God Provides When You Obey and Let Go of Certainty
As humans with God-given free will, we all struggle with two things: Being obedient and getting over certainty. We struggle with these things because God has given us that free will, the ability to choose for ourselves.
We all know being obedient is difficult. As a child, we struggle with obeying our parents when we want to pursue our own paths, desires, etc. Think back to the tug of war you may have had with Mom and Dad over which friends you wanted or how late you wanted to stay out after the Friday night high school football game. We are stubborn and headstrong and want to do things our own way. Our relationship with our heavenly Father isn't much different. Until you are completely willing to surrender and let go of your own selfish desires, you will be in a constant tug of war with what you want to do and what you know you should do(be obedient to God).
There are a lot of areas of our lives where this spiritual tug of war occurs. We want what we want when we want it. We don't want it in God's time, want to follow His plan for our life, or even give of what we see as our hard-earned money.
As a Christian, it is easier than not to surrender oneself to being obedient in some areas. As humans, however, we still have a difficult time of surrendering everything over to God. Take for example, tithing. This is something my husband and I have struggled with. We see the need to tithe and we want to give freely back to God, but our humaness gets in the way of trusting Him to provide.
This is especially difficult for a lot of people given today's economic climate and the uncertain times we are living in. When you have a family, a mortgage, car payments, and food to put on the table you sometimes have a hard time parting with ten percent income. There are moments we get discouraged and feel as though we won't survive. We wonder if we tithe and don't have much left over how we will make it until the next pay day.
This is where the certainty issue becomes a problem. We have to get over certainty. As humans we want to know outcomes right away. We want to make sure that even if God provides our "daily bread" today that we can peek and see the rest of the loaf in the pantry. But God doesn't work like that. Things happen in His time, but He does assure us that He will watch over us and provide for us.
Look to the story of the widow of Zarephath in 1 Kings 17:8-16: