Wilkerson Family: What determines how far we are willing to go to follow Him?

Saturday, March 3, 2012

What determines how far we are willing to go to follow Him?

In the back of all our minds, we have a limit, most likely an unspoken or even un-pondered limit, of how far we are willing to go to follow Him. A gauge so to speak, gauging tasks as they come up to decide if this is something we can take on. So what is that gauge based on? How do we “size up” the task so to speak?

I know from my own mistakes and heart that too often I take the wrong approach. I size up the task based on my own size. Like the Israelites in Numbers 13 when the spies were sent into the Promised Land to spy it out to see if they could take it. They came back and said “We seemed like grasshoppers in OUR OWN EYES,” (Num 13:33). They were sizing up the task against themselves and they saw that it was much bigger than they were. Way too often, I size up the task at hand the same way. If this is the approach we take, we will NEVER go very far and retreat to areas of comfort every time. Like the Israelites, that leaves us to wander in the desert the rest of our lives, with God giving us enough provision to barely survive, but completely missing out on the promises of God as they did! I am convinced that is why so many in the church today have reached a plateau in their walk.

So what is the right approach? Maybe we are comparing the task at hand to the wrong person. We should, as the Israelites should have, size the task up against God and not ourselves. Now the key here is how we picture God! AW Tozer said it best, “What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” Profound! This is HUGE because if we have too small of a picture of God, then we will not be willing to go very far for Him. There is no doubt we all have way too small picture of God because we cannot imagine all that He is. We cannot even get our minds around His creation, so how can we possibly get our minds around the Creator!

For example, here is a picture of a galaxy, called the Whirlpool Galaxy, astronomers call the Emerald of the Sky. It is fairly close in space terms in that it is only 31 million light years away, knowing a light-year is ~5,434,000,000 miles! It has a mere 250 Billion stars in it. Now, the most amazing part about this galaxy is the next picture. They zoomed the Hubble Space telescope in as far as they could to get a picture of the “black hole” at the center that is holding the galaxy together. Here is the picture it returned! NO PHOTOSHOP!