Have you ever had something asked of you that was so far outside of your comfort zone that you simply refused to do it?  Perhaps there is something new being expected of you that you have never done or tried before and there is no way you are about to start now.  Maybe the task at hand just sounds too hard — impossible for anyone to accomplish, let alone someone like me.  My guess is that you have been there with me more often than you want to admit.  We get really good at the excuses, don’t we?  We drag out all kinds of reasons as to why we can’t do whatever is being asked or expected.  Sometimes we get really creative and sometimes we respond with a simple, “I can’t”.

Yet, I wonder.  How often is that really true?  Do you and I know that it is really true when we respond that way?  I often heard a phrase growing up that went like this:  “Can’t never could ’til he tried.”  As much as I would try to push that thought aside or simply ignore it, there were always times when I would say, “I can’t”, and that phrase would jump into my mind and ask the simple question, “How do you know?”  When asked honestly and intently of our self, this question often reveals the true answer isn’t, “I can’t” but “I won’t!” 

We don’t like to get caught using the “I won’t” response.  It sounds so selfish.  It makes us appear lazy and unconcerned.  It puts the emphasis on our unwillingness to be involved.  We much prefer “I can’t”.  It gives the impression that we care.  It makes it sound like we want to, we simply are unable to.  “I can’t” says it is impossible.  The timing is wrong.  The request is wrong.  The setting isn’t right for me.  The task is beyond my ability.  I’m too young or too old.  Often these are just ways that we excuse our “I won’t” and attempt to portray it as “I can’t”. 

In the years that I directed children’s ministry and was a youth minister, I was constantly in need of volunteers to help with a wide variety of ministry tasks.  As I would ask, recruit, and even beg people to serve in some area of need, I would get a lot of “I can’t do that” but I do not recall ever having anyone actually say, “I won’t do that”.  I-can’t-itis is a plague that is wreaking havoc in our society and in our churches as it is symptomatic of the selfishness that defines the American culture.  Do you hear yourself in any of these statements?  . . . I can’t serve in the nursery.  . . . I can’t attend Sunday School, or any other Bible study for that matter.  . . . I can’t teach a children’s class.  . . . I can’t participate in a focused gathering of prayer for my church and community.  . . . I can’t be a sponsor at a youth event.  . . . I can’t make people feel welcome.  . . . I can’t tolerate people who sing, look, or act differently.  . . . I can’t help at a church work day.  . . . I can’t be involved in a nursing home, homeless center, or any other ministry that would take me out of my comfort zone.  . . . I can’t.  . . . I can’t.  . . . I can’t!

Well, just maybe you are right and you can’t — but God can!  Throughout the Bible, God selects common, ordinary people to do extraordinary — even impossible — things.  Imagine life if Noah had said, “I can’t build this boat, or ark, or whatever it is You are saying I need.”  . . . Oh, wait!  There wouldn’t be life, would there.  Or David saying, “I can’t defeat this giant.”  Imagine if Daniel had said, “It’s a law.  I guess I can’t pray.”  Or Mary saying, “I can’t be the mother of this Messiah that you say I am to have.”

Each of these people, along with many others, would have been right — at least by our definition.  The task expected of them was huge — seemingly impossible by our standards.  We get a good idea of this in Luke as God sends an angel to give Mary the news that she would give birth to the very Son of God.  Her immediate response doesn’t quite sound like “I can’t”, but it is at least a question at the heart of her words; “How will this be since I am a virgin?”  I know that because the angel responds with a way that it is possible by telling Mary that the baby she will have will be conceived by the Holy Spirit.  The angel goes on to say that not only will you Mary, a virgin, have a baby, but your aunt — the one who is beyond child-bearing age and is known to be barren, that aunt is going to have a baby as well.  I know the thought was at least forming in Mary’s mind that this can’t be because the angel states in Luke 1:37 that this will all happen because “nothing is impossible with God.”  Even with any questions and thoughts Mary may have had about why she couldn’t, she didn’t use the “I can’t” as cover for an “I won’t”.  Convinced or not of her ability to do what was being stated, she took the angel at his word that “nothing is impossible with God” and she responded with a willingness to be involved as she replies, “May it be to me as you have said.”

