ListenDaily – 30 March 2010: "But I told you..."
OK, so imagine a scenario something like this: You have had a busy week and your house is a bit of a mess. It's Saturday morning, and you have company coming over for dinner and to watch a movie at your home. You are called into work for a few hours, and so you tell your kids to clean the kitchen and the living room to prepare for your guests. When you come home from work, a half hour before your company is due, you find out that they have been working very hard cleaning...their bedrooms...leaving the kitchen and living room untouched.
How do you respond?
Is it good enough that they have been working hard? Is it good enough that they have been cleaning? Or has the plan that you have laid out now fallen apart because, no matter how hard they worked, they were disobedient?
Really now, how would you react?
I mean, not knowing the circumstances, most people would think it was great that kids cleaned their rooms. And can't you just imagine the conversation with their friends: "I spent all day cleaning my room and they're still not happy!"
But in this case, something else really needed to be done.
"Paul and his companions traveled throughout the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been kept by the Holy Spirit from preaching the word in the province of Asia. When they came to the border of Mysia, they tried to enter Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus would not allow them to."
(Acts16:6-9)
Doesn't preaching the word sound like a good thing to do? And yet, in this situation, it obviously was not what God wanted Paul to do. In order to carry out his part of his Father's plan, Paul had to be obedient to the specific thing God wanted him to do. In man's eyes, the preaching in Asia might have looked like the right thing to do, much like the kids' cleaning their rooms.
But in this case, something else really needed to be done.
So, serving on a committee, teaching Sunday School going on a mission trip, going into the ministry...good idea or God's idea?
TOMORROW: Through a child's eyes.
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Questions:
1. Reflecting on your own work in the church, were you specifically called?
2. What is the result, when a child busies himself with all sorts of activities, but never accomplishes that which his parent asked him to do?
3. Can you pray, right now, for God to show you, specifically, what He wants you to do?
INTERESTING THOUGHT:
"Beware of reasoning about God's Word - obey It." Oswald Chambers
"Just as a servant knows that he must first obey his master in all things,
so the surrender to an implicit and unquestionable obedience must become the essential characteristic of our lives." Andrew Murray
"Unless he obeys, a man cannot believe." Dietrich Bonhoeffer
"How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!" Benjamin Franklin
"The golden rule for understanding in spiritual matters is not intellect, but obedience." Oswald Chambers
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