BONDSERVANT NOT SOLDIER

When I am most zealous about something I tend to move under my own direction and under my own steam.  I run ahead of God into the battle and I always return bruised, battered, and bloody.  It is not enough to say that God is on my side; He must be at the front and in command or it is not His battle; it is mine.  Once I know that I will lay my sword down and wait for His orders, His direction, and His leading.

When I see myself as a soldier for God rather than a bondservant of Jesus, I move out of His service and into my own plan of battle.  I will fail, no matter how righteous the battle cause may be. 

I frequently get caught up in causes.  There’s a world of injustice and unrest that surrounds me daily; pain, suffering, poverty, and war are in the worldview of everyone and it impossible to escape the cries for help by the multitudes.  But I can’t let those cries drown out the voice of God.  He hears those cries as well and He has the only sustainable solution to meet them. Try as I might to grow in faith, and into the mind of Christ, I can never outgrow my need to listen to Him, who knows all.

“Seek the Lord while he may be found;

Call upon Him while He is near;

For My thoughts are not your thoughts,

Neither are your ways My way

Declares the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,

So are My ways higher than your ways

And My thoughts than your thoughts.”

Isaiah 55:6-9

When I see things that are broken I want to fix them.  But at times my zeal has me stepping out of rank, from bondservant to soldier.  God may want things to break; things that were not in His plan but were devised by human beings, with asking Him first.  We build our own houses for God, our own golden calves, and assume God will bless them because we ask Him to.  Those hand made things must break for God’s plan to be accomplished.  His purpose is the True purpose that will be accomplished forever.

“My word that goes out of My mouth;

It shall not return to Me empty,

But it shall accomplish that which I purpose

And shall succeed in the thing for which I have sent it.”

Isaiah 55:11