Pulling Against God
Scriptures: Romans 12:2; 2 Corinthians 5:7; Proverbs 3:5
Introduction
When Elijah (Eli) was small, I would put him on a leash and take him out for walks (he’s the family’s lab). He hated going for walks and he hated the leash even more. We would start down the path and Eli would just sit down. I would pull the leash in an attempt to get him to follow but he was not having it. There were times when I had to pull the leash extremely hard, almost lifting him off the ground, to get him to walk. Eventually he learned to walk on a leash. During the days that he was learning, it was very frustrating taking him out on walks. Sometimes he would follow and sometimes he would just want to sit. Sometimes he would get so distracted he would just stop and sniff around in the grass. Today Eli weighs almost 90 pounds and he loves going for walks, although he still hates the leash. He no longer sits in an attempt to not go for a walk but instead he now tries to pull whoever is walking him in the direction he wants to go.
When my daughters were very young, we would take them out to the mall shopping. Since they were too small to walk in the mall by themselves and too big to carry, we had leashes that we had them on. Okay, I know what some of you are thinking, but these were actually for children and they did not go around the kids necks. These came in two forms, one that strapped around their wrists and one that was similar to a harness that strapped around their bodies. The leash enabled us to walk freely while keeping a close eye on our kids. Everything was fine until the day Clarissa figured out how to take the thing off. During the times they were able to walk with the leash, there were many times when we had to pull them because they wanted to go a different way than where we had planned. Just like Eli, there were also times when they tried to pull us in the direction that they wanted to go.
In both cases, the purpose of the leash was to keep the dog and the child under control and out of trouble. The leash was also used as a means to protect. It protected our dog from interacting inappropriately with other dogs or people’s yards and it allowed us to protect our girls while we were out in public places. We often use the term “keeping someone on a short leash” to indicate the level of supervision someone is under with the leash being indicative of what is being used to foster the control. In this message I want to examine the thought that God has us on a leash and that there are times when during our daily circumstances we find ourselves pulling against God to not go where He is trying to take us or trying to pull God in the direction that we want to go. I heard this saying a long time ago that I want to you remember as we go through this message: God will pull you through if you can stand the pull. This is the premise of this message today; God will pull us through this life if we can stand the pull. We pray and ask God to bring us through difficult situations but yet oftentimes we want Him to do it our way thus we begin pulling against Him. Then there are times when we are so set in the direction that we want to go that we attempt to pull God in our direction. This in effect becomes a spiritual tug of war. God pulling us one way and we’re resisting or we are pulling one way and God is resisting. Whether we are pulling against God to not go where He is taking us or we are trying to go our own way with His blessings, the results are the same. So the question is how do we come to a place where we are not pulling against God? I believe the only way we can restrain from pulling against God is through the total renewal of our minds which comes through knowledge of Him. In the first section of this message we will look at what it means to renew our minds and follow up with examples of what that actually looks like.
I. Renewing Our Minds
Our minds are the source of our thought processes. It is here in our minds that many battles are fought, won and lost. You see, the mind is a wonderful thing, capable of great feats of wisdom, power and inventions. Likewise this same mind that is capable of all of this wisdom, power and inventions is also able to think up the most awful things that can be done to an individual. It is within our minds that our destructive thoughts become a reality. Because of the power that resides within all of our minds, it has become one of the greatest battle grounds for both good and evil. God is pulling at us through our spirits and we are pulling against Him with our minds. Paul brings this to light when he writes in Romans 12:2 “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, that you may prove what the will of God is, that which is good and acceptable and perfect.”
Once we have accepted Christ, we are encouraged to begin the process of renewing our minds and thus begin our battles with God. The tug of war begins with God on one side and us on the other. He pulls us towards righteousness and we pull back towards our own pleasure, our flesh. Let me read this same verse from the Amplified bible which will give you more insight into just what Paul is talking about. “Do not be conformed to this world, this age, fashioned after and adapted to its external, superficial customs, but be transformed, changed, by the entire renewal of your mind, by its new ideas and its new attitude, so that you may prove for yourselves what is the good and acceptable and perfect will of God, even the thing which is good and acceptable and perfect in His sight for you.”
