Do You Want to Go?

There are times when God asks us to do things we don’t want to do.

We see this all throughout the Scriptures. Moses is a perfect example of this. God called Moses to go back into Egypt to be his mouthpiece and lead the deliverance from Egyptian slavery. This is the last thing Moses had in mind. In the narrative of Moses’s calling (Exodus 3), Moses is very reluctant to fulfill this role. He gives God a number of excuses. His main excuse is that he’s slow of speech and no-one would listen to him (partly because he was a fugitive). From where Moses was sitting, God’s plan wasn’t going to work.

This is to be expected. When God lays out his plan in front of us, when he gives us our job description, we often times will think “there’s no way this is going to work.” Think of it, if it did make sense and seemed perfect, it wouldn’t be faith, would it?

This same thing was true of Abraham and Sarah. God told him that his plan to save the world would be through Abraham’s offspring. From Abraham’s perspective, this plan was so far-fetched that he laughed out loud when God told him! (Genesis 17:17)

This is the story of Jonah too. Jonah was so reluctant to do what God was asking him to do that Jonah ran in the other direction. Jonah did NOT want to go to Nineveh.

Do you remember the story of the conversation between Jesus and Peter at the end of John’s Gospel? The story where Jesus asks Peter three times if he loves him? (John 21). After Peter insists that he loves Jesus, Jesus says to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do no want to go” (John 21:18, ESV; emphasis added).

Are you willing to let Jesus lead you where you may not want to go simply out of your love and devotion to him?

Often times our litmus test for determining what God’s will is whether or not it “feels good”, or “feels right”, or even whether or not we “want” to do it. This is certainly one way of determining God’s will, but it is never to be conclusive. We see from Scripture that God often asks us to do things that we don’t want to do, or seems unnatural. This is the pattern of scripture. This is the pattern of discipleship and sacrifice for the sake of sanctification and the manifestation of the righteousness of God on the earth.

Here’s a challenge. If God were calling you to ministry, where would you NOT want to go? Why would you not want to go to that place? Further still, to whom would you NOT want to minister? What kind of person would be the last person that you would want to minister to? Why?

Exploring this questions and answers is a helpful tool in revealing where God wants to work on us.