God is never in a hurry

Naaman reacts violently when told to go to the Jordan River and dive seven times, and how God many times humbles our reasoning to then open us to the humility we need, and the openness, and the proper disposition so that He can then do the right things. miraculous works He wants to do in our lives.

We also talk about the fact that we have to reject the tendency to judge the human processes and the processes of God, and the servants of God, and the churches of God by their external envelope and look rather at their internal content, and whether or not they reflect the values of the Kingdom of God because that is what God truly seeks when choosing the people, and the churches, and the ministries that He wants to use, and that many times are not as dazzling or attractive as one would like to think because that does not matter to the Lord ; Rather, He often delights in using the humble and the simple.

And it is interesting that when Naaman is ready to go back to his country upset, without obeying the directives given by the prophet Elisha, his servants; It is interesting that it is these humble people who play a determining role in this whole story. First we have the young slave girl who breaks the news to Naaman's wife that there is a prophet in Israel who can heal her master, right? Notice how from this humble girl comes the word of solution to the problem.

And here when Naaman is almost gone, and he is going to lose the opportunity of his life for this healing that he so much needs, it is his servants who say to him, with such humility and simplicity that they speak to him: Father, if the prophet had asked you to you did something immense and sacrificial, and terribly hard work, wouldn't you have done it? how much more if what they tell you is something so simple that it does not require so much, but simply that you dive seven times in the river and then be clean.

And Naaman, thank God and for his blessing, he listens, he lets himself be carried away by the advice, as one already sees that something is happening in his life and in his character. An impetuous and haughty man thinks, and God's breaking process is working. And he bows his head and submits to the humble recipe that God has given him through Elisha.

I imagine there was that struggle inside of him as he took off his clothes and put on more suitable clothing to get into the water. I imagine that he was praying that no one would see him, this great general, this man always used to wearing a dress uniform and now has to in a sense probably become fragile, and even exhibit his leprosy to some extent to immerse himself in this water that perhaps is a little dirty, and that she is not the best, and that she is not the best that he would want, and she is exposing herself by becoming fragile.

I guess his servants were around watching what was happening and every time he went into the water once and out, twice and out, three times, four times, nothing happened, five times, all the same, imagine the mental process through him. Which Naaman has been going through all this, and he is wondering: what am I doing here? I must be crazy to get into this, nothing is going to happen. But it's all part of God's process isn't it? when God is dealing with our life.

I say: God is never in a hurry. He is interested in passing us through a process of improvement, of inner struggle. Sometimes God locks us in a cage and puts us there to hold the bars of the cage until we get tired, and like the colt that has been tamed by the rider we finally break. And I believe that God was passing Naaman through that process, and that's why He tells him seven times.

And it's interesting because many times, God's processes and the things that God wants to do in our lives take time, and sometimes God tells us something and promises us something, and we go this way, we go there and we can't find the way out. . We have a dream and the first time it failed. We go to university and the first year it is very difficult for us to get through the classes and our tendency is to lower our arms and abandon the battle, but we do not understand that in this process God wants to form in us certain characteristics of effort, faith, humility of heart , dependence on God, sustained prayer, an attitude of war, humbling ourselves to our expectations that God is going to make things fast.

Impatience, intolerance of others, sometimes we believe that we are the great thing and God has to break us and go through a long-term desert process. In this process of waiting as God did with Israel, 40 years in the desert, he writes to them: I put you there to break you, to humble you, to show you that man will not live on bread alone but on every Word that comes out of the mouth of God. , and to prepare you to bless yourself at the end, and to remind yourself that God is the source of your blessing.

God deals with us that way and He is not so interested that we simply ask for a miracle and that we continue to be as, shall we say, impatient and immature, impulsive as we were; what God is interested in is, as we have said from the beginning, to form the character of Jesus Christ in us, and He intervenes in our lives in a very persistent, effective, thorough, detailed way and that is why we have to see all things that happen in our life as God's treatment and God's training to bring us to the blessing that He wants to bring us, and to form in us characteristics and qualities that later allow us to be useful to the Lord, as he did with Peter, with Paul, with Elijah himself that later we are going to have a study about the life of Elijah and how in principle it manifests itself in the life of the prophet Elijah.

So that's what's happening here in Naaman's life. God is taking you through this long process, seven times on this dirty river. And he says that on the seventh time when he dives the seventh time, his flesh became like that of a child: perfectly clean, lush, tough and youthful, because when God performs a miracle He makes it perfect and when we submit to His processes then God shows us that there is nothing like obedience.

Naaman was finally subject to God, he underwent the process of training and breaking God in his life that he wanted to do something in his life, and use it to bless us, and maybe use it to return to his nation as an evangelist of the God of Israel . So God went through this process and taught him that there is no other god like the God of Israel.

And we will see later what happens when he experiences this miracle using God's process that he is a changed man. Not only is he physically changed but he is also changed in terms of his heart and attitude, which is precious and we will study this topic in our next meditation. May the Lord bless you.