It’s All the Small Things

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My friend shared this visual lately of two ways to view your relationship with God.

On one hand, you can think of God as this pool of clear water over there — somewhere you go on occasion, maybe daily, to take a dip. It’s refreshing and cool; it can bring you peace and joy. You, however, spend the majority of your day on the land. That’s where you toil and sweat and do all your hard work. While the daily dips in the pool are a good thing, it’s definitely a separate section of your day.

On the other hand, your relationship with God can be like you in a river. All day, every day. It’s you in the river. The river is all around you and it’s carrying you to the places the river will go.

I like this analogy because it reveals the difference between “adding God to your life” and allowing your whole life to become surrendered to God. I mentioned last week I am tuning into more of these faint whispers of what kingdom-living might look like in the day-to-day.

Kingdom-living is not me doing my life and then finding time on my calendar to go share the Gospel (although being intentional to share the Gospel through scheduling is a good thing!). But it’s not me adding another thing to my already-full schedule.

“Full” meaning it’s full with cutting up fruit to appease the hungry children while I simultaneously try to make lunch. Full with trying to wipe a tiny butt while simultaneously trying to keep a different, tinier kid from putting his hands in the toilet. Full with tidying up all things one! more! time! Full with saying yes to cutting out butterfly wings because my daughter wants to be able to fly and then trying to figure out a way to get them to stick to her back. 

Kingdom-living is allowing everything to become about the Kingdom’s King and his purposes. Asking God how he would have me order my whole entire day. And in the midst of this, truly, the small things become the significant things — because when you have an eye for God’s upside-down kingdom, the least things become the most important things. Steps that don’t add provide any additional benefit to your life become valuable because you know it’s what God wants. 

Steps that don’t add provide any additional benefit to your life become valuable because you know it’s what God wants. 

I love this thought from Bob Goff’s book Everybody Always that we are building a kingdom, not a castle. How easy is it, as we strive to live in the world but not be of the world, to get caught up in building our individual castles?

So much in this life is going to burn. Like literally, at the end of time or at the end of your life, so much of what we are daily making our lives about will no longer matter at all. At the end of your time, what’s going to remain? What will have been kingdom investments when you have passed on into the kingdom of God?

I am studying 1 Thessalonians and Paul’s words to the Thessalonian believers in chapter two struck a cord with me. He said: “Who is our hope or joy or crown of boasting in the presence of our Jesus Christ at His coming? Is it not you?” (1 Thess. 2:19)

Start with the small steps of obedience every day. If I’m not willing to obey God in the small, seemingly insignificant things — why would I be willing to obey him in the larger and harder things?

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Yoked

Spending time with God each day, prioritizing this in the midst of busy and full lives, isn’t a burden. You know? It’s a yoke.

Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

For my yoke is easy and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28-20)

Jesus, the Lion and the Lamb, tells us to come to him. He tells us his burden is light. If you think about it, having a yoke on you … would feel like a burden, let’s be real. Similarly, living the Christian life does have a weightiness to it. It’s this dichotomy of “I do nothing to earn salvation” (Eph. 2:8-9) and “I must walk out my faith as a result of salvation” (James 2:17, 1 John 3:18, Col. 2:6). But if prioritizing time in God’s word feels like a heavy burden, it may because I’m tangled up believing the lie that I need to do this “work” to earn God’s approval.

Christ’s yoke is weighty, but it’s a light weight — because Jesus himself is bearing up the weight with me. A yoke is made for two. And the cool thing is that when I’m yoked to Christ, when I’m walking my day in awareness of his presence and seeking his leading in the big and small things, it’s not all on me. I don’t have to live under the anxiety of not knowing which way to go in those big and small decisions. I just lean in to Christ, follow his lead. It’s easier.

But it also requires submission and obedience. If I’m consistently trying to go in a different direction then Christ, I will exhaust myself being yoked to him. I also won’t move anywhere, so that’s a bummer.

