noah built an ark, noah entered the ark and then noah on the ark. when i think of noah on the ark it teaches me the motivational power of faithfulness.
how many days was he there? i think the first number that comes to many of our minds is forty. but that’s not what the bible teaches. not at all. it rained for forty days and forty nights. but the bible says that after noah got on the ark, the floods started on the seventeenth day of the second month and noah got off the ark on the twenty-seventh day of the second month – a year. he was on the ark a year and ten days. and he was on the ark seven days before the rains started. so that adds up to noah being on the ark a lot more than forty days. he was on the ark 375 days – 375 days of faithfulness, 375 days of trusting GOD. after 120 years of trusting GOD which is how long it took him to build the ark.
one of the most impressive things to me about noah is his faithfulness. when i think of a man who would go onto an ark like that and trust GOD through that time, maybe some of the animals hibernated but not all of them did.
can you imagine cleaning up after animals for three hundred plus days? can you imagine listening to animals for all of those days? can you imagine smelling animals for all of those days? the incredible smells! faithfulness. noah and his family were faithful to GOD.
sometimes faithfulness isn’t fun. cleaning up after the animals on that ark wasn’t fun. worrying about whether the waters would ever recede – it wasn’t fun. but it had to be fulfilling, deeply. noah had to stand back at the end of his day and recognize when he saw that the entire earth was covered with water, “we’re it. we’re all that’s left. if sixty years into this project, i’d said, ‘no, GOD, where would my family be now? where would these animals be now?’” so on the days that aren’t fun when you’re being faithful to GOD, just stand back for a minute and look at what GOD’s doing through your life in this world.
just a thought from the front porch…
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