Joshua 5:13-14 (NIV®)
“Now when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and saw a man standing in front of him with a drawn sword in his hand. Joshua went up to him and asked, ‘Are you for us or for our enemies?’ ‘Neither,’ he replied ‘but as commander of the army of the LORD I have now come.’ Then Joshua fell face down to the ground in reverence, and asked him, ‘What message does my Lord have for his servant?’”
Life is filled with opposites isn’t it? We have a choice between a bad decision and a good decision. There’s a right way and a wrong way. There is victory and there is defeat. Anywhere we look we can find sides in direct opposition to each other.
We know from scripture the peril of choosing the wrong side when it comes to our spiritual lives. We also know from scripture that God honors those who choose Him. God loves His children. He provides and protects, He takes care of us. He wants the best for us. We never have any reason to doubt that, but I think knowing that can cause us to think that the good things we ask for are automatic – or should be. We ask for a good job, God gives it to us. We ask for a place to live and for our needs to be met. God does all that. (You understand He is the source of all good things in our lives, right?) On and on, we expect good things from the Lord, and that is not necessarily wrong, but I think there is more.
We choose to follow the Lord and to be obedient, but we need to be open-minded about what He wants for us, not just what we “expect”. In the book of Job, Job lost his children, wife, health and all his livelihood when he was following God. God restored it all, but Job had to go through those hard days not knowing his fate.
Through no fault of his own, Daniel lived in service to a king that had conquered his people and his country. Based on what we know from scripture Daniel never married or had a family, and His life was threatened multiple times. Yet God used him in both the life of the nation he loved and in end time prophecies.
Paul was stripped of his position and livelihood. He lived his life spreading the gospel and encouraging the church but it was not without tortures, imprisonments, and other hardships.
We tend to think that God would never ask us to do something that makes us uncomfortable, unaccepted or unsuccessful. He just wouldn’t. But these and other examples in scripture show us that our idea of what God wants for us is not always so simple. Instead, we should see “the big picture”. We should take a step back and say, “okay God. This is what I think and this is what I want to ask for and this is what I want to do… but I submit to you and your Kingdom. So what do you think? What do you want for me? What do you want me to do?”. When we get to the place where our acceptance of God’s answers to these questions is not guarded by our own preferences and prejudices, we will finally pick the right side. Not the side of evil, not even the side of ourselves, but the right side… God’s side.
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