Remember earlier when I talked about the leash and how it was used to protect? Well when Paul talks about how we should renew our minds, there resides a reason for this request. The ultimate reason is so that we will stop pulling against God, but this can only happen when we accept that what God has for us is for our good. Paul said that while we are renewing our minds, we begin to prove to ourselves what the perfect will of God is. How is this proven? As we begin to think and act differently based on our interactions with God, we begin to see God moving on our behalf. When we begin to see God moving on our behalf, we begin to understand that He really is there and working for our good. This is that proving stage that Paul speaks about in this verse. Finally he says that we begin to recognize fully what God has in His sight for us. Until we fully recognize what God has in His sight for us, we continue to pull against Him. We are not doing it all the time to be rebellious, but because we want to maintain some control of our lives. We do not fully trust God, but we trust ourselves. Although we know God is working for us, we do not know exactly what He is doing and therefore we try to control some things on our own. Because the mind is so powerful, it is the primary area we must change in order to stop pulling against God. We must renew our minds.
Have you thought about what it means to renew something? Consider your car that you have not waxed in a couple of years. You take it to a detail shop and they clean the car, inside and out. On the outside they wax it, compound it to get all of the oxidation off and then they apply a new coat of wax. When you pick your car up, its look is renewed. It is clean, shiny and a lot of the scratches are no longer visible. This is how it is with our minds. We have been taught a lot of things that we must remove in order to walk with God without pulling against Him. A lot of the things we have been taught actually goes against what our natural knowledge tells us. If we are to renew our minds, we must start with a basis of God is right and everything is subject to Him. Remember, how we think affects our ability to walk with God. What we have learned in our flesh must come under the obedience of Christ if we truly expect to be led to that place where God is trying to take us.
Let me give you a couple of examples of mind renewing. Julia hare, the national director of the Black think Tank organization related a story that reminded me of my youth. When I was a child, I lived in an age where kids were afraid of their parents. I could be setting in Church talking and my mother would look at me and I knew I had a choice, shut up or have her get up in Church, walk back to me and take me outside. When I got older, she would just give me the look which I knew what I could expect when I got home. It was not a crime when parent disciplined their kids. It was not a crime when teachers disciplined their students – then the change came, society became socially “aware”. With this change came a renewing of the minds. As Ms. Hare described it, it became a crime according to child services to discipline your kids. The paddle was taken out of the classrooms at school. Teachers became afraid of the principals. Principals became afraid of the superintendents. Superintendents became afraid of the school board. The school board became afraid of the parents and the parents became afraid of their kids and the kids are now afraid of no one. Can you see the validity of this example? In this example there has been a renewing of the mind but in a negative way. Let me share another example with you.
I read an article in the USA Today newspaper this week concerning a new degree being offered at a major university associated with a Protestant denomination group. This university is offering a Bachelor’s degree for women in homemaking – similar to the Home Economics’ courses offered in High School. The president of the university fired a female professor because he believed that it went against the bible for a female to teach a man (the female professor was teaching theology at the university before the president was hired.) This president, operating with the blessings of this Protestant denomination, has stated that the woman’s place is in the home and not being in front of, teaching or being in charge of men. So with this new course his university is offering, it is believed that they are trying to “renew the minds” of women to get them back into the home so that they can fulfill what God has “called” them to do.
With these two recent examples, I want to you to consider this: we are always renewing our minds because that is how we grow and learn. The minds we operated with as a child are different from the minds we operate with now because of all of the learnings that we have had. Our minds (brains) are also larger physically. Can you imagine a mother trying to have a baby with the brain the size of an adult – that would really be one “big headed” child. My point is this, if God is going to pull us through, we must have minds that are in tuned with God so that we can stand the pull. God will pull us through if we can truly stand the pull. Let’s look at some examples of things we will need to accept if we are to walk with God without pulling against Him. With these examples, I will contrast how what we have learned has set us on a path to pull against God. The first example we will examine today is found in 2 Corinthians 5:7. Next week we will look at some examples that Jesus gave us in the gospel of Matthew.
II. We Walk By Faith, Not By Sight
We have been taught that we walk based on the knowledge that we have. Without knowledge we cannot accomplish anything. That is why we make it mandatory that our kids go to school and hopefully will decide to go to college. That college degree will open doors that a high school diploma will not. So based on this understanding, we spend 16-20 years, sometimes longer depending on the area of study, learning secular knowledge to enable us to provide for a comfortable living arrangement in this life. During those 16-20 years of continuous studying, we forget some things while remembering or memorizing enough to move through the system. When we complete our studies and get a job, that job is often based on what you majored in while you were in school. Our expertise on the job is based on what we studied and what we continue to learn. This may work for our secular jobs, but with our spiritual walk, more is required. We cannot walk with God based solely on our knowledge of what is happening around us because we do not know everything. On our jobs, we can make certain decisions based on our training and area of expertise, but with God our areas of expertise may in some cases be null and void. To this point Paul says the following: “For we walk by faith, not by sight.” (2 Corinthians 5:7) The first thing we must recognize is that with God we must walk with blinders on, being totally dependant on Him. Our knowledge should only give us a deeper understanding of God’s ability which will allow us to open the door for God to act.
