Lynn Jones: Trusting God for Your Future
Many American businesses practice an inventory management strategy called “Just-in-time.” Following this strategy, a company keeps the absolute minimum amount of inventory on hand, receiving goods and supplies from their suppliers only as they are needed for production or sales. This approach allows them to control storage costs by eliminating large stockpiles of goods, relying instead on accurately forecasting demand and maintaining strong relationships with their suppliers. This way goods and materials arrive just when they are needed.
This approach to the way companies do business has some implications for the way we do life. We often worry about challenges that we will face in the future and whether we will have the resources to face those challenges. Our tendency is to want to build up a huge inventory against any conceivable trouble that we will face in the future.
Big inventories are a hedge against living by faith. Because of this, God has long been engaged in the business of trying to get us to reduce our inventories.
When Israel was headed to the Promised Land, God told them that He would give them enough manna each morning to meet their needs for that day. There was just one stipulation. No one could gather more manna than was needed for that day. If anyone tried to gather more than was needed for that one day, the manna would spoil. They had to be willing to trust God to meet the needs of the new day when it arrived.
Jesus included the same principle in the Lord’s Prayer. He said that we should pray to God, “Give us this day our daily bread.” No more than that. It is our tendency to want to fill our freezers with enough bread to last for many days in the future, but God encourages us to trust Him to provide the bread that we need each day.
Horace Greeley asked Abraham Lincoln at the beginning of his presidency, “Will the nation be plunged into a civil war?” Lincoln responded by telling the following story: “There were some lawyers in Illinois who followed the judge from town to town to argue cases. As they traveled, they had to cross several rivers, including many that were swollen. They were particularly worried about the Fox River. In a small town where they had stopped for the night, they met a circuit-riding preacher. He had crossed the Fox River many times, so they asked him about it. ‘I have one rule that helps me cross the Fox River,’ he said. ‘I don’t cross the Fox River until I get to the river.’”
God does not promise to give us today all that we will need for the future. We must journey toward future threats armed with nothing more than faith that God will be there to give us, just in time, exactly what we need.
Lynn Jones is a retired pastor who lives in Oxford. He does supply preaching for churches in his area and often serves as an interim pastor. Jones is also an author, has written two books and writes a weekly newspaper column. He may be contacted at: kljones45@yahoo.com.
