Jamie Grace- You Lead
God leads and you follow.
Is it easy to follow God in the world we live in? (No) Why not?
1. We have a lot of distractions. Most of us are
really busy. You have school work,
chores at home, sports, plays, speech, band, dance, work, and plenty of other
things going on. Obviously these aren’t
all bad things. They actually can be
great things to be involved in, but there is no doubt that it takes away from
time you could be spending with God.
2. A lot of the stuff around us doesn’t exactly
portray a Christ following lifestyle. I
turned on a local station and the first song playing is talking about getting
drunk, doing drugs, and getting with all of the girls. Turn on the TV at night and people are
hooking up with someone different every episode. No one respects anyone else or
themselves. Absolutely no one honors
their mother and father by doing what they are supposed to. That would be “un-cool.”
3. Don’t even try to check out the news because
that feels like it is always focused on people at their worst. All day yesterday the sports talk shows were
about Lance Armstrong “kind-of” admitting to cheating. He took steroids, or something like it, in a
sport that almost everyone else cheated.
He came back from testicular cancer to win 7 Tour de France titles, but
he apparently made some unethical choices along the way. At the same time, he created the Livestrong
foundation that, according to their website, has raised over $470,000,000 to
support cancer victims. Now that he
cheated a cycling, it apparently wipes out any good that may have come from
Livestrong. I think you could find
thousands of people that have benefited greatly from Livestrong and would say
great things about it and Lance, but that isn’t what sells news stories. The local news isn’t much better. It always seems to focus on death, scandals,
and political bickering.
4. If you look around the world, we spend a lot of
time trying to find people to lead us, but the qualifications seem to be
lacking. A significant number of our
leaders also seem to not follow God, at least not in their daily decisions or
actions. If our leaders don’t follow God
it tends to make it harder for us to follow Him.
If we go back to Israel around 1050
BC there is only one king and his name is God.
God appointed judges to help lead the people but these judges were
followers of God. At around 1050 BC the
people of Israel went to the judge, Samuel, and told him they wanted a king
like everyone else had. This made Samuel
mad because he felt like the people were disrespecting him. The Samuel prayed to God about what to do and
God responded in 1 Samuel 8:7 “it is not you they have rejected, but they have
rejected me as their king.” Samuel
warned the people in 1 Samuel 8:10-18 about how bad it would be if a king was
appointed, but the people wanted it anyway.
Do you know the saying “be careful what you wish for?” That saying fits perfectly here. God gave them exactly what they wanted, a
king who looked impressive. Saul was an
impressive young man a head taller than any of the other Israelites. God selected Saul because he would have been
like the kings of other nations, impressive looking. He also had a bad temper and frequently
disobeyed God.
Overall, Saul turned out to be a
less than perfect king. This was the
start of Israel’s roller coaster of kings.
Some of them, like David, were considered to be good kings. More, like Jeroboam and Rehoboam, were
marginal at best. Even the good ones
like David made some pretty big mistakes that upset God. When the Israelites asked for a human king
like other nations they appeared to have forgotten that humans make
mistakes. They could have stuck with God
as king, but they thought they knew better.
They actually asked for the problems they had.
I don’t want to get in to a
political debate. Multiple polls have
shown that the approval rating of our current and previous president was around
50% or lower. The approval rating of
Congress has typically been even lower than the President. So I think it is safe to say that a lot of
people don’t think we have selected good leaders. So we need to make a choice to follow God’s
lead. Make the time to talk to God. Tell Him “You lead and I will follow.” Then you actually need to follow. It doesn’t matter who our elected leaders
are, the choice to follow God can only be yours.
No comments:
Post a Comment