It’s easier to hear God if your heart is obedient to God.
A surrendered and obedient heart understands the limitations of “leaning on thine own understanding” to experience “exceeding abundantly above all we can ask, think or imagine.”
The hardest thing to do is surrender the way we think a thing should work out.
We clutch that way with such a death grip that it’s hard to see or hear anything else.
What if you could fast forward the movie of your life to see how it would work out God’s way. Wouldn’t it be easier then to drop our way like the hot coal that it is?
We want to know how it will work out so that we can put our faith in it. And yet “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”
“Hoped for” doesn’t give a preview of “how.”
But obedience walks you down that path.
Has the Lord ever asked anyone to do anything that has not worked out for their good and His glory?
No! Because it would be against His very nature.
Yet, obedience like everything about the way of the Lord doesn’t make sense.
It makes no sense that a stick would split an ocean in two, crack a rock so that water flowed to quench the thirst of millions or turn a bitter stream into drinkable water and yet at God’s request and Moses’ obedience, it did.
It doesn’t make sense that a child with a slingshot defeats a man 5 times his size with a stone and yet in the name of his God, David did.
It makes no sense that a crew of 300, led by no warrior (by his own admission) defeats an army as numerous as a swarm of locusts, with trumpets and torches. Yet, Gideon and his band of band of “laps water like dogs” brothers, did against the Midianites.
There are many more moments of obedience that make no sense that have become the stories we often forget in the face of our own prayers with the Lord.
Even when His request doesn’t make sense, choose obedience.
“This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans…”