Spending time with God is not a burden of adding another thing to your schedule. But if it feels this way, take heart knowing that most believers are in that camp from time to time. When that’s where you are, don’t wallow in guilt. Just start there! Be honest and tell God how you feel, but ask him to change you — and do this with a genuine heart of repentance. Set yourself up for success by finding a consistent time of the day that will work for you to be in his Word. Ask God to do the work of getting you to consistent time with him, and then as he prompts or convicts you each day, be obedient.

The reality is, the things we know we want to or should do often don’t come at a convenient time. And we can either push it off, saying “I’ll get to that later,” (but maybe later never comes) or we can choose surrender in the moment, trust God to help us accomplish the things that need accomplishing, and choose obedience.

Obedience yields the promised land. It yields fruit. Disobedience yields a desert of wandering around and missing God’s blessing — his blessing of Himself. We get to do life with the triune God. But so often we can walk around totally unaware of that fact! I am there, too. Many days I don’t even think to pray again in the midst of my day, after I shut my Bible in the morning.

Lord, grow me here! Place in me a greater desire to know you. Enable me to comprehend more of your love for me. Give me eyes to see your kingdom work to be done. Help me to seek you first, because I know that when I do that everything else will fall into place. In Jesus’ name, amen. 

 

Following God in the Little Things

A few years ago, I started to just gamble on believing maybe the subtle every-day promptings on my heart were the Holy Spirit working in me. For a long time, I just assumed those promptings were just myself telling myself to do stuff. And sure, I knew doing xyz would probably be a good thing to do. But I never felt like doing whatever it was anyway and I would always conclude that God couldn’t care about something that small anyway. So I would push the prompting away and keep going.

I’m talking small things. I started growing in this area when I felt prompted to call Walmart about an eye drop prescription — something I would have put off for a while because I have this irrational fear about calling business places. But instead of doing what I would have normally done, I went ahead and made the call based on wondering if maybe that prompting I felt was from God (but why would he care about eyedrops?).

I remember in that moment I was overcoming a fear (granted, a small one) because I was obeying God. And I also remember seeing the benefit: I think the prescription hadn’t been processed properly and I would have been out of eye drops if I hadn’t called that morning. (Side note, this was post-LASIK so the eye drops were kind of a big deal.)

That started me on this journey of being sensitive to God’s voice, the Holy Spirit’s promptings, in the small things. I’ve learned a few other things along the way:

• I’m more ready to obey God in the bigger things if I’ve been following Him in the smaller things. If I have this default of saying yes, I tend to default to yes for something that’s farther out of my comfort zone. Conversely, if I’ve defaulted to saying no for the everyday things, ultimately I’ve put myself in the driver’s seat and told God I don’t want to do things I don’t feel like doing.
• When I obey God, I walking across the Jordan into the promised land of His blessing. This may be something I see in this life, or something I don’t see in this life, but I do believe that obedience always proceeds blessing. I’m not saying we should obey God “so that He’ll do what I want Him to” — not at all. Rather, why wouldn’t I obey Him when I know there will always be fruit on the other side?
• When I disobey, I am choosing to forgo the promised land and wander around in the desert. Sometimes you can wander around in the desert a long time (hopefully not for 40 years, but I wouldn’t put it past me). Is there something that for a long time you’ve subtly known God would have you to do, and for a long time you’ve sidestepped it? What would happen if you just stepped out in obedience today? Oftentimes continued disobedience leads to an overall dryness in our walks. And if you don’t have the strength to obey? Just start there! Cry out to God: ask Him to forgive you for walking around in disobedience and ask Him for the courage to obey. Believe He will do the work in you!
• The Spirit’s guidance will always be inline with God’s Word. If you don’t have a steady intake of God’s Word, you’re subjecting yourself to believing lies. The world, the devil, and our flesh constantly berate us with falsehood. The way to tell the difference? Spend time in what God has already said. I do believe God guides in the little things, in the day-to-day, in conversations, but I don’t believe He will reveal something “new” to you that goes against something in Scripture. Not gonna happen.

At the end of the day, for those who have put their faith in God, His Spirit is in you. I pray that we grow in our awareness of, and obedience to, Him and He would use us to glorify Himself and build His kingdom — even as we wait for Jesus to return!