Resting in God's Providence

This episode contains portions from the following programs:

"Embracing the Mysteries of Providence"

"Walking in Faith, Not Fear"

"Where Is God in the Book of Ruth?"

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Dannah Gresh: So, I was out of town on a ministry trip. Farmer Bob was holding down the fort at home. There was a tornado warning, he said. He didn’t even have time to respond, really. He watched—helpless—as a microburst of wind felled three magnificent walnut trees in just a few moments of fury. The once-thriving mini grove lay in splintered ruin, its trees snapped like matchsticks, branches tangled in twisted heaps, and the earth littered with uprooted trunks, as if a giant’s fury had ripped through its heart.

In some ways, we were sad. They were majestic trees, especially one I was fond of. It provided wonderful shade in the summer and was an apartment complex for my red bellied woodpeckers—that’s probably what made me the most sad. But Bob and I were also thankful. We were grateful no one was hurt. Glad it hadn’t landed on the house or my barn babies—the horses and goats and such. 

You know, that day is a tiny picture of a much bigger theological concept—the providence of God. We’re gonna talk about that today.

Hi, I’m Dannah Gresh, and you’re listening to Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

We’re about to hear from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, Tom and Diana Elliff, and more, talking about this whole idea of providence. So keep listening!

Back to our trees. Did God make them fall? Does He control the weather? Could He have prevented it? And was He protecting us from something worse happening?

All of those questions have to do with God’s providence. Let’s have Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth introduce us to the concept and get some definitions squared away. She and her husband, Robert, wrote a book called You Can Trust God to Write Your Story. And listen to the subtitle. It’s, Embracing the Mysteries of Providence. Here’s Nancy.

Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth: There may not be any word in the Scripture that has more mystery attached to it than the word “providence."

I often say, “I love living under providence!” I love living under providence, and I hope at the end of this session and after you read this book, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story, that you will be often saying, “I love living under providence.” There is no safer place to live. There is no more peaceful place to live. There is no more joyful place to live, even in the midst of pain and heartache, than to live under providence.

Now, providence is not a word you hear a lot in everyday conversation. 

But it’s an incredibly important word and concept. What does it mean? Well, tucked inside this three-syllable word is the shorter word provide—providence, provide—which combines two Latin words, one that is kind of like the word video, which means “to see,” and then the prefix pro, which means “before.” So that provide part means“to see before.”

God sees things before we see them. He sees things before they happen. To go before—God goes before us. He sees and knows everything before it even happens, and He makes provision—providence—for whatever we will need at that time. He doesn’t always tell us what it is before that time, but He’s gone ahead to make provision.

Just stop and think about that for a moment. Imagine the peace, the comfort, the hope that would be ours if we really believed that God sees and knows everything that lies before us, before it happens, and that He has already provided whatever we will need when we get there. What incredible freedom that would give us from fear, anxiety, and dread.

Providence is God’s watchful care over His creation—the plants, the animals, and the humans—over all of His creation. And what an amazing gift that is to us. But that’s not all there is to God’s Providence.

The word also speaks to His wise, sovereign rule over every detail of His creation—His watchful care and His sovereign rule.

Now, this thing of God’s sovereign rule over all of His creation is admittedly a subject that can stir up controversy. But when you think about it, there are really basically two options. Door number one: God sovereignly causes and/or permits everything to happen that happens in our lives and in this world.

Or, door number two: God stands by and watches passively and powerlessly, unwilling or unable to do anything about what happens.

When it comes down to it, those are really your two choices: A God who does sovereignly rule or who doesn’t, and He’s unable or unwilling to do anything about what’s going on in our world—which would make Him not God at all.

Let me just read to you some Scriptures that talk about the providence of God. They don’t use this word; the word isn’t actually found in the Scripture, but the concept is all through the Scripture. 

God’s provision and sustenance—we read about that aspect of His providence in Psalm 145, verse 15: “The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food in due season.” God provides for the needs of His creation.

Jesus talked about this in Matthew chapter 6. Beginning in verse 25, He says, “Do not be anxious about your life.” I think He would say this to Americans who have this hyped-up fear, worry, anxiety, and anger. He says:

Don’t be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. . . . Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. [God’s providence, His watchful care over His creation.] Are you not of more value than they? . . . And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin, [they’re not anxious or worried or angry] yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

God’s provision, His sustenance of His creation—birds, flowers and us—it’s all an expression of His providence.

And then we go out to the big picture, the macro-picture of history and world affairs and current events and governments and nations and kingdoms, and all the stuff in the news. That’s probably half the reason Americans are angry, stressful and worried, is because there’s so much crazy stuff going on. Right? In the news—I mean, some days you just think, “I shouldn’t watch any more of this. It’s all crazy.”

