Isaiah 66:9 reveals something important about the character of God: He does not begin what He does not intend to bring to a good completion. Labour is painful, demanding and often frightening, but it is also proof that something living is ready to be born.
When God allows a person, a promise or a vision to go through a season of labour, through pain or trials of any kind, the process has a purpose.
Delay is not denial, and pain is not always punishment. Labour is evidence that delivery is near.
Many people give up hope, and even give up on God, at the point of pain, mistaking resistance for rejection. Yet God asks a searching question: “Shall I bring to the time of birth, and not cause delivery?” (Isaiah 66:9, NKJV). The answer is no. The God who allowed the travail also guarantees the birth.
If you are in a season where prayers feel heavy, progress is slow and your strength is stretched, remember that labour is not the end of the story. Birth is. And God has promised: “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, says the LORD, thoughts of peace and not of evil, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11, NKJV).
That verse anchors us in the assurance that God’s plans for us are deliberate and full of hope, even when the present is uncertain. Again and again I have seen this in my own life and in the lives of others: nothing strengthens a believer like the settled conviction that God is good, always, even in the middle of deep pain.
For a fuller look at how Scripture focuses less on the absence of trials than on the purpose God brings out of them, read my book Refined, Not Ruined.
