RESTORING YEARS
Joel 2:25 (KJV) - “And I will restore to you the years that the locust hath eaten, the cankerworm, and the caterpiller, and the palmerworm, my great army which I sent among you.”
The Lord is a restorer. When Jesus was preaching and teaching on the earth, He took from Isaiah 61 and proclaimed to the people, “This day this scripture is fulfilled in your ears.” What was being fulfilled? One thing was restoration. It is now and forever will be Jubilee, the acceptable year of the Lord. The Lord is wanting to restore things that the devil stole from you. What are those things? It could be finances, it could be health, it could be relationships, and yes, it could even be years. Stolen time.
How in the world could the Lord restore stolen time? I know He can physically do it. He did it in the Old Testament while Joshua was fighting (Joshua 10) and when King Hezekiah received his healing (Isaiah 38), but God is not limited to that, and I don’t think that is specifically what the Lord is talking about when He says He will restore the years. I just wanted to show you that time is not His problem.
Can God restore years to you? Obviously, He can, or He would not have promised it. Restoration is possible for us every day. One way God can restore time to you financially is like He did with Peter. Peter had not caught any fish, but Peter gave his ship to Jesus to teach from, and that caused a response from God. Jesus told Peter what to do, and Peter got so many fish that it almost sank a couple of ships (not bass boats), and that could have sustained him and his partners while he was off doing the ministry with Jesus.
The widow woman needed to pay off her debts so they wouldn’t take her sons as indentured servants. This was not only financial, but it made up for all the time that her now-deceased husband served in the ministry.
At Ziklag we see David receive a great restoration. What could have taken years in the natural to get back everything, or even start over, the Lord gave back in what looks like a matter of days. God can do in minutes what could take you decades on your own. David prayed, and the Lord gave him instructions to pursue, overtake, and recover all (1 Samuel 30:8). That is how we recover the years the devil has stolen from us. We pray and then receive specific instructions from the Lord.
Do you have things to recover? Do you have years you need the Lord to restore to you? I do. Let’s get them back. It is time to recover all.