“7 ‘You are the Lord God, who chose Abram and brought him out of Ur of the Chaldeans and named him Abraham. 8 You found his heart faithful to you, and you made a covenant with him to give to his descendants the land of the Canaanites, Hittites, Amorites, Perizzites, Jebusites and Girgashites. You have kept your promise because you are righteous.“NIV

‘’And you have done what you promised, for you are always true to your Word’’ (New Living Translation)

I remember sitting in bed in our little house in Lower Wortley, Leeds, early one Sunday morning. As I recall, it was still in the earliest days of the King’s church – during the period when we travelled back and forth every week. That day, it felt like God ‘quickened’ a passage of Scripture to me, and only in the last year or two have I come to realise how remarkably this ‘word’ has come to pass. With the passing of time I now have perspective.

If God does give you a prophetic word, you will know it really is God by what transpires. But it may take a long time to unfold. Not necessarily so, but it’s a possibility.

Of course, the truth is that this realm of the prophetic (impressions on the heart and so on) can be highly subjective, and we can get it wrong. But as someone has said, we’re on a sure foundation when we can point to any promise God has made in the Bible, and say to Him, ‘’Do as you have said.’’ George Mueller of Bristol is a great example of such praying, and his story is a remarkable one. If you can get hold of his biography, it will be well worth the investment of your time to read it. It builds your faith.

Here in Nehemiah 9, the person praying (possibly Ezra?) takes the long view. He looks back, not merely across decades, but centuries, and declares that God kept His promise to Abraham. From where he sat in human history he had sufficient perspective to be able to affirm this. Furthermore, from our vantage point, we know that God’s promises to Abraham were to be more completely fulfilled in the coming of Jesus and the growth and expansion of His church.

God keeps His promises and we can ‘stand’ on them. They are like rock beneath our feet.

PRAYER: Lord God, I pray that you will find my heart ‘faithful to you.’