Have you ever been overlooked? You know how David must have felt that he was
only an afterthought in his father's mind when Samuel came with the news that
one of Jesse's boys was going to be the next king. Jesse didn't even bother to bring David to
the lineup for Samuel to consider.
Samuel wanted to anoint the others but God said no to all the
above. Samuel finally had to inquire
whether this was all the boys before Jesse said, oh yeah, there is one more but
he keeps the sheep. God saw the heart,
saw what wasn't obvious to anyone and said, this is the one. Even afterwards David was treated badly by
his brothers when they were arrayed with the rest of Saul's army against the
Philistines and their champion Goliath.
It is hard to be the one always overlooked but take heart, the Lord knows
you're there and He has a plan for you.
The harder question to answer here is who are you overlooking? We tend to look out for our own interests
quite well, we tend to know the slights of others in overlooking us but there
is little or no chance that we aren't sinning against someone or, likely more
than one someone, by overlooking them because they don't meet our
standards. The way to get past that one
is to stop looking at yourself and ask God to help you see what He sees.
Following Jesus means not only leaving everything you know
behind you, it means also leaving everything you have hoped for behind
you. The first person who offers to
follow wherever Jesus goes is told, "Foxes have holes, birds have nests,
but the Son of Man has no place to lay His head." Did this man assume what the disciples seemed
to have assumed, that Jesus was bound to a throne and therefore the man was
willing to follow Jesus because at the end he would find fulfillment of his
dreams? The response certainly disabused
him of any such idea, kings certainly have a place to lay their heads. We live in a time when preachers teach
exactly the opposite, if you want your best life, to have your dreams realized,
follow Jesus. The second, who wanted to
bury his father, is told that we can't let anything stand in the way of our
following Jesus, no matter how near and dear, no matter what it would mean for
our reputation among men to walk away from that prior commitment. Even honoring your father and mother has to
come second to honoring Jesus. The
disciples got a little glimpse into who was this man when He, like the God who
spoke and caused all things in creation to obey Him, calmed the storm with a
word.
Most often when I hear this verse about God being able to do
more than we can ask or imagine I hear it quoted in a way that has to do with
prosperity. In context, is that really
what it is saying? I think it has much
more to do with the power of God in us, bringing us to knowledge and fullness
in Him. We tend to overestimate
ourselves in some ways and underestimate God it seems. We think we are overlooked because we esteem
our natural gifting and talents and Samuel did the same with respect to David's
brothers, but God sees the heart. Where
we have any effective use for the kingdom is at the heart and spiritual gift
level. Our usefulness comes from the
work of God in us and through us, not from our talents in only their natural
state. We need to be more yielded in all
our being to Him for this verse to be realized.
No comments:
Post a Comment