Chapter 6: The Promised Land (Part 1)

I've shared many faith stories on these blogs over the years, but perhaps none as prolonged and confusing as the one I'm about to. A lot of the stories I've written about already are fairly self-contained - God gives us a word (for example, go to Israel), we do the thing He said (for example, we go to Israel) and hey presto, we're done. This story is not like that. This is a story of a promise God made before we even wanted or needed it fulfilled, a promise that has more than once nearly diverted us completely away from God's purposes, and a promise that has felt utterly out of reach for most of the time since God gave it to us. This is the story of how God gave us a house.

A Wife, a Job and a House

To set the scene, let me take you, very briefly, ten years into the past, when I was a youthful, optimistic Jesus-lover who cycled round SW-London teaching people how to do maths and play music (not necessarily at the same time). I had finished university a few years previously, moved to London to do an internship at a church, and was now living in Raynes Park enjoying my new leafy suburban London life. It was an exciting time of life for me, where God and I regularly chatted about my wife the future and all He was going to do in the years to come. He (repeatedly) assured me that yes He had a wife for me, and when I stopped to ask Him about other things too, He would always affirm to me His intention to give me a job that revolved around ministry, and also a house. These three promises that God so repeatedly spoke to me - a wife, a job and a house - have stayed with me since that time.

As it turns out, the first promise He fulfilled not too long afterwards, in August 2019 when I married Melissa (a story I've not yet written about but probably should - it's a good one). The second promise of a ministry-based job, though still unfolding, is most definitely one that we are seeing being fulfilled through the new worship ministry we stepped into last year. Which brings me to the third promise.

'The Deposit'

In 2018 I felt God calling me to leave London and move to Brighton, and within six months of moving I had met and proposed to Melissa. In the run-up to our marriage, my parents generously gave us a chunk of money to go towards a house deposit. In and of itself this was incredible, and seemed to completely confirm God's promise to give me a house, but this kindness was made more incredible by the fact that Melissa had spent the last year praying that her future husband would come with that exact same amount of money to go towards a house. We did muse in retrospect that Melissa should have asked for more - but anyhow, it felt certain that God was giving us a house just as He had promised, and that we would soon be settling down into marital, mortgage-paying bliss.

However, as I've written about previously, it started to become very clear that this was not God's plan for us at all - at least not straight away. We discerned that God had no intentions of letting us settle down - He wanted us to quit our jobs and go travelling for six months. Sure, we reasoned - we can get new jobs and buy a house when we're back. No big deal. So, we tucked the deposit safely away at the back of our bank accounts and set off for Israel.

The Cost of Travel

Halfway through our travels, however, our dream to buy a house had ran into a couple of tiny snags. The first, minuscule, barely-noticeable snag was our growing feeling that God was not calling us back into normal work but rather into some sort of travelling worship ministry that didn't easily go hand-in-hand with owning a house and being settled in one place. The second, microscopic, inconsequential, not-really-worth-mentioning snag was that the only money we had left in our bank accounts to pay for our upcoming three months in America was our sacred house deposit.

We continued in our plans, waiting expectantly for God to provide alternative means for us to pay for our time in America, convincing ourselves that God would keep our house deposit safe because, after all, it was for our future house. But the cheques did not come. Weeks went by and the mysterious donations never made their way to us. Bills for travel, study and accommodation started coming thick and fast. We could no longer ignore the horrible, uncomfortable thought that been silently nagging away at us for months - that maybe God had already provided for our travels, and maybe the money was already sitting in our bank accounts. With no other options available to us, and time running out, we did the only thing we could - we turned our house deposit money into our living expenses money.

The Demon and the River

In that time God showed me what He was doing in the two of us through all of this. He gave me a picture of Melissa and myself standing opposite Him next to a river, holding a bag of money. We gave it to God, but we were horrified to see God immediately turn it upside down and begin pouring it all into the river. In the vision we watched helplessly, desperately begging God to stop, as the coins drifted downstream and the bag grew emptier. However, a strange thing happened as the money poured into the river. A demonic creature, who had previously been completely invisible, started to materialise in front of us. It became clearer and clearer, then all of a sudden dived into the river after the money. God instantly stopped pouring the money away, and as He gave the bag back to us I also saw many more bags of money that had been hiding behind Him.

The message was clear. This money was God's money, not ours, and we had unhealthy attitudes towards it that we hadn't even realised. God was revealing to us that if He was going to trust us with money in the future, He first needed to deal with our sinful mindsets and attitudes so the enemy would have no place of influence over our finances in the future. A demon was crouching next to us and we hadn't even realised, and our decision to surrender the deposit money back to God was crucial in allowing God to bring us into freedom in this area.

Though we had some understanding of what God was doing, it didn't make the sacrifice any easier. Using the deposit money in this way stretched our faith to the absolute limit. Did we really trust that God was bigger than our finances? Did we really believe that He could - and would - give us back all the money we'd lost? Everything about our decision felt incredibly foolish and irresponsible, yet we knew we had no choice but to obey. The real question for us was at that time was how long this season of testing and refining would take - and how much money we'd have left by the end of it.

An Act of Faith

As it turned out, God needed to do quite a work in us. Our course in America came to an abrupt end as covid lockdowns took over the USA, and in the blink of an eye we found ourselves back in England, in a cabin in someone's back garden. With no jobs, we continued to live off of our deposit money for the next four months. God's promise to give us a house felt very far away.

A strange thing happened, however, at the start of the summer. A chat with Melissa's parents re-ignited in us our desire to buy a house, and renewed our belief that God was still committed to this promise too. So, despite having no income and only half a deposit, we did the logical thing and started looking at houses, waiting to see what God would do.

Well, let me first tell you what God didn't do. He didn't give us a house. The houses we saw weren't right, we had no idea what we really wanted or even where we wanted to live, and furthermore we had finally come to appreciate that we weren't in any position whatsoever to buy. But what He did do is, in that moment, hand us back the bag of money that we had given Him seven months previously. In the six years that have passed since those viewings, we have not touched that bag of money, and in fact we have seen it increase and even surpass its original size (we're still not quite sure how). God taught us not to cling on too tightly to the things He gives us - but rather to trust Him with everything, to trust His purposes even when we can't see them, and to trust His ability to provide for us.

The story continues here.