Last week I was talking to an older friend here who is currently married to a Dominican man, raising their two little children here, and running a school basically out of their own home. She was telling me how one day in the past few years her sister made the remark that "it's really good that you enjoy the heat because you live in a place where its 90 degrees in the middle of January". Her reply was something like "well I don't. I don't live here because I love to be hot every second of the day. I live here because it's what God called me to do. I hate the heat, but I'm obeying God".
Obedience. My mom always used to tell me that it's not obedience if I wanted to do the same thing she was telling me to do. Obedience was doing what she asked me when I didn't want to do it. It's giving up your own will and wants to submit to that of your authority.
Obedience is hard. Obedience is literally doing what we don't want to do. I believe that we as Christians don't obey as God as much as we are called to.
As a senior in highschool the big question was always "where are you going to college". Your parents ask like every day, your grandparents ask at Thanksgiving and then again at Christmas, your parents' friends ask every week at church. It's a tough question and a huge decision. But what is the main advice people give when helping each other chose a college? "Well what feels right to you? Where can you see yourself at? Which place seems to you like it could be home for the next four years? Oh, just go with your gut. Do what you want to do". Yes, we may get the occasional "pray about it" response, but the majority of the time, it's about what feels good to us. Obedience to God is literally doing what doesn't feel good to us. Obedience to God is searching for His will and following it even when it feels totally wrong to us. So maybe one college feels good to you, but God is telling you something else. And that's scary, that's hard, doing what you know is God's plan but having it feel totally wrong. God doesn't always make his plan happy and easy and feel good. His plan, though it will always end in a better place, is often the most difficult path we could take.
Paul in the Bible demonstrates this so well. From the second that he is converted from Saul to Paul, he obeys God. He relentlessly goes where he is called to go, sees the people he is called to see, preaches the things he is called to preach. Do you think getting himself thrown in prison or saying things he knew would get him stoned, felt good to him? Do you think God's path for Paul's life seemed like the right thing to do in Paul's eyes? I'm guessing no. But he did it, nonstop, till the day he died he followed God's plan despite the pain it brought him.
More often than not we take a Jonah approach to God's will rather than a Paul one. We hear God's voice, we see how his plan sounds to us, and when we don't like it or agree with it, we run. We go where we want to go because we think that our idea of a "good plan" is far better than God's idea of a good plan. We run the other direction but when we do God pulls us back. God's plan WILL happen one way or another. It might take pain and heartache and tough times to pull us back onto His track, but He will pull us back. We may hate our freshman year of college, we may not make any friends, or maybe we make bad grades, maybe money runs out and our families can't afford that college anymore. Then we have to transfer. Then God gives us a second chance to follow HIS will. He gets us swallowed up and then spit back out onto the shore so that we then have another to chance to go to Nineveh.
But here's the good news. We don't have to obey God alone. He doesn't give us this crazy hard path to follow and abandon us. One of the big "obeyers of God's will" in the Old Testament is Moses. In Exodus 3, God uses the burning bush to talk to Moses. Moses immediately questions God's instructions, but God tells him "But I will be with you..." And He was. This doesn't mean the path is any less tough or difficult, but He doesn't leave us to take it on all alone.
When we chose to obey God we are expecting that it will feel right to us, that God will give us peace about where He's calling us, that His will line up with our will if we pray about it enough. And sometimes it does. Sometimes we do feel at peace with God's will. But, more often than not, thats not the case. Obey God when it seems impossible, when it hurts, when it doesn't feel right, because that is true obedience. But keep in mind, when we don't chose to take God's path, He will do what he has to do to get back on His path, so we might as well just do it His way from the beginning.
Go to Nineveh even if you hate the people there, save your people from Egypt even if it's you against a whole country, preach the Good News even if it will get you sent to jail.
If's God's will feels good, then you're probably doing it wrong.
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