2 Corinthians 11:3 - But I am afraid that as the serpent deceived Eve by his cunning, your thoughts will be led astray from a sincere and pure devotion to Christ.
It is always easy to suggest we’d do better in any given situation than those who’ve gone before us. In my immaturity, I often wondered at the fact that the Pharisees couldn’t recognize Jesus as the Messiah, that Peter could claim that he didn’t know His Savior in the courtyard, that Jonah tried to run from God, and even that Eve would be willing to eat that apple in the garden.
But as I’ve gotten older, I’ve begun to realize that we are often swayed by our circumstances and sunk by our attempts to intellectualize the ways of God. By that I don’t mean that Christianity is not for the thinking man, but rather that we often don’t have the capacity – or the foresight – to understand why God works the way he does. Our call is simply to do that which he asks us to do. Oftentimes, we see the “whys” later, sometimes we do not, but in either case we must be willing to submit our finite selves to an infinite God. Our job is simply sincere and pure devotion to Christ. I know who HE is; I don’t need to know anything else, do I?
Chambers says:
If there is something upon which God has put His pressure, obey in that matter, bring your imagination into captivity to the obedience of Christ with regard to it and everything will become clear as day-light.
Obedience is a word we just don’t like to hear. We don’t want to be told what to do – we like to think we can decide that for ourselves. But I’ve found over the years that none of my option-weighing, none of my careful deliberation, none of my human efforts to make the appropriate life choices gives me the peace of mind and confidence that the most simple act of obedience can give. Oh, that I could count the times I’ve felt God nudging me in a direction, but I managed to talk myself out of it through good ol’ common sense. How many opportunities have I missed because I consider myself so sensible?
Have you ever tried to capture the beauty of a landscape with a photograph? I’ve gotten some nice pictures over the years, but I always find myself a little disappointed in the results. No matter how well the picture comes out, it just doesn’t capture the scale of the mountains, the vastness of the canyons, the expanse of the sky. The shot captures only one little piece of the picture I saw with my eyes – everything outside the frame of that shot, above, below, to the left and to the right, remains unseen by anyone looking at the snapshots I’ve taken. And no one glancing at those pictures knows what happened right before or after a shot was captured, unless, of course, I tell them.
I think our lives are a bit like those snapshots, and God is the great photographer. We see only what is in the snapshot of our own life. We don’t see the whole landscape as he sees it. We don’t know what is to the left of us, or to the right of us. We don’t know what is above or below the frame of our personal “photograph”. We don’t necessarily know what came before us and we certainly don’t know what is to come after. But God does and he has placed us exactly where we fit best into the landscape of existence. His will for our lives extends beyond the boundaries of our little photograph - he considers the entire landscape. He has carefully placed us exactly where we belong, and our lives and the lives of those around us create a beautiful panorama that you can’t get with just one snapshot.
Chambers closes saying:
Spiritual muddle is only made plain by obedience. Immediately we obey, we discern. This is humiliating, because when we are muddled we know the reason is in the temper of our mind. When the natural power of vision is devoted to the Holy Spirit, it becomes the power of perceiving God’s will and the whole life is kept in simplicity.
We try to overcomplicate things. We try to make them difficult. We want to do God’s will, but all too often we make our obedience conditional upon our understanding the why’s and how’s. We need to simplify. We need to know our God and live our lives in “sincere and pure devotion to Christ”. When we know HIM, we will know that what He asks of us is sometimes beyond our understanding, but right nonetheless. Discernment comes AFTER our obedience, and not before!
I also liked this part: "The tiniest thing we allow in our lives that is not under the control of the Holy Spirit is quite sufficient to account for spiritual muddle." Oz is fond of saying that God "educates us down to the scruple," and he is absolutely right. If we hope to grow spiritually, we must allow the Holy Spirit to bring those little nudges -- the ones that say "your attitude isn't right" or "why do you judge that person based on their looks?" -- etc., etc., etc. And if we don't OBEY when that happens, and repent of our unChristlikeness, we can expect "spiritual muddle" to follow.
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