What Would It Take?

1/13/1997

Just something to chew on along those lines…did you ever wonder why Job lost his children, his wife, his health, all of his possessions? I mean wouldn’t it have been sufficient to lose one child? Wouldn’t it be sufficient just to lose his wealth? Did it ever occur to you that the magnitude of what happened, wasn’t that overkill, so to speak? That was huge. But why did it take all of that? Why did God see fit to allow all of those things to happen? One of the reasons why, maybe THE reason why is this--and you can see it in your own heart--some things aren’t sufficient to get our attention. Job was a pretty good guy. He wasn’t what you would really call a shallow person. You read Job 29 and see that this man was a father to the fatherless and he spoke out of the wisdom that God had given him and people’s mouths dropped open and they couldn’t even speak after he was done speaking. The light of his smile made people laugh and warmed their hearts. This guy had a valid relationship with God to the extent that satan hated him above every person on earth and God acknowledged him above every person on earth. So he wasn’t really what you would call a shallow person although he had a lot to learn.

So you’d ask yourself, “Why does someone that has so much going for him require so much devastation to get his attention?” The truth is, it depends on the person’s character and how much confidence they have in their relationship with God which might even be valid, and essentially how they are wired, how they think, what their series of experiences have been, how long it’s been since they’ve had a tragedy, how willing they are to picture the things God has given them as, “If they’d been taken away, then how would I be?” The willingness to go through that spiritual exercise of offering it up to God on a daily basis, whatever it is. Driving down the road you see a little shack where you can see right through from the front wall all the way to the back wall all the way through into the backyard because it’s just slats and the whole thing is smaller than your living room and there is a family of seven living in there, or two families living there. You’re just driving by on the interstate and you’ve got about five seconds to see it out of the corner of your eye and you ask God, “What would it be like if that’s the only place I had to live? How would I act? How would I feel? Would it slow me down at all in worshipping and loving him and loving other people?” If I had both arms cut off in an accident would I then be too shy to talk to somebody at a cash register at Revco about Jesus because ‘I’m embarrassed’. If we are not willing to take those exercises of spiritual life and a living sacrifice before God on a daily basis, we become dull to what those things are about.

The question that you have to ask yourself is one that I ask myself pretty frequently is, “How much would it take to get my attention?” Sometimes I am pretty well convinced that I am stubborn. I’ve got a whole lot in me of pulling myself up by my bootstraps. I am going to find a way to make it work. If the bootstrap breaks, I will find a way to tie a fancy knot in order to get ahold of it again and pull again. I have endless resources of creativity rather than finding God. Perhaps for me it would take all of those things unless I was really shaking myself and offering my life as a living sacrifice every day and demanding of myself the ultimate sacrifices in every area and being willing to humble myself before Him daily. If I’m not willing to do that…I might have a pretty good relationship with Him. I might have a lot of knowledge or a lot of this or that… and yet in order to go to the next level, God is going to have to devastate me if I am not willing to lay it before Him myself just because I just don’t think of it, I’m too busy having a good time with all of His good things. Valid as they may be, if I’m not willing to live a broken and contrite heart and life before Him and to offer everything on the sacrifice before Him, all of my desires and plans, feelings and my health and my living circumstances and relationships, and all that kind of stuff. If I have to have it my way in order to be happy or I just don’t even think about it, I don’t offer it to Him continuously for real, then perhaps to take me to the next level He will have to cut off my bootstraps and give me a couple of broken arms so I can’t pull myself up by them anymore.

I think Job, as wonderful a person as he was, my guess is, knowing God a little bit, knowing how God thinks and acts and responds to His people a little bit, my guess is that he was a stubborn dude. Otherwise he would have lost one child and all of the things he learned could have been learned. David learned a whole lot from the loss of a child. It didn’t take everything all in a few weeks’ time, or whatever it was, in order to get his attention on that one point about the nature of God and who he was before God. He worked that out fairly quickly. A whole lot of it happened just from the words of one man. One guy came up to him and said, “David, let me tell you a little story.” A whole lot of what God wanted to do came out in one little story from one person. Apparently Job wasn’t like that. Apparently Job couldn’t hear that story and relate to that story and repent and give his whole life to God the way David did at that time.

