Smiling at the Future (Day 16)

We talked in the last session about how this woman is clothed with strength and honor that come from the presence of God. She’s been living in the presence of God, living in the Word of God. As a result, she’s able to respond to the challenges and the pressures and the busyness and the realities of everyday life in the power and under the control of the Holy Spirit of God.

I think of Ruth. She lost her husband. She lost her brother-in-law. She lost her father-in-law. Then she and her bitter mother-in-law moved from Moab to Israel where she knew that she would certainly face racial prejudice because the Jews did not like the Moabites. She knew that she would face an uncertain future as a widow in a culture that had no room for widows.

She was a poor woman. The fact that she worked in the barley harvest—that was a poor person’s crop, and she was just a gleaner. Just to subsist, just to barely eke out an existence she had to work very, very hard. We picture someone like Ruth as this model of a woman, just this beautiful woman. But chances are she had rough hands, rough skin because she had been working hard in that barley field.

She was a woman who was clothed in strength and with honor because she knew Jehovah. She knew what He was like. She knew He could be trusted, and that’s the key to the second part of this verse that we’re going to look at today. “Strength and honor are her clothing; she shall rejoice in time to come.”

 I tend to get worried and pressured about things that haven’t even happened yet. If I’m clothed with strength and honor that come from being in the presence of the Lord, then I can look to the future with calmness, with peace, with joy, with anticipation.

Make sure in the burden-bearing that you’re in the yoke with Christ and letting Him carry that burden with you so that people won’t start to look at you and think, “Man, if that’s what being a mother is all about, I don’t think I ever want to be a mother.”

It’s important for your husband and your children to have a wife and a mom who looks at life with joy. Your husband and your children need a cheerful wife and mom in the home. So here’s a woman who’s confident. She’s free from fear. She’s free from fear about the future. She’s free from anxiety and from worry.

 “I’m a very protective mom. I’m an over-protective mom. I heard you on Revive Our Hearts recently quoting a verse that if God doesn’t guard the city, then we watch in vain (Psalm 127:1, paraphrased) and that the same applies to our children.” She said, “Boy, did a light bulb go on for me! I haven’t been trusting God with my children’s safety. I’ve repented of that sin.”

Boy, she called it a sin. She recognized it for what it was. She said, “I feel so much more relaxed. I realized that God is so much bigger than I am and that He can protect my children far more than I ever could.” See, here’s a mom who, when she looked at just herself and her circumstances, she became fearful; and when she became fearful, she became over-protective.

She’s free from fear. She’s free from anxiety. She’s free from worry, so she doesn’t have to be always fixing everything and everyone around her. She doesn’t have to be controlling her circumstances because she knows that God is in control of her circumstances.

The woman who is clothed with strength and honor that comes from God doesn’t have to live with those fears. Now, that doesn't mean that the problems won’t come. They will.

But it means that she knows that there is a God in heaven who is controlling that weather, controlling the environment, controlling her circumstances, who is better able to care for her and her husband, better able to meet their needs than she possibly could. As a result, she can relax. She can smile. She can look with joy upon the future.

There’s a tendency to just live with fear:

Fear about the future. Fear about your husband dying. Fear about losing a child. But as we have come to verse 25, we see that this is a woman who is clothed with strength and with honor, with dignity. She’s a woman who is not overcome with fear. The Scripture says in the second part of this verse, “She shall rejoice in time to come.”

She looks to the future, not with fear, but with hope. The reason she can do that, we said in the last session, is because her hope is in God and her fear is in the Lord because she reverences God. She has confidence in God. She knows that He’s in control. She knows she can’t control her circumstances and her future anyway.

We try to control things that we really can’t control? So she relinquishes control. She surrenders control to the God of the universe as if to say, “Lord, I know that You can handle this.”

Isn’t it foolish for us to lie awake at night worrying about things, some of which haven’t even happened, some of which may never happen. To be doing that when the Scripture says that the God who’s the creator of heaven and earth never sleeps. He’s up. He’s thinking about it. He’s dealing with all that concerns us. His Word promises in Psalm 138, “The LORD will perfect that which concerns me” (verse 8).

As you make those choices, make sure you’re not making choices that some years from now you will look back and you will say, “I wish I had done it differently. I wish I had been faithful. I wish I had hung in there. I wish I had trusted God to intervene in my circumstances rather than taking matters into my own hands and try to fix things myself.”d