Your Boss or Friend is God's agent to carry out His will in your life.

Your Boss or friend is God's agent to carry out His will in your life. It doesn't matter how they feel about you or what their worldview is, or even if they've ever heard of the Lord. Our Father is in complete control of all things and one of them is how other people respond to us, including our bosses at work. There are of course many scriptures that show this, but this is the one I happened to read this morning, and next to it was a note from one of my books:

Psalm 75:6–7 —No one from the east or the west or from the desert can exalt a man. *But it is God who judges: He brings one down, he exalts another. *

Your promotion, or lack of it, is in the hand of God. Your superiors are simply His agents to carry out His will. They are not conscious of doing His will and never intended to (unless, of course, they are Christians prayerfully seeking to do the will of God), but that does not alter the result in your life. You can trust God in all the areas of your life where you are dependent upon the favor or frown of another person. God will move in that person’s heart to carry out His will for you. Bridges, J. (1988). Trusting God

Through His Word, God teaches us that He is able to move people's hearts and minds to do His Will and do so without violating or coercing their own wills. How He does it, we're not told. That's a mystery. We are simply told that He does do it, and we're told and shown examples of it over and over again. I didn't understand this though, until the Lord pointed out examples of how the ancients understood this. One of my favorite ones is in 2 Samuel 16. As King David and some of his leaders approached a city in Israel, a relative of Saul's came out and began throwing stones at David and cursing him. When we read that, we expect to see David get angry like we most certainly would, but he doesn't! Instead the captain of his guard gets angry and David basically tells him to chill out. That's surprising in itself, but what's really surprising is David's reason for doing so. Listen to what David says to him: 2 Samuel 16:10–12 —But the king said, “What do you and I have in common, you sons of Zeruiah? If he is cursing because the LORD said to him, ‘Curse David,’ who can ask, ‘Why do you do this?’ ” *David then said to Abishai and all his officials, “My son, who is of my own flesh, is trying to take my life. How much more, then, this Benjamite! Leave him alone; let him curse, for the LORD has told him to. *It may be that the LORD will see my distress and repay me with good for the cursing I am receiving today.” *

Making what the man did even worse, and giving David every reason He could need to punish this person, remember that God's law says in Exodus 22:28 —“Do not blaspheme God or curse the ruler of your people. * One I'm afraid that we often forget ourselves. But the point is that David understood that what had happened wasn't just between him and this man. He knew that God was involved too.

This is what we usually don't realize or if we do, then we forget about it. If we truly realized this, then nothing anyone did or said to us could possibly get to us, because, like Jesus, we'd realize that the only power they had was given to them from above. Instead though, we generally get angry, put down the person who's hurt us or done wrong by us. Instead, we need to remember that not only is God behind what's happening, but also that God uses everything for our good. So we should be asking the Lord what we need to learn from what happened to us, and of course, like Jesus told us, forgive the person who hurt us. Besides, when we don't cooperate with the Lord, it usually brings yet more negative consequences into our lives.

We often try to forget about the bad things that happen to us as they don't fit in with our view of God. In reality though, it's those things that cause us to grow in our faith, and it's those things that often turn out in the long run to either be a tremendous blessing in disguise or lead to a tremendous blessing that wouldn't have happened otherwise. Again, look at Joseph. If he hadn't been sold as a slave, he never would have been put in charge of Egypt.

The lesson I got from it was that I needed to trust God with my life enough that I no longer needed to know "why". I try to think of myself now like a private in the Army. He's given orders and expected to obey them, and never told why. Only the officers at the top know the reasons for those orders. I often remind myself of that old hymn, "Trust and Obey." We don't have all the information we'd need in order to understand it all anyway, only God does, and He operates on a "need to know" basis, and privates don't need to know.

I use this to remind me of how God operates because too often we tend to think that He thinks just like we do, and He doesn't. (Isaiah 55:8–9) We like to believe that we know what's best for ourselves and everyone else in our lives, but again, we really don't. We also like to believe that we can figure God out, and again, we can't. If we could figure Him out, then we'd be God, and He wouldn't. God is much bigger then our finite minds can wrap themselves around. When He does give us answers, He "stoops down" to show us why, (Psalm 18:35) the way we'd do in order to answer a young child's question about a serious subject. We really are just little children, only we have this huge inflated ego that thinks we're all grown up when we're not. He uses the circumstances and people in our lives, to put us in situations where we will grow in faith and grow up to be responsible adults in His Kingdom. If we'd but recognize this and trust Him, we wouldn't have to deal with so much stress, worry, anger and anxiety in our lives.

I thought I'd share a story of something that happened to me that illustrates this for those interested.

I remember years ago when I was fighting with workers comp to get them to OK a surgery I desperately wanted to rid me of the pain I live with. I had the surgery before and knew it would have rid me of the pain for at least 7 months, which would be like heaven to me, but they weren't cooperating with me or my doctor at all. I had prayed and prayed, but it seemed like the Lord hadn't heard me. In other words, God wasn't doing what I wanted Him to do and was quite sure was His Will - after all, it would help me and that had to be in His Will, right? Wrong. I literally fought them for over a year, even getting a lawyer, and still they wouldn't budge! You think I'd have recognized that God was behind this, but I was so focused on myself and what I wanted, that it didn't occur to me until close to the end.

Workers Comp had told me that for them to consider it, I had to have a certain procedure done; a procedure I'd had before and that to me was no more then legal torture. It was the last thing I wanted to do for sure, but in order to get that surgery, I finally agreed. My first news after the procedure was again from workers comp saying they wouldn't pay for the surgery, and again I was very angry and felt betrayed by God. Then my doctor emailed me and gave me the results of that procedure. I was shocked! He told me that my back had deteriorated so much since the first surgery that I wasn't even a candidate for it anymore since they'd have to do 3 times as much as they'd done the first time, which was basically impossible. It just wouldn't work. That's when I realized that God had been behind the insurances answer the whole time.

The Lord was merciful to me because He did show me "why" that time, but He doesn't always tell us why. In fact most of the time He doesn't. He never told Joseph why his brothers had sold him into slavery, or why he'd later been put in prison. He didn't tell David why he had to spend years running from Saul when He'd already told him that he'd been chosen to be the King of Israel. I'm sure you can think of many other examples too. He doesn't usually tell us because He expects us to live by faith and once we know why, it's no longer living by faith. Why did He tell me? I don't know. Maybe it was the thousands of prayers where I begged Him to tell me why the surgery wasn't being allowed. Or maybe it was because my daily habit was to be in His Word and always try to apply it to my life and He felt I needed to know this so I could better apply it next time. If workers comp had allowed that surgery and not fought me on it, I probably wouldn't be able to walk at all today. And the outcome would have still been the same, whether or not I knew "why".