Wednesday,
March 16, 2016
VIDEO
Trust in the Lord with
all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding. Seek his
will in all you do, and he will show you which path to take. Proverbs 3:5-6(NLT)
Yesterday we began this short series
on Yielding
to God, and the differences we can expect when we choose to bow the knee in
prayer…to yield to God’s Lordship.
The idea of trusting the LORD with all
your heart, even past the limit of your own ability to reason
things out, leads us to what you’re saying with the first phrase that comes out
of your mouth when you bow in prayer:
You’re yielding
to follow anywhere God leads
Abram (who would
later become Abraham, father to us in the faith) never saw it coming. He took a walk one day and God spoke to his
heart:
The Lord had said to Abram, “Leave your
native country, your relatives, and your father’s family, and go to the land
that I will show you. I
will make you into a great nation. I
will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others. I will bless those who
bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt. All the families on earth will be blessed
through you.” So Abram departed as the Lord had
instructed, and Lot went with him. Abram was seventy-five years old when he
left Haran. Genesis 12:1-4(NLT)
Did you get
that? God spoke to a 75 year-old man who
had lived all that time in one spot, and told him to get up, leave everything except
one nephew, and take those aching bones on a journey to….well….somewhere out
there! And the man did it!
There are many kinds
of calls – letting go of things, places, people, ideas – many of them familiar
and comforting – some in which we frame the very identity of our lives. In the case of Abram – it was to physically
leave it all behind.
Sometimes God leads people
to make major changes, and we cannot really foresee where the journey will take
us. Although the short beginning to
Abram’s adventure makes it seem as if it all happened in one day, real time, I
suspect there might have been a little (or a lot) of time in-between God’s call
and Abram’s leaving Haran to follow that faceless God out into the dessert. That’s not something you decide lightly! Abram probably wrestled with this whole thing
for a while…maybe some months, even years!
I say this because you
cannot read this story and not remember your own call experience. Mine was a growing (and rather uncomfortable,
unnerving) sense of dissatisfaction with how little it actually cost me to
serve God.
Doesn’t make sense,
right?
Well, it does when you
begin to recognize the cost to God for the overwhelming gift of grace to
forgive my sins, which is what happened to me.
How could I not give everything to Him, when God had held nothing back
for me? When I finally yielded to the
call, God put it in our hearts to follow Him anywhere. For our family, it meant what it meant to
Abram – leaving the familiar place and life we’d known to follow him into the
unknown!
So scary!
And somehow, once
the decision was made to yield, it was so much more comforting
than scary to place yourself totally in the hands of One who promised to never
leave nor forsake you as He leads you into that unknown.
And that’s the rub…the
comfort
of His care only comes after you make the first step
in His direction; only after you yield!
For You Today
Tomorrow we’ll talk about a few more
yield-points in our lives.
But, for right now, ask yourself the
question – what yield has God asked of me…and am I still holding on when I should’ve
let go?
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