“Give me
understanding, so that I may keep
your law and obey it with all my heart.”
Psalm 119:34
“God use me”, he
prayed.
Then he added this
addendum:
“Just don’t make me
minister to the old, the sick or the homeless.”
“God let me be your
hands and feet”, she implored.
“I will go wherever
you send me!”
But in her heart she
would not surrender her idols.
Sometimes our prayers
come with caveats.
Like the infomercial
playing on the television in the wee hours of the night we have a litany of
disclaimers that we fail to verbalize to God but that He hears loud and clear!
Then we wonder out
loud to the shepherd of the church we attend “Why won’t God use me?”
I don’t find Abraham
offering God a set of conditions when the command came to him –
“Go from your
country, your people and your father’s household to the land I will show you…So
Abram went, as the Lord had told him;” Genesis 12:1,4a
What I do see is obedience.
Perhaps you think it
would be hard to ask someone to leave their home and everything familiar but
then consider another command Abraham received –
“Then God said, “Take
your son, your only son, whom you love—Isaac—and go to the region of Moriah.
Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.”
Early the next
morning Abraham got up and loaded his donkey. He took with him two of his
servants and his son Isaac. When he had cut enough wood for the burnt offering,
he set out for the place God had told him about.”
Genesis 22:2-3
Can you find any
hesitation on Abrahams’ part?
Maybe there was some,
but certainly, it is not evident from the inspired text.
What’s the point?
Here’s the question,
how surrendered are you?
Is anything less than
full surrender true surrender?
I wonder if General
Grant would have accepted terms of surrender if General Lee insisted at
Appamatox Courthouse that his Confederate Army be allowed to continue to battle
in three or four states.
Silly proposition, right?
And yet that is
exactly what we try to do with God.
Will God use a person
not fully surrendered to Him?
Sure.
Will that person walk
in all that He has purposed for them?
Likely not!
We need only to look
at Jesus as our example.
Fully surrendered;
fully used!
No comments:
Post a Comment