But where is God’s providence in this? Let me read you a few verses.

Daniel chapter 2—and by the way, the book of Daniel is a great study in providence. It says, 

He changes times and seasons; he removes kings and sets up kings (Dan. 2:21).

He does according to his will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth; and none can stay his hand or say to him, “What have you done?” (Dan. 4:35).

He makes nations great, and he destroys them; he enlarges nations, and leads them away” (Job 12:23).

Who’s in charge here? So what are we worried about? Right? I love this verse: 

The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all (Psalm. 103:19).

That’s a verse you need plastered on the walls of your house and wherever you tend to be worried or anxious or fearful or angry. Put it where you can think about it and see it and counsel your heart. “The Lord has established his throne in the heavens, and his kingdom rules over all.” And then for the “all,” fill in the blank of whatever that “all” is bothering you today.

What’s making you worried? Stressed? Angry? Does His kingdom rule over that?

Dannah: Hmm, great questions from Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth. If God really is ruling over all, then the things He brings into our lives are there for a purpose. Even the hard things.

In the 1700s a poet named William Cowper wrote a hymn that speaks of God’s providence. It’s called “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” One of the stanzas goes like this:

Ye fearful saints, fresh courage take:
The clouds you so much dread
Are big with mercy and will break
In blessings on your head.
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust Him for His grace.
Behind a frowning providence,
He hides a smiling face.

Sometimes we don’t enjoy what God allows in our lives. They’re what Cowper called “frowning providences.” But it’s so helpful to remember that God’s face is really smiling and loving and caring toward His children.

Let’s hear from two individuals who are resting in the providence of God, even when they’re “frowning providences.” 

Tom Elliff and Diana Barber both experienced the death of their spouses. Then God brought them together. Here are Tom and Diana Elliff, in conversation with Nancy.

Nancy: Can you tell a short version of your dad? That was a hard providence in your life.

Tom Elliff: Well, my father was one of those ministers and everybody’s hero in our family. And we cannot explain this except to say that, as he told me later on, he said, “I got to a point in my ministry where I was just coasting. I failed to realize it’s daily bread.” (I wish I could emphasize that with every one of us—it’s daily bread.) And he said, “I just got out of the Word and would mechanically preach what I had preached as I’d go from place to place.”

And in the process of that, my father was unfaithful to my mother and, ultimately, left her and married someone else.

Nancy: And this was after years of faithful ministry.

Tom: They were sixty-five years of age when this happened. They’d been married forty-three years—if you can imagine something like that.

Nancy: I remember this. It was just so astonishing, hard to believe.

Tom: That’s right. And yet, in His providence (we don’t have time to tell the entire story), God brought him . . . God brought them . . . I had the privilege of pastoring my father, after my mother’s death, pastoring my father and his wife for almost twenty years. He lived until he was ninety-seven.

Nancy: God turned ashes to beauty.

Tom: Absolutely. And in that, like what Joseph said to his brothers, “What you meant unto me for evil, God meant unto good.” In that, God took the stinger out of that horrible, horrible event that was so shattering to us. It has taught thousands of people how to forgive. I’m so grateful for that. I praise the Lord that what was meant for evil was turned to good, but only in the providence of God.

Nancy: I remember you and your family, your brothers and sisters, walking through that season when you couldn’t see the restored man that your dad was going to become.

Tom: Correct.

Nancy: He was restored through repentance and the grace of God, but it was a long process.

Tom: It was a long process, but it was a process that did take place, for which we are eminently grateful, because it’s a picture of the grace of God. And it remains that to this very day.

Nancy: Yes. It’s a beautiful picture.

Tom: Yes. And from that to God’s leading through physical tragedies . . . things that you would just think, Oh man, that’s got to be the end of it. But He’s bigger than it all. Behind those dark clouds, there’s the face of God with that smile.

Nancy: A smiling providence. Yes.

Diana, I think we, as women, sometimes hear stories like this and a kind of fear rises up that we think, If I really trust God with my family, with my future. . . In Proverbs 31 it talks about this woman smiling at the future, but your story is about people you thought were godly and go off the rails. Or you talked about losing a child just weeks before the due date. How do you walk in faith rather than fear when it comes to thinking about all the bad things that have happened, all the bad things that could happen. I know as women, our imaginations are going right now as they’re listening to this conversation, and they’re tensing up and going, “If I really trust God, what might He do to me?”

Diana Elliff: Yes.

Nancy: And you can revert to fear.

