My all-time favourite Bible verse is: ‘Those who believe will not be in haste.’
I first saw it on a fridge magnet and it spoke to me so deeply, it rocketed straight to the top of the Scriptures I most love. Unfortunately, however, the fridge magnet didn’t give book, chapter or verse number. Somehow I got it in my head that it was in Psalms, so I diligently scoured them end-to-end and utterly failed to find anything remotely similar. A careful read-through of the entire Bible had the same result. I wondered how I could have missed it. It didn’t occur to me that I needed to change translations. I was reading the New International Version and I needed to be going through the King James. If I had realised that, I would have found what I was looking for twenty years before I did.
‘Those who believe will not be in haste’ is from Isaiah 28:16 and it’s the inscription on the precious cornerstone of a sure foundation that God promises to lay in Zion.
It was in 2009 that I finally discovered the source of the verse. By that stage, I’d been trying for years to come into my calling, believing at the time it was to write children’s books, and I was all-but-ready to give up. I was crushed by the repeated rejections I was getting. But I’d apparently managed to put such a good face on anyway that my friends repeatedly praised me for my inspirational ability to bounce back from defeat. One day, having received yet another rejection, I was having a cup of coffee and, instead of my usual morose brooding, I was talking to God and thanking Him for making me so resilient. As I did, I heard Him laugh. He clearly thought my description of myself was hilariously funny. So I pointed out to Him that I hadn’t described myself that way, my friends had. But He retorted that my reaction on receiving a rejection was simply to distract myself with a cup of coffee and not think about anything but zone out of the feelings of disappointment. Then I waited until those wounded feelings faded, however long it took—sometimes days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months—and then I’d try again. He drew my attention to the fact I’d never come to Him and asked Him what went wrong. Instead my immediate solace was a cup of coffee or a distracting book. They were good—but they weren’t God.
And so, in this conversation, I discovered the first of my false refuges. And I repented of it, naïvely believing that this would bring my breakthrough. But I got another disappointment and another rejection. This time I went straight to God.
Later I realised it’s not enough to repent of a false refuge. We have to face a test to see if the repentance is genuine.
Now, long story short, in the ensuing conversation with God, I mentioned that a theft of my ideas and work was a repeated pattern in my life and it always happened when I stepped outside the areas for which I was qualified. As soon as I said the words, I realised they were a vow. But I couldn’t imagine where the vow had come from. Normally such vows are born in childhood but it’s not the language of a child. Very young children simply don’t think in terms of qualifications. It looked like it might be a vow that had passed down from a previous generation. I immediately asked my mother if she knew of anyone in the family who’d experienced being rejected because of a lack of qualifications or a theft of their work for the same reason but she didn’t know of anyone. I couldn’t ask my dad because he’d died not long before.
Long story short again, the following day I was in a small group for prayer ministry. I brought up this vow about qualifications and asked if I could receive prayer to find out where it came from. The leader opened her Bible and started flicking through it. I thought she was searching for an encouraging Scripture verse, but she pulled out a piece of paper and read: whenever I was about to receive a reward for my hard work, someone with more qualifications would cut in and push me out, taking the promotion I’d earned.
That was so exactly the problem that I could hardly believe it. Then the leader revealed that these were my father’s words. She had visited him not long before he died and during their conversation he’d said this to her. And she’s said to herself, ‘You’ll want to deal with the issues behind that when you recover,’ so she wrote his words down to remind him later.
A minute later I was in the middle of renouncing the vow that had come down from my father to me, when the Holy Spirit dropped a prompt into my thoughts. ‘While you’re at it,’ He said, ‘you might also renounce your covenant with Death.’
I didn’t have clue what that meant but I did it anyway, figuring Jesus could take care of it. An hour or so later, I found out that a covenant with Death is mentioned in Isaiah 28:15 and 28:18, and sandwiched in the middle is:
Therefore thus says the Lord God, ‘Behold, I am the One who has laid as a foundation in Zion, a stone, a tested stone, a precious cornerstone, of a sure foundation: “Whoever believes will not be in haste.”’
Isaiah 28:16 ESV
Wow! I thought. There it is at last. My favourite Bible verse. Yay! It’s an inscription on a cornerstone. Hmmmm, I mulled to myself. What exactly is a cornerstone?
Sixteen years later, I’ve realised this: we talk (and sing) a lot about Christ alone, Cornerstone. But we don’t actually have a clue what that means.
This is the beginning of a series that seeks to address that problem.
Grace and peace to you from our Lord Jesus Christ.
Thank you to Lorna Skinner of www.riversofmusic.co.uk for the background music.
The full story of God-incidences in discovering my false refuges is found in Hidden in the Cleft, available as a hardcover, softcover or an ebook. It’s the fourth in the threshold series but I’m repeatedly told that it’s the one to start with.
Please get in touch through the contact form at Armour Books if you are in the US, UK or Australia/NZ and there are availability/price issues at the retailer for any of these volumes. Amazon’s prices in Australia tend to be twice the recommended retail price. In New Zealand, the book is available through Jubilee Resources International.