OBEY ME!

I don't know about you but the idea of obeying someone really grinds my gears.

I hate, HATE, the idea of having to take orders from someone. There are always times that it comes into play, like if you are a student you obey the teacher. But even then you can choose not to and fail your courses if you want to I guess.

It's the idea of someone telling you how to live, where to go and what to do that really gets to me. This feeds into my desire to be the CEO and not the worker of any business I work in. I want to be the boss, I want to dish out the orders, I don't want to take them!

And I know that this isn't a unique trait to me. It seems to be a major problem with everyone in Gen iY (the next generation after Gen Y). I am a Gen Y'er but can totally relate to this desire to control my own destiny and not listen to anyone else who may tell me what to do.

Typical traits my fellow control freaks are disrespecting of parents wishes, knowing more than the teacher about what is good for me, not paying any attention to government or the laws that they might set, ignoring how annoying my music may be to my next-door neighbours/fellow passengers on the bus/anyone in the general vicinity.

(Random aside: why do people listen to music on public transport on speakers instead of headphones??!!! Do they really think that everyone else wants to listen to the latest rap/dance/hiphop/pop that they are into?! Come on people, they are PERSONAL sound systems!!)

But getting on with the topic....

Recently my amazing father-in-law bought my hubby and I our first car. Problem is it is still four weeks until I sit my license so I am not actually allowed to drive the thing yet. I did anyway. For the first two days of owning the car I threw the rule book out the window and experience freedom. 

Then Luke had a crisis of conscience and told me that we really shouldn't drive anymore illegally. Apparently breaking the law is bad. Apparently God isn't really for that either.

Kill joy.

The thing is I agree with Luke (and God) and I shouldn't be driving illegally and would have a fit if anyone of my friends did it. The thing that pissed me off was that someone, in the case the LAW, told me not to.

I have serious authority issues.

I usually don't bring it up at job interviews.

So I got to thinking:

What is it about obeying that annoys me so much?

And it's not just me! I know that YOU (yes you, reading this right now) have moments where obeying isn't exactly your forte. I know that there have been times when you have thrown the rule book out the window too. Maybe you didn't drive illegally, maybe it was eating more sweets than your mum said you could. But there was a time when you didn't want to, and didn't obey.

So if you are a Christian how does this rebellious nature work when we are dealing with all matters Godly?

This desire to not obey, to be in control, is the BIGGEST issue that separates us from God! Back in the Garden of Eden (whether it was metaphorical or not) the issue was that humanity not only wanted to disobey  God, but they wanted to BE God. To call the shots. That's why the serpent says to Eve "nah, you won't die you'll just be as smart

as God and know everything" (CSW (Christine Susan Welten) translation)

The tower of Babel was about people wanting to be God, to control the world. Abraham gets Hagar, instead of Sarah, pregnant because he tries to control how a prophecy will be fulfilled. Saul gets kicked out of being the king because he does all the sacrificial stuff himself instead of waiting like God had told him. Israel as a country repeatedly refuses to obey God and ends up in exile with the Temple destroyed.

The Bible is FULL of people who couldn't find it in themselves to obey God. And these are people who saw God walking with them in the garden, as smoke on a mountain, as a pillar of fire, and angelic messengers. They had all this cool stuff happen and they still slipped in obeying.

It seems to be the major failure of humanity.

Only Jesus obeyed God 100% and even then he prays, that, if at all possible, what had to happen could be cancelled. 

So if we have this amazingly huge flaw that all of humanity suffers from, what the heck are we suppose to do about it??

Well, I don't know.

Truly.

I think that it is about prayer.

It is through talking to God, admitting our failures and our desire to control (and how badly we do it!), and saying "I want you to be in charge" that we learn to actually let God be in charge.

Even praying that we want God to be in charge in a sense is obedience. We are obeying the command to pick up our cross and follow Jesus. We are saying in effect "I don't know how to do this, but I am trying." We are letting God in and giving him the authority to start changing our hearts.

It is about listening.

In prayer we start to learn to hear God's voice instead of just our own. It takes time and practice to know God's voice in amongst all the other noises in our world and prayer is massive in being part of us being able to hear it.

If we are listening well to God then we will feel when there is a conviction for us to change something. We begin to hear and recognise the call to do something, go somewhere, help somebody. And we learn to respond with "YES" when we hear it. We begin to obey the voice of God as we learn to listen for it.

It is about talking.

We aren't meant to do life alone. Obeying stuff can be hard, particularly when it seems to be inbuilt into us to disobey. 

So we need to talk to each other about our struggles and failings. We need to be honest about the things we find hard to give up or start. We need to pray with each other and for each other so that we can draw on the strength of the community when we are doing something that we know we shouldn't but we don't want to stop.

It is about reading.

We NEED to read the Bible. We need to do this so we can know how God works, how God speaks, and what God says. We need to read it so we can learn what God's voice might sound like and when we have got it really really wrong. Because we don't always get it right and sometimes what we feel is right is actually not what is right.

Praying, listening, talking, reading.

Doesn't sound so hard, but it is.

But when we start doing these things we will start to see our lives change for the better. We learn to love God and others more, we become more humble and accepting of life and the rules in it. We learn to respect people and the things that they say and enforce. 

In short, we become more like Christ.

"Not my will Father, but your be done."