Diana: Yes. The word that comes to my mind is this: It’s so important for us as believers to walk with Christ today and walk with Him tomorrow before the storm ever hits because the storms are coming. This loss of my child and my late husband, that will probably, more than likely, not be the last one that I have or the last person or people that I might lose in this life.

Nancy: And for those who didn’t hear that part of the story, your husband had Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Diana: Yes.

Nancy: Which is a terrible illness—as was Jeannie’s . . . cancer.

Diana: Yes.

Nancy: But we’ve all watched people taken through that ALS. So as you’re walking through that journey, it would be easy to just fall into fear.

Diana: Yes. I remember the day we went to the doctor, a new doctor, to try to find out what was going on with my husband. He started losing weight. The doctor said, “Feed him this. Give him that. Make milkshakes.” I was doing all of that, but he just continued to lose weight.

So we went to this internist, and he said to us, “I think you have a neurological disease.”

We didn’t know which one. He didn’t know. And he said, “We’ll just do blood work, and I’ll have you come back again.”

So we did this, and when we got home from the hospital that day, I got on my knees beside my husband. He was in a chair, and his left arm was closest to mine. I took my arms and wrapped them around his arm, and I looked him in the face, and I started crying—and this is so unusual for me. My children have hardly ever seen me cry because I just don’t do that. And my husband was probably shocked because he’d not seen me cry very much. I burst into tears, and I said to him, “But I can’t live my life without you.” So we cried together.

And then God’s grace was sufficient in that moment, and then we went on. I fixed dinner that night, and got up the next day and went through my day with him. On the second day of hearing this news, the still, small voice of God came to my heart. He said these words to me: “Wayne Barber is not your lord. Jesus Christ is your Lord. He will never leave you nor forsake you.” And that really got my attention because God revealed to me through His Word and in that moment that His will is perfect.

So I talked with my husband that afternoon. I told him, “You know, when the Bible says God’s will is good; His will is acceptable and perfect, no matter which way this goes, we have to come back to the fact.” I was saying these things because he had so beautifully taught me these things which he had been preaching through the years. I said, “We have to come back to what God says. And every time I begin to wander out into fear, I must come back to God’s Word and what He has to say.”

But the Lord brought me through that. And the time that I have experienced God’s peace the most was the day that I was standing at the cemetery. My children were there. My brothers and sisters and my mother were there—my dad’s with the Lord. I stood there that day, and I knew God was with me. I’d never been as peaceful in all my life as I was that moment. I thanked the Lord that day, and I said, “Lord, thank You. Your grace is truly sufficient for me.”

Dannah: Isn’t that a sweet testimony? Diana Elliff and her husband Tom have both experienced the difficult providences of God, but their trust in Him is unwavering.

Someone in the Bible learned to trust God that way. I’m talking about Ruth, the young widow from Moab. 

Staci Rudolph and I talked about it in a recent True Girl episode. True Girl is our podcast for tween girls. In this particular episode, we were visiting the Great Wall of China while we discussed Ruth. 

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Dannah: So, you’d say the Bible is the story of God’s relationship with His creation, right?

Staci Rudolph: Yes ma’am

Dannah: But while reading through the book of Ruth, it might be easy to ask, “Hey, when is God going to show up? He’s not even in this story!”

Well, what if I told you that He did show up? The book of Ruth actually shows exactly how God has a relationship with creation! 

Staci: Well, I’d believe ya if you told me that.

Dannah: Well good, because it’s true. The book of Ruth teaches us how to see God’s work in our lives, and shows us God’s love for us! 

Even though we don’t see God walking and talking as a character in her story, that doesn’t mean that He wasn’t there. In fact, He played a really big part in the things that happened! God participated in the story of Ruth through something called providence.

Staci: That sounds a lot like the word provide.

Dannah: Yes ma’am. Those two words are very similar. Providence is just a big word to describe the protective care of God happening all around us. It’s when God acts by making sure the events in our life go according to His plan. 

Staci: Like when He provided those last few empty slots on our Great Wall tour so we could bring everyone on this massive, very steep climb! Wow, it’s hard to walk and talk up these stairs! (puffing)

Dannah: Yep, we saw His providence at work there. 

Staci: I know. Let’s talk about this. It might take our mind off these stairs!

Now, God made everything, and because of that, He also has the power to control everything. He can control where a bunny builds its nest, or how many strawberries grow on a plant, or even what grade you get on your next test (though the studying part is up to you). But we can’t see Him at work with our eyes. He does it, and we don’t even notice!

Even when we don’t see God moving around and making things happen, He always sees us. Providence means that God always sees our situations and helps them turn out the way He wants them to.

