What Does Your Response to Jesus Reveal?
Looking back, I can see something in my response that I couldn't recognize as clearly then. I knew what I believed God had said, but I was waiting for someone else to validate it. I wanted someone to tell me it was okay to pursue ministry and show me how to begin. Without realizing it, I had placed man's approval beside God's voice and decided I needed both before I could move. It would take me years to learn that when God speaks, His word is enough.
How Do You Respond When God Asks You to Move?
At age 47, I heard the Lord ask me to leave my job and apply for a position at my church. I had spent years as a nurse, so this wasn't a small career adjustment. It meant a significant financial change, leaving a profession I knew and stepping into the very thing I had longed to do since I was 15. This time my response was different. I said yes, took a giant leap of faith and went from years of nursing into full-time ministry.
It has been one of the best decisions I have ever made. What has followed has been years of growing into who God created me to be and learning what it looks like to follow Him when I don't know exactly where the road is going. I'm not where I know God is taking me yet, but I'm on the road. I had finally learned to move when God spoke without waiting for someone else to tell me I was allowed to go.
You might think that meant I had mastered the whole obedience thing by then, but I hadn't. In 2017, God began dealing with me about holding a women's conference, and my immediate response was, “I don't like women's conferences.” At the time, my opinion of women's conferences was that they all looked like somebody had hosed the place down with Pepto-Bismol and hung a bow on everything that didn't move. I am not particularly girlie, and none of that sounded like me, so I couldn't understand why God would ask me to do something that seemed so completely outside of who I was.
Then He told me I should teach from the book of Jonah, which made even less sense to me. I spent about thirty minutes arguing with God and pointing out all the flaws in His plan. I didn't think the people I needed would agree to help me, I wasn't sure the budget would work, and then there was the obvious problem I felt compelled to point out: “There are no women in the book of Jonah. Are You going to ask a man to lead a men's conference from the Proverbs 31 woman? This makes no sense to me.” It never pays to argue with God, but apparently I needed thirty minutes to remember that.
Everyone I thought might say no said yes. People even offered to help meet the conference budget. God already had the details worked out while I was busy explaining to Him all the reasons His plan wasn't going to work. The irony isn't lost on me now. I had spent decades wanting to do ministry, and when God began opening a new area of ministry to me, I spent thirty minutes trying to talk Him out of it.
That conference eventually led to my book Left-Field Dreamers: Everyday Girls Doing Extraordinary Things, and it became the beginning of a calling I hadn't anticipated. I didn't think I wanted women's ministry, but I discovered that I deeply love leading women to a place of encounter with God. God knew something about me that I didn't know about myself yet. What I saw as all the reasons His plan didn't make sense were details He had already worked out.
Our Response Can Reveal What Is Happening in Our Heart
When I look at those different seasons of my life, I'm struck by how differently I responded to God. At 15, I needed man's approval and validation before I felt free to pursue what God had spoken to me. At 47, God asked me to make an enormous change, and I was willing to take the leap of faith. A few years later, I was already doing the ministry I had wanted for decades, yet I could still respond to an unexpected direction from God with thirty minutes of objections rooted in fear and doubt.
The circumstances were different, but each response revealed something about what was happening in my heart at the time. That realization has made me pay much closer attention to how I respond to God. When my first reaction is fear, resistance, doubt or a long explanation of why something couldn't possibly work, I have learned that it is worth stopping long enough to ask what is underneath my response. Sometimes the response reveals something I didn't know was there.
Over the years, I have learned to simply say yes and move. He always meets me on the journey. I don't need every detail before I obey, and I don't need everyone around me to agree that what God has said makes sense. God's ways are always the best ways, even when what He is asking doesn't look like something I would have chosen for myself, and learning that has changed more than the way I respond to Him. It has also changed the way I read Scripture.
Look at the Different Ways People Respond to Jesus
As I have studied the life of Jesus again for The Jesus Trilogy, I have found myself noticing the responses of the people surrounding Him. We can become so familiar with these accounts that we concentrate almost entirely on what happened. We know the major events and the people involved, so our eyes can move across the page without stopping to ask why one person responds one way while someone else in the same story responds very differently.
Go back to the accounts surrounding the early life of Jesus and pay attention to the people. Don't begin by deciding who is right or wrong or trying to turn each person into a lesson. Simply observe what happens when people are confronted with Jesus and with what God is doing. Who moves toward Him? Who pulls away? What do their words and actions make you curious about?
Those questions become even more interesting when we stop reading simply to get to the end of a familiar story. There are details in these passages that are easy to overlook when we already know what happens next. Slow down enough to notice what Scripture actually tells you, and just as importantly, notice what it doesn't tell you. Ask questions before you reach conclusions and give the text room to show you something you may have read past many times before.
What Does Your Response to Jesus Reveal?
That question becomes much more personal when we stop looking only at the people on the page. If their responses are worth examining, perhaps ours are too. How do we respond when God's direction doesn't match what we expected? What happens in our hearts when obedience costs something, when His timing isn't ours, or when what He asks simply doesn't make sense to us?
I know what some of those responses have looked like in my own life. I have waited for man's approval when God had already spoken. I have taken giant leaps of faith because I knew He had called me to move, and I have also spent thirty minutes telling God why His idea wasn't going to work. Each response showed me something about where I was in my relationship with Him and where fear, doubt or the need for approval still had influence.
This isn't an invitation to condemn ourselves every time our first response isn't perfect. It is an invitation to allow Scripture to expose what we might otherwise miss. Sometimes a response can uncover a place where we still need to know God more deeply, because the more we know His character, the more we learn that He can be trusted even when we don't understand what He is doing.
The more I have walked with God, the more I have learned that I don't have to understand His entire plan before I follow Him. I can trust the One who sees what I cannot see. I can obey before every detail has fallen into place because I have learned something about His character along the way. Knowing Him changes the way I respond to Him.
Go Back to the Bible and Look Again
This week, I want to challenge you to return to the Scriptures surrounding the early life of Jesus with fresh eyes. Instead of reading only to remember what happened, watch the people around Him. Pay attention to their words, their actions and the choices they make when they encounter what God is doing. Don't hurry to explain their responses. Give yourself room to observe them first.
Then begin asking questions. Why might two people confronted with the same truth respond so differently? What does one person recognize that another seems to miss? What do you notice when you stop concentrating only on the events and begin paying attention to the people inside them? Most importantly, what does each response to Jesus reveal about the condition of the human heart, and what might your own response be revealing about yours?
This is the kind of discovery we're making in Week 2 of Jesus: The Promise Revealed — From Birth to Baptism. The workbook isn't designed to simply tell you what I discovered and ask you to agree with me. It is designed to help you slow down, engage the Bible for yourself, trace connections throughout Scripture, explore the world surrounding the text and ask questions that help you see things you may have read past before.
If you've been wanting to know Jesus beyond the stories you've heard about Him, I would love for you to come study with me. There is so much more in these familiar passages than we realize when we read them quickly. Grab your copy of Jesus: The Promise Revealed and begin the journey from the manger to the river, opening the Word and discovering Jesus for yourself one passage at a time.
Study it. Savor it. Live it.