons of Israel went on, and pressed hard against Jabin the king of Canaan, until they had destroyed Jabin king of Canaan.”

Jael wasn’t a trained killer and we don’t know how this one act shaped and affected her life afterwards but we do know that she did what the army couldn’t do. She did what no one else could do. She did what she had to do. She did what God had created her to do. She was in the exact spot in history that God wanted her to be in. She was created for such a time as this.

Esther is the woman we look at most as being created for a purpose. It was her uncle Mordecai who actually told Esther, who knew but that she was brought to the kingdom for such a time as this. (Esther 4:14). Esther was born Hadassah. According to Esther 2:7,9 she was beautiful in her appearance and she was an orphan. The circumstances of her life had prepared her for what God was asking her to do. She was created for a purpose.

Each one of us are made for this time and place. We have been given gifts to help us carry out God’s will. Ephesians 2:10 tells us:“For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand so that we would walk in them.”God doesn’t call you to be who you are not, but who you are right now—who He made you to be, for the plan He intends for you. It’s easy to think that we have nothing to offer the Lord. It’s easy to feel intimidated by others who seem to be so much better at what they do than what we feel we can do. But God is not asking you to do your neighbour’s  job. He is asking you to do what He has prepared you to do—your calling.

God will engineer the circumstances of our life to bring us to the point that when He asks us to do something we will find that we are prepared. I once had a friend tell me that everything that happens to us is a lesson to be learned and that if we learn the lesson, we probably won’t have to repeat the situation. I don’t know how true that is but I do know that everything that happens to us God allows and that according to His Word He will bring good out of it. “For all things work together for good to them that love the Lord; who are the called according to His purpose.” (Romans 8:28)


We women have unique God given gifts for our circumstances. It is time we all stepped into the calling God has placed on our lives. So many people feel that only pastors or evangelists or missionaries are ‘called’ but I would beg to differ, no, I would actually say that is not even scriptural. We all have been called to the Kingdom for a specific time, place and purpose. He has a job for you to do! It may be a job that He hasn’t asked anyone else to do before. 

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