Thursday,
February 2, 2023
But regarding Israel, God said, “All day long I opened my arms to them,
but they were disobedient and rebellious.”
Romans 10:21
This is one of those OUCH verses for those who think
of themselves as a pillar of the church. Israel was God’s special, chosen,
dearly-loved bunch. Along the way,
disobedience and rebelliousness became their norm. God’s arms were wide-open to them and all the
world, but stubbornness (read that: human
nature) kept God at a distance, while Israel did what Israel wanted to
do.
I have been that (and don’t you look so spiritual on me…you have too!).
This was brought home to me in a word picture decades ago when we lived
in Florida. I passed a small farm on the
way to the church each day. The owner
had built a three-rail fence around a pasture.
I suppose he didn’t have an end post on one side, so he attached the
three rails to a tree. Over time the
tree had grown, separating the three rails.
The results of this project were unmistakable. The living tree flourished, while the three
dead rails cracked and splintered. The
fence became useless to the purpose for which it was constructed, keeping cows
in the pasture.
It’s not difficult to get a handle on the point here:
You never attach something living to
something dead!
Pillars of the church can become dead fence posts,
toxic to the church.
When serving ends, and ownership takes its place,
the living organism (the body of Christ) can become an organization (the
business of human preferences). Our God
is a living, very active, sovereign God.
And the church is His. The moment
we begin to hold-on to anything (as if it belonged to our better ideas),
pillars-turned-fence-post are headed for an unpleasant experience.
When you get rebellious towards God’s ways, it isn’t
God who loses that struggle!
There are about 2,000 devotional
posts and 400 sermons in the Rocky Road Devotions
library. To dig deeper on
today’s topic, explore some of these:
When Darkness Takes Over and No. Other. God.
This is an updated version of
“So Much Anger” published on Rocky Road Devotions January 16, 2014
Images: Title via Wikimedia.com Images without
citation are either personal property of the author, or in public domain.
Unless noted, Scripture quoted from The New Living Translation©
No comments:
Post a Comment