Dear Friends,
How can you keep disappointment from getting you down? Today’s devotional gives you excellent help. God bless you.

Because of Calvary,
John Janney

• Genesis 50:20 (ESV)

  20 As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good, to bring it about that many people should be kept alive, as they are today.

“When I was eleven years old, one of the most tragic incidents in my life happened. If you have ever been involved in Little League baseball, you know that there is almost nothing more important than making the cut as an eleven-year-old All-Star. I was not selected for the team, and what’s worse, two of my eleven-year-old buddies were. I was utterly devastated.

“My mother sat down with me on my bed and said, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ She told me about a guy in the Bible who had a promise from God that he would be a ruler. But he was thrown in a pit and sold into slavery. Then he was thrown into jail and forgotten. Through all of his disappointments, he kept doing the right thing because he believed in trusting God’s promise. Later when Joseph looked back on those harsh experiences, he saw that God used them to get him in a position to save his family.

“My mother said to me, ‘Tommy, there will be a lot of times in your life when God does things that don’t seem to have any rhyme or reason whatsoever. You’ve got to trust Him even when He doesn’t give you the answer.’ Pretty good counsel, wasn’t it?” [Tommy Nelson, A Life Well Lived: A Study of the Book of Ecclesiastes, (Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2005), p. 50-51]