By Gobel Brockman
Most of you reading this know that I'm a retired mailman with the U.S. Postal Service, leaving after 25 years of employment. It didn't take too long after I started working for them to realize that there was something about being a Postal employee that I was going to have to get used to:
The only thing that never changed was the fact that they were always changing something.
You could pretty much rest assured that as soon as you got comfortable with the way they wanted things done, someone was going to come along with a "better" idea, and you were going to be relearning how to do the same job. It was like that when I started, and it stayed like that throughout my career. I know that I'm not alone in that. I'm sure many of you reading this have encountered the same things at your chosen profession. Change is constant and unavoidable. (Although many times I've been tempted to argue that second point.)
But as a Christian, I should have already been used to that. If there's one thing I've learned in my study of Scripture and in my personal walk with Christ over these past 34 years, it's that God is always doing unexpected things in the least expected ways. "God" and "comfort zone" rarely belong in the same sentence - unless, of course, that sentence is, "God is going to take you out of your comfort zone and ask you to do something you'd never do on your own." A few examples:
*The children of Israel stood on the banks of the Red Sea with their enemy approaching. God could have just stopped the enemy in their tracks, but no, He had to part the Red Sea and make them walk through it on dry ground.
*The three Hebrew children in Daniel 3 were thrown in a fiery furnace because they wouldn't bow to the king's idol. God could have just intervened and stopped it all, but no, He allowed them to be thrown in, then joined them in the fire to protect them.
*Jesus told the disciples to get in a boat and go across to the other side of a lake. As soon as they got "in the midst of the lake" - the very place He told them to go - a massive storm hits. He could have just spoke a word and stopped the storm, but no, He had to walk on water to get where they were so they could see Him stop the storm.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Being a Christ-follower is not always a comfortable place to be. God will often change things up and we find ourselves relearning life itself. If you are a regular reader of this devotional you know that I often quote Hebrews 11:6: "Without faith it is impossible to please God..." and I might add, it's impossible to need faith if we already have all the answers and can see our futures clearly. I won't pretend that I can explain to you all of the mysteries as to why God asks us to leave our comfort zones and do what we think is impossible. What I will tell you is that it's in our best interest to do things God's way whether that "way" makes sense to us or not. In Genesis 12 God told Abraham to "...leave your homeland, your kindred, and your father's household, and go to a land I will show you." The Bible says that he took Lot (his nephew) with him. I've wondered whether or not that was disobedience to God's command to 'leave your kindred and your father's household' given the amount of problems that came about because of Lot. (At the least it's definitely worth a Bible study.) But my point is simply that regardless how difficult or impossible the call of God on our lives may seem to be, let's just be obedient. It may - no, it probably will - take us out of our comfort zones, but we shouldn't get too upset about that.
The God we serve never gets uncomfortable.
No comments:
Post a Comment