“The days are coming,” declares the LORD, “when the reaper will be overtaken by the plowman and the planter by the one treading the grapes.” (Amos 9:13)

On might file this under: You do not have, because you do not ask (James 4:2). It’s been said that nothing tries God’s patience as much as when His people are praying. That’s because many times as we pray all we are essentially doing is giving our Lord advice as to what we think He should do.

Combine this with a healthy dose of unbelief and we can see why the Christian Church in America today is in the deplorable shape it is so obviously in. Frankly, many Christian congregations would simply be stunned if God actually did what they are praying for Him to do every Sunday almost without even thinking. This is what Charles Spurgeon addresses in this devotion:

When people hear about what God used to do, one of the things they say is, “Oh, that was a very long while ago.” They imagine that times have altered since then. Others among you say, “Oh, well, I look upon these things as great prodigies–miracles. We are not to expect them every day.”

That is the very reason why we do not get them. If we had learned to expect them, we should no doubt obtain them, but we put them up on a shelf, as being out of the common order of our moderate religion, as being mere curiosities of Scripture history. We imagine such things, however true, to be prodigies of Providence; we cannot imagine them to be according to the ordinary working of His mighty power.

I beseech you, my friends, abjure that idea, put it out of your mind. Whatever God has done in the way of converting sinners is to be looked upon as a precedent, for “the LORD’s hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither His ear heavy, that it cannot hear” (Isaiah 59:1, KJV) Has God changed? Is He not an immutable God, the same yesterday, today, and forever? Does not that furnish an argument to prove that what God has done at one time He can do at another?

Nay, I think I may push it a little further and say what He has done once is a prophecy of what He intends to do again–that the mighty works that have been accomplished in the olden time shall be repeated, and the Lord’s song shall be sung again in Zion, and He shall again be greatly glorified.