Listening

Today is one of those lessons in Oswald Chambers’ My Utmost for His Highest that I’d love to just rip out of the book.  But I haven’t, which is, I suppose, a good first step related to the lesson.

“I will follow you Lord, but first let me….”  Luke 9:61

I’ll get right to the punchline in Chambers’ commentary – “We act like pagans in a crisis, only one out of a crowd is daring enough to bank his faith on the character of God.”  Earlier, above that, he writes: “Again and again you will get up to what Jesus Christ wants, and every time you will turn back when it comes to the point, and you abandon resolutely.”

In the past, when thinking and writing on this passage I have referred to it as a practice in which I, like the man in the passage, “but” God.  That it, some option or opportunity reveals itself to me with clarity, I feel led to respond (that #!$& still, small voice) in this way or another, but talk myself out of it.  At times my refusal has some logic behind it, at other times it is more flippant, but of course the logic is of no interest to Chambers.  In his binary world, there is abandonment to God and rejection of God.

I have no solution here other than to note that at times I listen to that voice, and others I do not.  I’d like to think that the instances of listening are increasing, and the rejections decreasing, but as I think that it sounds a lot like rationalization, and a whole lot like keeping score.  Then it occurs to me that in both acceptance and rejection, I am listening – which at least sounds like a good start.