09/21/2024
God wants to do a new thing in your life. Stop resisting. In Acts 9:5 God asks a guy named Saul why he insisted on “kicking against the pricks” which essentially means why are you resisting? Let’s be frank, Saul thought he was right. No, Saul knew he was right and he had the good well meaning church folk of that time on his side to prove he was right. He was armed with arrest warrants from those good well meaning politically driven church folks for the destruction of people who chose to believe “The Way.”
God blinded Saul during that encounter on his way to Damascus to transform him into Paul, someone who could “see” and “hear.” Up until that encounter Paul had been the product of committed study the the letter of the law and strict enforcement of it. He hadn’t been yet persuaded by the power of the blood of the Lamb. He hadn’t yet been constrained by the great gospel that Jesus saves.
I submit that too many are blinded by television, social media, 24 hour news feeds, and propaganda and that’s not the Word of God. As a result our ability to “see” God for who He is and to hear and obey His Word is distorted. It’s time for a life altering encounter with God. Stop resisting Him by taking in what society wants to feed you. Stop doing what you’ve always done because you’ve always done it that way. Examine your life against the only standard that matters…Jesus Christ. Don’t persecute Him; follow Him.
I tell people all the time, I haven’t watched the news voluntarily since 2020. As a matter of fact I remember the night when I chose to stop watching it. I was up all night unable to sleep soaking up news from a 24 hour station. My mind wanted to rest and my body was begging for sleep but I kept watching until I distinctly heard God say, “Turn off the television. Stop filling your mind with this. It is not of Me. Pray.” I turned off the television and began to cry out to God. As I cried out He gave me peace. Peace that made no since in that moment given the state of the world and our country. I prayed until I fell asleep. When I awoke the next day I was determined to empty my mind of politics, pundants, spin specialists, and bad, sad, depressing, distressing, distracting news. I am a witness that our minds become resistant to the Word as we lean into the news of the world. It’s not Godly. At first I couldn’t imagine how I could stay informed without watching the news? How could I not watch it. But over time I’ve learned that God replaced my need for the daily dose of biased garbage with a thirst for studying the Word. All the news I need is in the Word. I call it the GNN (God News Network). I stopped resisting God. It’s so hard to hear God with all of the noise going on in the world today.
Many years ago, a friend took me on a hike up a mountain. Once we got to a plateau he said, “ What do you hear?” I listened for a moment. I looked around at the most beautiful view I’d seen of a vast sea of God’s creation for miles and miles. I turned to him and answered with glee, “I hear nothing!” That moment helped me comprehend that we are inundated with continual noise that drowns out our ability to be at peace and to hear clearly from God in our hearts. As a result we resist God. We resist His will. We cannot see or hear His way clearly. There’s a mixed signal. We equate and relate the God who created everything with ourselves. We expect Him to fit compactly into our viewpoint and we diminish His greatness into our values. We reduce Him to a Sunday morning sound bite with which we can persecute Him and each other. All the while He is waiting for us to stop resisting Him. We insult the magnitude of God by compartmentalizing Him and tagging Him to what we earnestly believe is right and righteousness not seeing that our version of right is self centered, self willed, self driven, self taught, selfish, and excludes giving others the very grace and mercy we arrogantly expect from God each day. We don’t study to learn who He really is. Like Saul we’ve got folks warrants in hand and we’re on our way to serve up justice in the name of the lord-or in the name of the fake news that has lorded over us. For the few folks who choose to read this I implore you to embrace your transformative encounter with God. He’s doing a new thing in you. Separate your relationship with Him from worldly suggestion. Seeing Him means becoming blind to noisy distractions.
