Lent 2010

I know it has been a LONG time since I've blogged. Sorry about that. Selling our house and buying one in Manitoba has occupied alot of my attention in February but I praise God that we have done both. I wanted to write earlier in Lent and to use this George MacDonald quote as a springboard for discussion.

"But I do not know how to awake and arise!"

I will tell you. Get up, and do something the Master tells you; so make yourself his disciple at once. Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because he said, Do it, or once asbstained because he said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe in him, if you do not anything he tells you. If you can think of nothing he ever said as having had an atom of influence on your doing or not doing, you have too good ground to consider youself no disciple of his.

But you can begin at once to be a disciple of the Living One - by obeying him in the first thing you can think of in which you are not obeying him. We must learn to obey him in everything, and so much begin somewhere. Let it be at once, and in the very next thing that lies at the door of our conscience! Oh fools and slow of heart, if you think of nothing but Christ, and do not set yourselves to do his words! You but build your houses on sand."

- From Creation in Christ by George MacDonald

I read this early on in the new year and appreciated the exhortation to start now. So often I find myself thinking about obedience and not actually acting by faith in obedience to God. Or I find myself reading about other people's obedience and wishing I could be like them. Or I spend time trying to gain a bit more insight into why do I disobey (a necessary thing as my 6 months of counselling have helped me see) and let that contemplation be a distraction from or replacement for actually obeying what I know is His will. Can you relate?

I'm going to stop writing so you can respond to what the Lord has said to you through this. Go in His grace and strength knowing that His Spirit can give you the ability to obey!