Here Am I for the Great I Am: Making Sense of Obedience

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Here Am I for the Great I Am: Making Sense of Obedience

Recently, my Monday mornings have been spent pouring over my notes from Sunday sermons. When you are given such rich truths, you want to make sure they take root!

Sunday morning, Pastor Joe opens the Word and brings a word. He then challenges us with that word to obediently live the Word so we can give the Word to a world desperate for a word. We know that the only word that can bring a word worth hearing and heeding is God‘s Word, so we’ll start there again today (and every day), as we learn what it truly means to trust and obey...

Genesis 22. I’m sure you’re familiar with this passage. I thought I was, too, until I found out Isaac was much older than I had imagined him when he made the multiple day journey with his father to Mount Moriah to carry out an act of obedience that would be hard at any age or life stage.

I’ve always thought Isaac was this young boy (likely a toddler), walking alongside his dad, maybe even carried by him at times because of the long trek they had up that mountain. But as Pastor Joe recapped this story as he read and reread details from the text, emphasizing timelines and connecting the series of events with the previous and following chapters, he concluded Isaac was likely 37 years old at the time of this journey.

I know. Shocking, right? For those of you to whom this is new news, I’ll give you a minute. Believe me, I’ve taken quite a few myself yesterday and today, dissecting the text, looking for myself, seeking to truly understand that which I cannot fully comprehend.

And that, dear friend, is what Bible study is all about — reading the Word in a way that It can read us, teach us, and beseech us to live according to It. God’s Word is alive and active. (Hebrews 4:12) It changes us, from the inside out, so It’s not just something we talk about, it’s our deepest desire to live it out.

So, when I recovered from the shock of discovering how old Isaac was at the time of this event, I was able to glean these three lessons about OBEDIENCE…

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When in doubt...

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When in doubt...

When in doubt, don’t look to the world to figure it out, go deeper into God’s Word where you won’t be tossed about.

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about quite a bit lately. You too, huh? Bouts of pensiveness among the craziness of this past year and a half? Even the strongest among us have, at some point, doubted something — doubted the statistics, doubted the science, doubted the mandates, doubted the motives. We may have even doubted God.

Honestly, the thing that has me bothered most as I ponder it all, is the fact that in today’s culture, doubting God is praised, while questioning the motives of man is condemned. Seems a little backward to me, but that’s just typical of this wayward society. Why are we allowed (and even encouraged) to doubt a holy, perfect, righteous God, but we are not allowed to (and extremely discouraged if we) question corrupt, flawed, sinful human beings?

So many have not only questioned their sanity, they’re questioning their faith and many are literally jumping ship as they dive head first into a sea of doubt. I believe this sea of doubt is made up of torrent waves of progressivism, deconstruction, reconstruction, and other forms of evolutionary faith — faith that is fluid and fickle, not foundational and factual. Any faith that is fluid will not hold fast in times of trial. Swimming in this sea of doubt is dangerous and destructive, and it will destroy anyone who lets this doubt consume them.

Then we will no longer be immature like children. We won’t be tossed and blown about by every wind of new teaching. We will not be influenced when people try to trick us with lies so clever they sound like the truth. ~ Ephesians 4:14

But when you ask him, be sure that your faith is in God alone. Do not waver, for a person with divided loyalty is as unsettled as a wave of the sea that is blown and tossed by the wind. ~ James 1:6

When you choose to swim in a sea of doubt, you will be tossed about. The waters in this sea are dark and deep. There is no anchor of truth to steady you. There is no lifeboat of proof to rescue you. There is no lighthouse of hope to guide you.

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