God’s Provision:

 

The Question Is? 

The story is told of Mr. Yates, who owned a farm in Texas. The Great Depression came and he was having trouble keeping up with the payments on his farm. The bank began to press Mr. Yates and gave him thirty days to pay his back payments or face foreclosure. With three weeks left to go, a man came to Mr. Yates’s door. He worked for an oil company. He asked Mr. Yates to give the company a lease to drill on his farm for oil. Yates knew he was going to lose the farm anyway, so he decided that it couldn’t hurt. Well, that oil company did drill and hit a gusher—eighty-two thousand barrels of oil a day. Mr. Yates immediately became a multi, multi, many-times-over millionaire.

Now, there’s a question on the floor. Exactly when did Mr. Yates become a millionaire? Did Mr. Yates become a millionaire when the oil company struck oil or did Mr. Yates become a millionaire when he bought the farm? Mr. Yates was a millionaire the moment he purchased the farm, but he lived in poverty because he didn’t know what was underneath the ground.

When you came to faith in Jesus Christ as your personal sin bearer, the moment you came to faith, you were blessed “in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing” (Ephesians 1:3). Like Mr. Yates, many of us are living in the Great Depression. We are living spiritually poor, spiritually defeated, spiritually weak, and spiritually anemic lives even while sitting on top of all this wealth, because we don’t know what’s down there.

 

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  Tony Evans’ Book of Illustrations: