It’s a pleasure to hear from Rebekah Hawk this week! Take a read – I’m sure you’ll enjoy the devotional thoughts. If you want to get to know her a bit more, stop by the contributors page.
My little idea that I’d like to share with you today comes from the excellent biography I’ve just finished reading: Becoming Elisabeth Elliott – namely, that determining what God is asking of us, at any moment, is more beneficial to us than asking what He is doing or why He is doing it.
After her husband Jim Elliott was killed by the very men he was trying to reach with the gospel, Elisabeth worked very hard to continue the mission. She discipled the new converts of the church Jim was pastoring. She labored over the translation of the Bible into the unwritten languages. She and her young daughter were actually invited to live in the jungle with her husband’s murderers.
We might expect–and certainly the world at that time did expect–an amazing redemptive story coming out of the jungle. Other books and movies have glamorized the story to be just that, but that is not exactly what happened. Elisabeth left the jungle with very little assurance that anything she or her husband had suffered was producing believers in the one true God.
What I did not expect, though her journals do reveal her longings to know that her labors were not in vain, is her single-minded obsession with knowing what God wanted her to do next. She did not waste time speculating about what God was doing or going to do, or why He was not moving in the hearts of the other missionaries to be cooperative, rather than divisive and dismissive.
What Elisabeth teaches so well, both with her pen and her life, is that focusing on what God is telling us to do reveals our right attitude toward our Heavenly Master. Paul begins most of his correspondence by reminding his readers that he is a slave–a servant–of God. Servants are characterized by simple obedience. Once they know what the Master wants them to do, they do it.
That’s what makes Christianity so incredibly child-like. We are not told that we must know why our Lord and King wants a thing done; we are told simply to do it as a service for Him and for His glory. Our faith is revealed in the simple belief that He knows exactly what He is doing.
Finding out what God wants us to do is also a relatively simple task: we have the Word of God replete with commands such as “Do not be afraid,” “Be kind…and tenderhearted” and even more fantastically, we have the Holy Spirit of Almighty God within us, convincing us of truth, and helping us to understand the Scriptures. He has given us everything we need to obey Him, to trust Him, and promises to help us obey Him and give us wisdom if we ask.
I am most like my Savior, then, when I take up my cross, denying my right to understand exactly what my Master is doing, and obey what I know He has told me to do.
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