Radical Obedience

I was reading in Isaiah 20 and God told Isaiah to walk around naked for three years to symbolize the coming destruction He was about to unleash on Egypt and Cush. Whoa! What a radical suggestion...and Isaiah did exactly as he was asked. Now, I don't know about you, but I don't think I could walk around naked for three nano-seconds much less three years. I was reminded of two things from this passage. One was that I serve a RADICAL God who doesn't mind being a bit unconventional. He will do anything and everything to convey His message. The second thing I was reminded of was that I need to be obedient even when I think God has lost His mind. I know He never will lose His mind and that He will never ask me to do something that is wrong...so why do I ignore Him? Because I am a stupid sheep a lot of the time...but God loves me anyway. I need to be willing to do anything, no matter how radical it seems to be obedient to my Heavenly Father.

I spoke at my roommate's youth group for her last Sunday, as part of a True Love Waits series they are going through on Sunday nights. After speaking to the whole group for about twenty minutes I hung out with the high school girls and tried my best to answer the questions they hurled at me. One of the things I told them was that I believed that God would tell me who my husband was going to be before I started dating him. They wanted to know how I knew God was speaking to me. One girl asked something to the effect of, "Do you have to be really close to God to hear from Him?" I told them that they didn't need to be Martin Luther or Billy Graham, but that they needed to be consistently seeking God, reading His word, and letting God cleanse them from and deal with the sin in their lives. I told them that if they were purposefully living in such a way that they knew was displeasing to God that it was probably going to be pretty hard to hear Him, because sin separates us from God. They looked crushed...like they really wanted to hear from God, but they weren't quite ready to give up living the way they wanted to. It made me very sad for them...and think about those things in my life that I view as more precious than God. My pride, my schedule, my....whatever. We must come to the point where really do value obeying God and living in His presence more than we do anything else...and not just in word, but in deed.

My encouragement to you as much as to myself today is to be radical in your obedience to and pursuit of our amazing God. We serve a radical God who had a radical Son that took radical steps to save us from eternal punishment. Doesn't He deserve our radical obedience to His loving ways?