RE: Tasks

Learning can be a hard and exhausting thing to do… not because God makes it difficult, but because fighting against the lesson is just so tiring… He isn’t about to give up, I can’t go any further until this is done, so we either sit and wait in my stubborness or we move… (God is real good as staring contests, I don’t encourage them at all). It’s so strange to me… obedience is so “basic,” yet is continuously the hardest part about following. Belief=action, right? Obedience=love… these are the basic foundations of following, yet they are the most daily and still the hardest. I found myself unwilling to obey in an area I perceive as “small,” as if there is a hierarchy of tasks in God’s eyes. Disobedience is disobedience, period. To paraphrase the book of James, “You break one (command), you break them all.” I’d have no problem walking up to a stranger and praying with them, asking a friend to have a seat, or calling my brother out on disobeying his parents… these come naturally in a prophetic sense. “What was Jonah’s problem?” I wonder, “I don’t think I’d have such an issue with proclaiming repentance to Nineveh.” I didn’t have a problem when God said, “Go,” or when He said, “Stay,” at different times in the past. What instead was my heart unwilling to do? Make a phone call. Yes, make a lousy phone call. Why? Because I didn’t know why I needed to, as if God was obligated to tell me why He was making me do something. Indeed, the “littlest” thing, yet disobedience is disobedience and I found myself miserable for not doing it.

There is no hierarchy of tasks; nothing that is okay to be stubborn about. There is no such thing as a “request” from God as if it’s an option- you either do it or you sin. How many times we see such simple commands as optional- that somehow not doing them will be okay with Him. That’s false. You’d think that after walking into terrifying situations of obedience and watching God do ridiculous things such commands as making a phone call would be easy, but God knows our weaknesses and it’s not because He wants to toy with us that He touches them, but because He wants to see that area of life strengthened to His glory. He’s doing something. I don’t know what it is. I may someday find out. What I know is obedience=love… disobedience=sin… still and always.

Time to go.