To cry out for peace and provision while your heart yearns to serve the living God is a tangle of desires which the Lord alone can order aright. Your request has in it the raw material of a true seeking, but it must be purged of its earthly admixture. You ask for peace, a job, money, the increase of your project, and to serve God. In this list, the soul’s true need and the body’s clamoring are mingled together. Let us first seek the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added. The order of your prayer must begin with God Himself, for He is our peace, and from that peace all true service and provision flow.
Consider that many who seek peace are content with a false quiet, a peace which comes of forgetting God while they busy themselves with projects and schemes for gain. But what is a peace that cannot bear the scrutiny of the Almighty’s eye? If the thought of God troubles you, then your peace is a mere writing on the sand, a sorry sham that will wash away in the floods of death and judgment. The God of peace does not patch up the old, rotten heart with quietness; He slays it and brings the soul to the mercy seat, there to find peace through the precious blood of Jesus Christ. Have you come there? Has your sin been confessed, renounced, and laid upon the appointed Lamb? Until you know this, your peace is the peace of the devil, a strong man armed keeping his palace, and your goods are not in safety. Seek the peace that is a blessing, the peace which God creates in the heart that bows itself before the Crucified One. Then, and only then, will you find that even in the want of a job or the delay of a project, there is a quietness which no Pharaoh can break, and a song in the night which the world cannot sing.
Now, mark this well: to desire to serve God is a noble impulse of the new nature, but service must spring from communion and not from a project of our own devising. You speak of your project. Has God commanded it, or is it a Babel which your own hands have conceived? The one who would serve the Master must often take the lowly place of a suppliant, not merely for money to carry out a plan, but for light to know the plan itself. Are you willing to come before His judgment seat as well as His mercy seat? Job was willing, in the depths of his agony, to enter into ordered pleading with his Maker, to lay his cause before Him and to fill his mouth with arguments. So ought you to do. You feel your need of money and worldly success, yet God may be thundering forth, “Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?” Bury your forehead in the dust before you dictate terms to your Creator. The service God accepts is born of sweet communion with Him, where you first hear what He has to say. Many are fond of prayer who neglect the hearing of the Word, but this is a monologue of pride and not the dialogue of faith.
Let me cheer you with this glorious truth: God is mighty, and despises not any. Do not imagine that your lowly condition, your empty purse, or your struggling project are too small for His notice. It is the very power of God which enables Him to care for the tiny sparrow and to number the hairs of your head. A puny, finite manager must pass over small details to attend to great ones, but the infinite God has no such need. He is mighty in strength of heart, and therefore He can condescend to the most minute concern of the lowest penitent. If you are indeed seeking His face, however broken and despairing your cry, He will not pass you by. The dewdrop is as truly the sphere of His working as the rolling ocean. Have confidence, then, that the very petition for daily bread, for a lawful calling, and for the means to serve Him is heard at the throne, provided it is offered in the name of Jesus and from a contrite spirit. But let your principal wrestling be to find God Himself, for in His presence is the fullness of joy, and He Himself is the treasure far exceeding silver and gold. When the heart is right with heaven, you may cast all your temporal cares upon Him, for He careth for you.
As for your desire to serve Him and increase your project, flee to Him for faith, for without faith it is impossible to please God. The apostles, when given a hard command, did not cry, “Lord, increase our holiness,” or “Lord, increase our zeal,” but “Lord, increase our faith.” Your work, whether it be sweeping a crossing or preaching the Gospel, is a standing testimony to a skeptical world only as it is the fruit of living faith in the living God. You need no greater stock of faith laid up in store; you need the daily manna, the increase suited to the trial of the day. And if your project is His, He will supply the needed means, whether through a job or through a raven sent to the brook. Cease from carving your own fortune with a knife too blunt for the task, and which will only wound you. Lay your hand upon the promise, and let your expectation be from God alone. His consolations are not too small for you; have you anything better to put in their place? All the gold of Ophir cannot purchase a quiet conscience, nor can the success of a project give you a title to Heaven. Taste and see that the Lord is good, and in tasting His forgiving love, you will find the very peace of God which passeth all understanding keeping your heart and mind through Christ Jesus. Then you shall go forth to your labor with joy, and your service shall be acceptable upon His altar.