Let’s say you are studying for your science test, and you decide to have a strawberry from your garden as a snack. When you pick it up, it has a tiny little worm in it. You don’t want to eat that strawberry! So, you throw it over the fence and out of the garden. It lands right next to a bunny’s nest. The bunny is so happy, because she now has dinner to feed her babies. God didn’t place that strawberry there with His own hands, but He did line up the events to make sure the bunny family was fed. That’s what providence looks like. He makes sure the bunnies are fed, and He makes sure that we are taken care of too!

Dannah: I love that, Staci! So, providence was God’s role in the story of Ruth, right? He was making sure everything around her was happening in a way that would help and protect her. He was unfolding His plan. 

Staci: While God may not have been high fiving the workers and handing out juice boxes in the heat of the fields where Ruth was working to collect enough grain for dinner that night; it doesn’t mean He wasn’t there and working in Ruth’s situation. In fact, He was the one who directed Ruth to that field in the first place. Let’s check out our key verse to see how God was at work.

Proverbs 16:9 says,

We can make our plans,
but the Lord determines our steps.

Dannah: I love that verse! It’s a great reminder of God’s providence.

When Ruth set out that morning to pick the barley, she’d decided she would work in a random field. It wasn’t just a coincidence that Ruth happened to stop in Boaz’s field, who happened to be a family redeemer. God planned it that way! 

He knew that if Ruth had gone to many of the other fields, she might be bullied for being from another country. God knew Boaz was a good and safe man who would not let that happen in his field. Do you remember why? Because he obeyed God’s rules to provide for foreigners, widows, and orphans! 

Ruth may have planned to go out and find a field to work in, but God directed Ruth’s steps so that she would make her way to Boaz’s field to work. Do you see how God was at work making that happen? In fact, He’s directing how the story turns out throughout the book of Ruth! Sometimes we just don’t notice it, but when we learn to look for it, we see it.

Okay, so now that we know how God was at work in the story, let’s look back on some of the big things that happened. We’ll see if we think these things happened because the characters planned them, or because God planned them.

Staci: Oooh! We should break them up into scenes!

Dannah: Good idea! 

Staci: Oh, oh, oh, look at that thing! ACTION! 

Dannah: That thing is an ancient suspended gong! I don’t think you’re supposed to be hitting it.

Staci: Sorry, I got carried away. Okay, scene one:

In chapter 1, many members of Naomi’s family died. Not only that, but the country where they lived ran out of food. Naomi heard that there was plenty of food in the town where she was born, Bethlehem. Because of that, she wanted to retur.! Was it God or the people who “determined her steps”?

Dannah: God! 

Staci: Ding ding ding! We have a right answer!

Dannah: Okay, my turn! Scene two:

In chapter 2 Boaz met Ruth in his field, and he liked her. He was impressed by how hard she worked and how much she cared for her mother-in-law. Ruth liked Boaz, because he was so kind and devoted to God. When Ruth told Naomi that they had met, she found out that Boaz was actually one of her family’s family redeemers! (Remember that important title?) Because they met, they discovered there was hope for their family! Was it God or the people who “determined her steps”?

Staci: That would be God, my friend!

Dannah: You got it.

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And we’ll have to interrupt the conversation there. Staci Rudolph and I have fun recording those True Girl podcast episodes. If you’d like to hear more for a tween girl you love, you’ll find a link to that True Girl episode when you go to ReviveOurHearts.com/weekend, and click on today’s program. It’s called "Resting in God’s Providence."

There’s also information there about the book by Robert Wolgemuth and Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth, You Can Trust God to Write Your Story. And, on top of that, for a donation of any amount to Revive Our Hearts, we’ll send you our Women of the Bible workbook called Esther: Trusting God’s Plan.

Listen, I don’t know what difficult providences you might be experiencing right now. But I do know the God who’s wisely and lovingly giving you just what you need. Can you rest in that? Can you look for the smiling face behind the frowning providence?

If you’re a regular listener to this program, you might have noticed a pattern in the last few weeks. We’ve been talking a lot about trusting God, even when circumstances seem to make it difficult to do. 

Well, next week we’re going to stick with that theme. Nancy DeMoss Wolgemuth has a phrase she likes to say. It helps to remind us that God is in charge. You may have heard her say it before. You’ll have to listen in next time to find out what that phrase is. 

Thanks for listening today. I’m Dannah Gresh. We’ll see you next time for Revive Our Hearts Weekend.

This program is a listener-supported production of Revive Our Hearts in Niles, Michigan. calling women to freedom, fullness, and fruitfulness in Christ.

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