When Paul made this declaration, he had first walked his readers through a series of comparisons of our temporal home versus our future eternal home. Throughout his comparison, he stressed that our lives here on earth are filled with times that will make us groan due to the burdens we are faced with, but it is all temporary. Finally Paul encourages the reader by re-establishing our position in God and with that knowing that one day we will be with the Lord. After he concludes all of this he says “for we walk by faith and not by sight.” We must get our arms around what this means for us as a Christian. Until we start walking by faith and stop walking by sight, we will continue to pull against God. I believe Paul made the statement at this point so that we could understand that what we see around us is not always definitive of what god is doing in our lives – so we must continue to look to Him.
I am not sure how many of you have seen the movie “Ray” which was based on Ray Charles life, but it contained some insight into what happens to a person who loses their sight. There is a difference between someone who is born blind and someone who loses their sight. I want to use the person who loses their sight, because that is what is required of us to walk by faith – we must lose our individual sight. As long as we can see, we will try to pull God in the direction that we want to go. However, only when we are plunged into total darkness are we willing to allow someone who can see to lead us. When a person who could once see loses their sight, they begin to find ways to compensate for their loss of sight. In the movie based on Ray Charles’s life, it showed his mother teaching him how to get around so that he would not have to be totally dependent on others. She did not want him living with the mindset of being a cripple. Ray Charles learned ways to compensate for his blindness, but he also developed his other senses, his sense of smell, touch and especially hearing. This has been documented in many cases of individual who are blind. They are able to sense and hear things that we do not because we can see with our eyes. And because we can see, we ignore and miss a lot of things that go on around us that a blind person would be sensitive to. Remember in the movie when Ray Charles was at the home of his future wife, he was explaining to her about how he compensates for his blindness. In that scene he references hearing a humming bird outside of the window. His future wife looked outside the window and saw the bird. Ray Charles heard the bird and knew it was there but she had to turn and look for the bird because although she could hear the bird, her senses did not register it because her eyes were elsewhere. When a person becomes blind, their other senses become more sensitive and attuned to what is happening around them. So let’s apply that to the spiritual.
When we begin to walk by faith, we become blind to seeing and assessing through our own minds through the use of our eyes and “secular knowledge”. We become like the blind person who could once see but is now blind. We are no longer able to go where we want and see what we want to see. Now we are more dependent on others to assist us. As time goes on, our hearing becomes more focused as does our sense of smell and touch. The same happens in the spiritual. As we grow stronger in walking in faith, we rely less and less on our own ability to see (our own understanding and knowledge). Our ability to hear increases and we are able to hear God better when He speaks. Our ability to hear and process becomes sharper. Not only are we able to hear God’s voice more clearly, we are able to distinguish more clearly when Satan is speaking to us and when our flesh is speaking. The confusion that we once experienced when trying to hear God’s voice and understand it diminishes because other things are blocked out and our hearing is open. Think about the times you have been so involved with something with your eyes that you did not hear someone speaking to you or walking up behind you. You hearing were operating fine, but your senses were somewhere else. Having eyes makes us blind to what is happening around us. I want you to try this, close your eyes and just listen to my voice. Does not my voice because clearer now that you are focused? As long as we are walking with our eyes open, we are subject to distractions. When we begin to walk by faith in God and not by our own sight, our hearing becomes aligned with our senses and we hear and understand things we did not hear and understand before.
I also mentioned that a person’s sense of touch is increased when they lose their sight. A blind person uses their hands to feel their way, as a guide. They also use their hands to gauge things, temperature, texture, etc. Their hands do not become more sensitive but they become more aware of what their hands are touching. The same happens in the spiritual. There will be times when you will touch someone’s hands and if you are sensitive enough God will reveal to you what you need to do for person. Maybe that person just need to know you are there, but how many times have we hugged one another and did not pick up on the spiritual impact of the hug. When we stop walking by our sight, our spirits will be more in tuned with God. We will stop looking at someone with our eyes and say “they look fine to me” but we will look with our spirit and allow God to reveal the true nature of what is going on with the person.
To walk by faith will require that we renew our minds. Thinking that our knowledge is all that we need to walk with God will be proven wrong. Thinking that my individual intellect is all I need to walk with God will prove to be lacking. Once our minds accept that fact that our walk with God is not based on what we see but on what God sees, we will begin taking the steps to walk in faith. In closing this section, I leave you with the words of Solomon: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding, in all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.” Proverbs 3:5
Next week we will look at Matthew at a sermon that Jesus taught giving us concrete examples of what it means to renew our minds. Until then, may God continue to bless and keep you.
