Wednesday, March 16, 2016

Yield - Part 2

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?

You chew on that as you hit the Rocky Road today…and have a blessed day!



[1] Title Image:  By Yield_sign.svg: derivative work: Fry1989 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

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