In the long gap between posting there has been plenty of things I've thought, "hmmmm, this is significant and deserves meditating on and writing about," only to allow said experience to slip my mind and miss the opportunity to do either actions.
With that said, here are some thoughts, meager shadows of what they could have been.
It seems that one of the easiest and most effective ploys of our dark and all-too clever, shall I say,
spiritual enemy is fear. Fear of what? Sometimes nothing. Sometimes ridicule. Discomfort. The unknown. Failure. Any one or multiple of the sundry ways that ultimately translate into our selfishness and unwillingness to be obedient to what God has commanded us to do. Unwilling to do very simple tasks in order to build the kingdom
eternally!
I'm talking about myself but I know that I am not the only one in this crazy world that suffers from the ugly aspects of the human condition.
But what happens when we do obey? What happens when we trust God? We pierce the lie, walk through it and find that on the other side of the mirage before us, that which God has commanded us to do is almost always exponentially simpler and easier than we thought. "My yoke is easy and My burden is light" (Matthew 11.30).
Yet it would be naive to say that nothing God calls us to is difficult. Consider when God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son. Anyone who called that an easy or simple task is either one of the greatest souls to ever live or a total out-of-their-mind lunatic. God called Christ, His own son, to the cross. Before His arrest and eventual crucifiction Luke records of Jesus, "And being in agony He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground" (22.44). If God did not spare Jesus from not only a horrible death and suffering He
did not deserve, but also from the agony of anticipating the consequences of obedience, how can we expect God to spare us from either? We cannot. That would be folly.
What am I getting at? I'm not sure. But I think that my point is "faith." Just as sin has a cumulative effect on us, dragging us deeper and deeper and entangling us all the tighter, so does obedience to God's commands and promptings pull us down to greater depths of faith. Faith to believe that God will provide all that is needed to fulfill His commands. I've heard it compared to building muscle, and I think the comparison a valid one. If you lift weights, when you first begin, you cannot go in and lift much. But slowly as your body is torn down by the training and then rebuilt even stronger, your body progresses to greater and greater strength. What once was impossible, has become relatively easy. Faith and obedience are much like this. If Christ had told Peter the first day they met, you will die on a cross, hung upside down for my name, I doubt that Peter would have accepted that for himself. In fact, we know that after
three years with Jesus, day in and day out, Peter was unwilling even to admit he knew Jesus, much less die a gruesome death for Him. But in time, after years of obedience and servitude to the commands Christ gave him, Peter did have the faith to obey and die as His precious savior had.
And what helps with obedience? A peer in a similar place, united with you in common cause to build the kingdom and committed to obedience. Having a peer to bounce off of is what the Army calls a "combat multiplier." What you can accomplish with someone else is usually much greater than what you can do alone. Find someone to run with. "Though one may be overpowered by another, two can withstand him. And a threefold cord is not quickly broken" (Ecclesiastes 4.12).
