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."

God has left the Temple

When I was a young girl, maybe around ten, I started what can only be called an obsession. I don't know what triggered it but I can say that every time from that age on when I saw articles or pictures about this topic I would collect them. My mother worried about my fascination, thinking it wasn't healthy for a young girl to be so interested in something so complex, and at times dark, but I kept going. To this day I follow what I can. My obsession is with

The Israel/Palestine Conflict.

I know, not really a usual interest for a young child but something about the fact that no one could agree on what was happening or who was right capture my mind and I have found it only more interesting as I have aged (though I am now aware of the fact that propaganda plays a major part).

The thing that I never really understood was the rest of the world getting so involved in the issues of this small country. America was the mediator (many times) between the two states and tried to help them come to peace. I always have thought, what business is it of theirs?? It isn't their land so why do they butt in an expected the two warring countries to listen.

The thing is, this conflict is so much bigger than just the war within it's boundaries. It has everything to do with Zionism, or the belief that Israel is still the Holy Land, Jerusalem is still the Holy City, and as good Christian countries (so the thinking goes in America) we need to protect the land of God from the heathen Arabs, or at least stop it imploding. There is also a direct correlation for Zionists between the return of Israel to the Jews and the return of Christ. To speed up one is to speed up the other.

I have simplified this somewhat as Zionism is far bigger than just this issue, but I am surprised at how many people I met who don't even realise that they are Zionists! There are so many Christians that seem to just accept as fact that the Israelites are in the right and the Palestinians are evil and deserved to be corralled in concentration camps on the Gaza strip.

There are also many who have sympathy for the Israelites after what they went through in WWII. Granted, the making of a Jewish state on the same soil that their religion comes from seemed to make sense after the senseless slaughter of millions of innocents. The world was trying to do the right thing by a people who had been left to die by the very same people. The problem was, in their guilt, the West didn't ask permission from the people who were living there happily; namely the Palestinians. As a result of their land being taken over and the borders continuously shifting against their favour, the Palestinians fought back.

Were they right to? I don't know. I don't agree with war in any case but if someone came into your home and told you you had to clear out because people who hadn't lived there for centuries were coming back to take over, I might be a little put out too.

But putting aside the rightness or not of fighting back, I want to look at the reasons as to why the West generally supports Israel and vilifies the Palestinians.

The idea that the return of Jerusalem to the Jews and the return of Christ are linked is from Revelation. Now I don't know about you, but I don't know anyone since Revelation was written that truly understands what it is talking about in full. Jerusalem can look like a heavenly city, the renewed earth, and at times a bride (!!), and so taking what it says literally without any proper understanding of the text is dangerous.

The Jews themselves tried to hurry along the Messiah. After their temple was destroyed and they were taken to Babylon in exile (at the end of the OT before the NT), they were allowed to return to Israel and rebuild their temple. This they did but the Messiah did not come. So they tried to be ultra Holy and keep all the Sabbath's because somehow that would get the Messiah to show up. When Jesus finally did come (400 years later) he proceeded to tell off those people that had helped evil doers by thinking that their actions made them holy while they did not love or care for people. I look at Palestine now and ask, is the West trying to bring back Christ through their actions in Israel but by doing so are not loving or caring for the Palestinians and letting evil happen??

I believe that the promises that God made to the Jews are true and still stand. But I believe that they are fulfilled in Christ and have also gone out to the ends of the earth. At the death of Christ, the temple curtain that separated God from the people was ripped. This signified that God left the Temple to dwell in them. This in affect means that Jerusalem, while holy from a historical and biblical view, is as holy today as any piece of land where believers stand. The city itself will always be significant to believers but it is not somehow more Godly than anywhere else.

I am sickened by what happened to the Jews in WWII. Nothing will rectify how most of the world stood back and let that happen. But building walls around slums to keep the Palestinians and Jews separate, or putting fences up and making Palestinians walk through check points, or putting them in massive camps where disease spreads, is not justifiable just because this happened to them. Two wrongs do not make the past ok.

I had a friend go to Israel last year and when they came back they told me that they saw "no holiness in the holy land." There was only fear and hatred, pain and anger.

Bombing people who you believe have done you wrong isn't going to stop their actions. It is going to breed a new generation of children who grow up in fear and who are taught to hate. As they grow older they are going to want answers, revenge, meaning to their lives. And they will take it out on the people who they see to have caused the suffering.

People, if you are Christian or not, there is no justification for anything that is happening over there. There is no one who is acting well, there are none that can claim that they are acting more holy. As people who love others, Christians should be the last to try and justify or support a war where the victims are children and innocents.

God has left the Temple, let's all stop fighting for an empty house.