08 Aug We Must Choose God Over Personal Happiness – Part 1 Trust and Obey
Blog Series
Moving from Checkers to Chess
Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective
We’re continuing our series: “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ Five Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective.”
Unless we have an eternal perspective, viewing life as God does, we are playing checkers in life while God is playing chess. And, if that’s the case, two things are certain: (1) we will consistently make the wrong moves, and (2) we lose in the end. I’d like to help avoid that.
(If you would like a concise outline to help you keep your mind around the big picture as we move through the details, click here and we’ll send you one. It’s available at the end of this post also.)
So far, in looking at the Five steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective, we have seen that (1) We Must Believe the Unbelievable, and (2) We Must Embrace the Inconceivable.
This week, we look at Step 3:
We Must Choose the Undesirable
There are three parts to “choosing the undesirable”
- We must choose God over personal happiness
- We must choose others over self
- We must choose the eventual over the immediate.
Now, of course, when we say we must choose the undesirable, it is not really undesirable. It only seems undesirable if you do not have an eternal perspective. In reality, however, these things (God, others, the eventual) are the true pathway to happiness and a deeply fulfilling life. By choosing what seems (to the world) undesirable, we learn that they are actually truly desirable, leading to our happiness and fulfillment.
This week we begin by looking at the first decision we must come to grips with in choosing the undesirable:
We must choose God over personal happiness
To choose God over personal happiness requires two things
- We must Trust and Obey
- We must Lose the Fear
Let’s take a look at that first part – we must trust and obey.
We must truly believe that He exists, that He is good, that He loves us, that He is sovereign, that the Bible is true, that we can trust His character and His actions, and do whatever He asks of us.
We express our faith by obeying Him. Faith is the key to willingly choosing God over personal happiness.
Faith is believing what God has said and acting accordingly.
Some cynics have defined faith as “believing in spite of the fact that there is nothing to believe.” Or worse, “believing in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.” Mark Twain famously said, “Faith is believing in something you just know ain’t true.”
In the classic movie Miracle on 34th Street, Santa Claus utters what much of the world thinks faith is: “Faith is believing in things when common sense tells you not to.”
Going down a slightly different path, in the Walt Disney cartoon Pinocchio, Jiminy Cricket sings, “When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.” That’s what faith is like for many people. It is like wishful thinking. Jiminy believed that if you wished hard enough, your dreams would come true.
Many people think that if they just believe hard enough, their prayers will come true. That simply isn’t accurate. Faith in faith is no good. Believing is futile if you are believing something that isn’t true.
Let me offer a better definition of faith: Faith is believing what God has said and acting accordingly.
When we do that, we are on safe ground. Our degree of obedience to God and the Scripture is the demonstration of the degree of our faith.
If we believe, we obey
When it comes to faith, many of us are like the man you’ve likely heard of who was walking along a narrow path paying little attention to where he was going. Suddenly he slipped over the edge of a cliff. As he fell, he grabbed a branch growing from the side of the cliff. Realizing that he couldn’t hang on for long, he yelled, “Help! Is anybody up there?”
A great, booming voice answered, “Yes, I’m here.”
“Who’s that?” the man asked.
“I’m your guardian angel,” the great booming voice replied.
“Help me!”
“Do you trust me?”
“Yes, I trust you completely!”
“Then let go of the branch,” the angel said.
“What?!”
“Let go of the branch.”
There was a long pause. Finally, the man yelled, “Is there anybody else up there?”
When we get into life’s scrapes, when we flounder for direction, when we ache for consolation, when we yearn for fellowship, when we are desperate for deliverance, we cry out to God for help. But then, when the Lord makes it clear what we are to do, we often wonder if there is “anybody else up there!”
Why does God require obedience from us?
Everything God asks of us, He does so because He wants to give something good to us and/or keep some harm from us. Therefore, the shortest distance between us and the life we long for is total obedience to God.
Like an athlete under a closely scrutinized training program, or a piano student in a carefully monitored practice regimen, or a soldier involved in expert preparation for special operations warfare, there is no wasted motion with God. Every action, every attitude, every rehearsal contributes to the ultimate goal of becoming more like Christ. If we get lazy or careless or rebellious, it only delays the realization of the goal.
God requires obedience from us because He loves us.
Conclusion
As I mentioned in my book, 30 Days to Growing in Your Faith, obedience is not a self-discipline or commitment problem, it is a faith problem. When we understand this and begin focusing on our faith rather than our obedience, our obedience begins to follow.
We are powerfully motivated to do what we believe will make us happy. This is not wrong. It is how God has created us. But then, He has structured reality so that He is the only one who can truly make us happy.
Blaise Pascal wrote:
All men seek happiness. This is without exception. Whatever different means they employ, they all tend to this end. The cause of some going to war, and of others avoiding it, is the same desire in both, attended with different views. The will never takes the least step but to this objective. This is the motive of every action of every man, even of those who hang themselves.
When we become convinced that we will be happier by being faithful and obedient to God than by following our own strategy, there is a surge in our power to turn from sin.
This is what God wants for us because he loves us and wants the best for us. Of this, CS Lewis writes:
“Make no mistake,” [God] says, “if you let Me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through.”
It is for our good, not God’s legalism, that He asks us to obey Him.
Continuing his comments on the subject, Lewis writes: “[God] claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our own, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There is no bargaining with Him.”
Because this is true, our only rational response is total obedience to Him.
Next week we’ll look at the second thing necessary to choosing God over personal happiness, which is to Lose the Fear. I’ll see you then.
Get a Moving from Checkers to Chess At-a-Glance-Overview: Click Here
As we have been studying these concepts for quite some time (including in some prior blog series), and I am excited to now be connecting all the “moving parts” from those posts and combining them into a “spiritual game plan” in this “Moving from Checkers to Chess ~ 5 Steps to Unleashing the Power of an Eternal Perspective” series.
For an overview of the game plan, so you can see at a glance where we begin and where we’re headed, I’ve created an overview/outline you can download for free: Click Here
For the full discussion of each of the steps, begin with the first post in this series, Moving from Checkers to Chess, and then continue with the following posts thereafter.
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