How about you and me?  Do we believe that nothing is impossible with God?  Do we live as if we serve a God who can do things in and through us that we think are impossible?  Does knowing that nothing is impossible with God make our statements of “I can’t” seem more like the “I won’t” that they are?

May you and I live obediently to God, surrendering anything that we say, “I can’t”, and asking Him if “He will”.

What do you do when life comes at you 100+ miles per hour and your internal alarm bells are clanging loudly and will not be silenced? 

You’ve been there, right?  Perhaps you are there right now.  . . . Bad news just arrived from the doctor.  . . . Word has been circulating for weeks that the company is in trouble and jobs will have to be eliminated.  . . . A “good friend” has betrayed the confidence you placed in them and has begun to “share” private information with others — information that will damage, even destroy, your reputation.  . . . God has been speaking to you heavily through His Spirit and His Word about taking a stand for Him in your neighborhood and you know some people won’t like the transformation that could take place.  . . . On the list could go. 

We each have our list of alarming events, don’t we?  I remember (somewhat clearly) being so sick twenty some years ago that I often struggled just to get out of bed each day.  The doctors were coming up with no answers and I was alarmed — so afraid that the worst of the worst must be happening to me.  I think that may have just been preparation because it was even more alarming when the Mayo Clinic doctor finally said, “You have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  There is nothing we can do for you.  Goodbye!”  So long and have good life.  I hope it works out for you.  Wow!  If they couldn’t do anything to improve my physical health, then I was in bad shape.  How alarming!

I also remember, even more clearly, a month my wife and I spent at the Ronald McDonald House at the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital.  Obviously not a normal vacation spot for most families.  No, this was a visit brought about by a trip with our daughter to a local ER for an ongoing seizure that ended with her kidneys and liver shutting down and a quick ride to Chicago.  Alarming enough?  I thought so.  Then, as the doctor worked methodically to discover the reason for her body shutting down and the ensuing coma, he finally calls us into a conference room and says, “There is nothing more we can do.”  Okay, now we’re at alarming.  Five-alarm alarming!  How do you respond to that?  What do you do when life seems to be all stacked up against you and you are afraid?

How about when you are under attack?  . . . When the enemy is coming at you full force and nothing can stand in its way?  . . . When an army is coming out to destroy you and take everything you have — an army so vast that its reputation strikes fear into everyone long before it arrives?  . . . Oh, wait.  . . . That sounds familiar.  . . . That was yesterday’s text in our “A View From The Top:  What Does God Say” study.  In 2 Chronicles chapter twenty, we find that very scenario laid out before us.  It was a frightening time for Judah and its king, Jehoshaphat, as reports arrived of this “vast army” coming to attack.  So, what did Jehoshaphat do?  What can we learn from his actions? 

Jehoshaphat began by recognizing his fear and dealing with it appropriately.  We read in 2 Chronicles 20:3-4, “Alarmed, Jehoshaphat resolved to inquire of the Lord, and he proclaimed a fast for all of Judah.  The people of Judah came together to seek help from the Lord; indeed, they came from every town in Judah to seek him.”  Yes, Jehoshaphat was alarmed.  He had every reason to be.  Yet in his fear, he made a decision that he would not waver from.  He resolved to ask God what was up.  He wasn’t approaching God with his list of demands, rather he was “resolved to inquire of the Lord”.  His resolve gathered the whole nation around him to fast and seek God — that He would be heard and listened to.  As the nation gathers in prayer and fasting, Jehoshaphat leads them in seeking God and calling on Him to take care of this situation as only He can.  Jehoshaphat lays out before God their trust in Him, their obedience to Him, their reliance on Him as their deliverer.  He acknowledges that on their own, they are helpless before this invading force.  So, as the nation gathers before God, they say, “We do not know what to do, but our eyes are on you.”  We don’t have an answer, but we trust that you, God, have one.  We’re not going to make up a solution on our own rather we will fix our eyes on God and expect Him to give the plan.  And so it is in this time of expectation that, “All the men of Judah, with their wives and children and little ones, stood there before the Lord.”  (1 Chronicles 20:13) 