I just want you to ask yourself that question, “What would it take for me? How much would be required of me? What would I have to lose? How much would I have to hurt? How many things would have to happen to me in order to get my attention, to turn me into a full worshipper with no recourse, no bootstraps to pull up, nothing left except just Jesus, and I’m satisfied in Him and I’ll take what He gives me. Not my will, but Yours be done. I want this cup to pass, but whatever You want is Yours. The way Jesus did it. That’s the heart that the Father is still looking for. The Father loves the Son and everything that looks like the Son, and that’s what He’s determined, bound and determined, to get us to that place, and He will do what it takes, just like He did with Job. Thank Him for that, but don’t make it any harder for Him than it has to be. Don’t make it any harder for yourself than it has to be. No parent loves to spank his children. God himself said, “I find no enjoyment in disciplining my children. I have to do it. But I don’t find any enjoyment in it.” God wasn’t glorying in and enjoying what happened to Job. It was breaking the Father’s heart, too. But somehow He knew that in the end since Job was firmly right smack in the middle of His palm the whole time, He could bear it knowing that Job was safe. But it broke the Father’s heart.

But no offense, Job, you’ve got things that none of us have. We aren’t insulting you in any way, but you know this is true that you were a hard case. And I’m sure you are praying for us that we’ll not be so stubborn, that we’ll not be dull and not be unable to hear and to sift and to feel and experience and lay things on the altar now so that to go to the next level in our lives the more difficult things don’t really need to happen. There are a lot of other people that suffer as a result of our suffering. It would certainly be God’s will that we could grow up into the holy faith, into the image and the likeness of Jesus and the full knowledge of the Son of God and to be fully equipped for works of service and to be bound together one with another in a picture of an army marching in step running over the walls and unhindered by anything the enemy would throw at us. Together, exactly in the formation, exactly in the relationships as He planned them to be. That would certainly be the Father’s will. God forbid that we would be so stubborn that it would cost us years of our life and massive amounts of pain and difficulty and confusion because we weren’t listening, we didn’t do it His way. We weren’t laying things on the altar as we lived our lives and so we had to learn the hard way. We were safe in His hand, but it sure is wasteful. Jesus obviously is the second Adam. He’s our Father in that sense, just as Adam was our first father. Jesus is our second Father. We have Jesus’ genetic makeup. We have Jesus’ wherewithal, we have the spirit that lived in Him living in us, we have the ability to not have to learn like Job learned. If we listen. If we be careful with it, we wouldn’t have to have the avalanche of things happen if we would submit it all to Him as Jesus did. “Not my will but Yours be done” right up front and live that way in that sensitivity, it can be really special. And we can avoid some of that.

I just want you to ask yourself that question. If right now God wanted to take you to the next level, what would it take for you? How incredibly difficult would you make it for Him, or how easy would you make it for Him to take you to the next level? Would it take all those things that happen to Job before you finally listen? Or would it take just the voice of a prophet, an Agabus or a Nathan, or someone just to say, “Hey, listen up. Got a story for you.” Would that be enough for you? Or would it be just the Father’s voice, feeling the withdraw of the Father’s fellowship and we turn and run after that and say, “No, I won’t lose your fellowship, Father for the sake of my this or my that. Spare me. Let this cup pass. My God, my God. Don’t forsake me. Anything but that.” Would we be able to just feel and experience the Father’s fellowship and let that be enough to turn us away rather than to have our whole life have to collapse in us and around us and be snatched from us in order to get our attention so we can learn what Job learned. We’ve got everything we need, everything that pertains to life and godliness. We have all the things that we need in order to learn these lessons together, hand in hand, building the way God wants us to build exactly the way He intends, and we could spare alot of that stuff if we would be good listeners and responsive to Him. So let’s do it that way how about.