As the nation stands before the Lord seeking His instructions, God speaks through the Spirit of the Lord on a man, Jahaziel.  God’s message in the midst of this alarming situation was, “Don’t worry about it.  I’ll fight this one for you.”  God instructs the people to take up their battle positions and to stand firm.  Stand firm — not to fight, but to be spectators and worshippers as God wins the victory and defeats the enemy army.  And so they do.  The people go out to their positions singing, “Give thanks to the Lord, for his love endures forever.”  2 Chronicles 20:22-23 says, “As they began to sing and praise, the Lord set ambushes against the men of Ammon and Moab and Mount Seir who were invading Judah, and they were defeated.  The Ammonites and Moabites rose up against the men of Mount Seir to destroy and annihilate them.  After they finished slaughtering the men from Seir, they helped to destroy one another.”  . . . They helped to destroy one another?  . . . Helped who?  . . . Whose battle was it?  . . . Who would be claiming the victory?  . . . God had said the battle was His.  He had fought the battle and the victory belonged to Him.  As God’s people sang and praised Him, He enlisted the enemy to help destroy one another.  What a powerful, Almighty God!

Now, back to you and me.  I’ve seen this power, how about you?  In those alarming times of life, I am getting better at seeking Him but have room for improvement.  I can look back and see times of growth.  Twenty-some years ago as I struggled with the attack on my physical health, I tried to deal with the fear and unknown on my own.  It took a gentle and loving God to draw me to the point of seeking Him in the midst of my battle with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  It’s funny, but somewhere along the journey I learned to seek Him and trust Him with that and it slowly and gradually became a non-issue.  I learned a lot through it and it definitely helped prepare me for the things God was calling me to do and somewhere in that process of learning and preparing, it lost its power over me. 

Oh, I left a little bit out earlier in describing our alarming news at the University of Chicago Children’s Hospital.  The doctor did come in and say, “There is nothing more we can do.”  But he also continued by saying, “We can pray.  It’s the only thing that keeps some of our patients alive over at the county hospital.  Here, we rely too much on our technology when we ought to pray.”  Wow!  The five-alarm alarming comes and the reminder to seek God comes from a very unexpected source.  And so we do.  We seek God and acknowledge our trust in Him and His ownership of our daughter.  We stand before Him and watch, knowing that He cares for our daughter even more than we do and He can see the results of her life continuing just as clearly as He can see the results of it ending.  So, as we waited — as we praised God for His presence — our daughter began to improve.  Over then next few days and weeks, her condition began to stabilize; allowing the doctors to do work and procedures that her frail body would not handle when we first arrived.  For weeks, her condition was back and forth.  Then she finally woke up.  Her kidneys and liver began their return to normal function.  Dialysis was ended and we left that hospital with a daughter that needed physical therapy and rehab, but with normal functioning kidneys and liver and we had a renewed reminder that this precious child was indeed a gift from God. 

Wow!  This post has gotten long, but once I get started on how God has taught me — and continues to teach me — to be resolved to seek Him during alarming times; I have a hard time stopping. 

So, when life comes at you and me 100+ miles per hour and the alarm bells are clanging loudly and refuse to be silenced, God calls us to seek Him as the Almighty One.  When we are alarmed, may you and I be resolved to inquire of the Lord.  May we stand firm and watch God deliver us in, through, or around, the alarming situation in our life.

But everyone else is . . . going.  . . . doing.  . . . having.  . . . being.  . . . getting.  . . . watching.  . . . buying. . . . wearing. . . . ________.

Most of us have heard some variation of the above statement.  Actually, we’ve probably used a lengthy assortment of the above statement and filled in the blank to meet our own purposes more often than we care to admit.  How many times have you used some version of the above statement because you wanted to be like everyone else — you just wanted to fit in.  No matter how much someone has tried to persuade us that following the crowd is not always worth the consequences, we can’t be convinced.  We fall headlong into some sort of compromising situation before we realize that the consequences are greater than we expected.

I’m not the only one who has been there, right?  If that sounds familiar because we have lived it, then we ought to be able to have an understanding not only of what happens in 1 Samuel chapter 8, but why it happens.  As we look at the chapter, we see a reason given — an excuse, if you will — as to why the nation of Israel would make the request they do.  There is a growing dissatisfaction with the current leadership.  Samuel had led the nation to victories and into a time of peace.  Now he was growing old and his sons, whom he appointed as leaders following him, were corrupt.  So the people of Israel rise up and in essence state, “We don’t like the people in the position, so give us a new system of leadership.”  As a matter of fact, their actual request reveals a motive behind the desire for a change in structure.  We read in 1 Samuel 8:5 that the elders had come to Samuel and make this request or demand, “You are old, and your sons do not follow your ways; now appoint a king to lead us, such as all the other nations have.”  Later in the chapter, after Samuel has explained to the people what they are really asking for, how a king will rule and demand and take, they refuse to be swayed.  Actually, their demands become even more forceful in verses 19 & 20 as they respond to Samuel’s explanation, “No!  We want a king over us.  Then we will be like all the other nations, with a king to lead us and to go out before us and fight our battles.”  That’s it!  We want to be like everyone else.  We hear what you’re saying about the pitfalls in this course of action, but everyone else is having a king to lead them and we don’t want left out. 

We look at them and know their success as a nation under a king and we think, “These people were just arrogant and foolish — unwilling to listen to reason.”  How blind can they be?  This wasn’t the first time they had been faced with a poor quality of people coming into leadership, yet God had always taken care of them and led them and fought their battles for them in times past.  If they had just remembered, Samuel had been brought to leadership by God in the midst of a situation not unlike what they were currently facing.  Samuel’s rise to a position of leadership and authority came as God brought judgment to the sons of the previous leader, Eli, because they too did not follow the ways of God and were very corrupt.  It’s not like the nation reached a point of crisis in leadership and made a bad choice because they had no example of God taking care of this very problem — they just had no trust that God would and they wanted to be like everyone else.

Before we come down on them too hard, how often have you and I found ourselves in similar situations?  We don’t like the character of the person in leadership of our nation, region, locality, church, or family and so we push for a change in the entire system.  We don’t care why we have the leader we have, we want change and it sure looks like everyone else has it better than we do.  Underneath it all is the same rebellion present in Israel’s pursuit of a king.  It sounds like this, “We know God set it up this way, but things are different now.  We have a greater knowledge than God of what we really need.  If God had foreseen the way things are now, He would understand us setting aside what He said.”  That is what God tells Samuel.  God says to Samuel, “It is not you they have rejected, but they have rejected me as their king.” 

Sound familiar?  It should.  How often have we thought, “The Bible can’t really mean that anymore?”  “Times are different now, I’m sure God would understand (if He were here).  We always say that last part under our breath, but we say it.  Or how about the infamous, “I know what the Bible says, but . . .”?  And then comes the next line.  It is really the same line used by the nation of Israel; we just reword it to fit the situation — “I know what the Bible says, but everyone else is doing it this way and look how successful they are!”  We are so good at justifying our rebellion and disobedience, aren’t we?

It is time for a change.  How about you and I adopting a new phrase and response to God?  Instead of the old excuses, why don’t we practice an “I know what the Bible says, so . . .” attitude?

I pray that your life and mine will be different as we live out an obedient “I know what the Bible says, so I will do it.”  May God lead, teach and direct each of us that we would follow Him faithfully and obediently.