Choices

If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

I feel God wants to remind us about some choices we need to make to be able to effectively follow Him. But I will focus on the one we have refused to consider, many times even living and teaching the contrary.

How many times have we been told (even by implication) that a wife determines God’s call for her husband? How many times have we been taught that the displeasure of one’s wife can be interpreted as God’s voice? Or something that has been spoken over and over until some use it as scripture, that the voice of the people is the voice of God? Where in the Bible did you read that God follows universal suffrage to lead? Since when did God move by popular vote? Or where do you see God speaking as a democratic leader?

The sad fact is that many western missionaries taught a false doctrine of marriage, and still do. And the dilemma is that it is not consistent with Biblical doctrine. It is sad because it rearranges priorities once someone gets married. I fact it rearranges priorities everywhere else to be more consistent with the world (read the European culture, plus of course a few others, especially matriarchal societies) as opposed to God’s word.

In that doctrine, a man’s call is subject to his wife for it to be valid. Put very bluntly, God must consult a man’s wife before calling him. Meaning that the wife and not God is the overall determinant of a man’s calling.

If that is not idolatry tell me what it is. In actual fact it may go all the way to blasphemy. Just look at it soberly without the veil of tradition.

Thou shalt have no other gods before me. (Exodus 20:3)

That tradition simply and easily breaks the first commandment if we were to look at it without bias.

Is the stability of a marriage of greater worth than God and His call?

Let us look at a few scriptures to get the scriptural direction.

Do you think Abraham consulted Sarah when God asked him to offer Isaac as a sacrifice? Did his wife lead him to the conclusion to obey? Could Sarah have agreed that kind of sacrifice?

Why did God stop speaking to Mary, the well favored one that the Lord was with once Joseph took her as his wife? Why did He start issuing orders to Joseph about Mary yet her status had not changed as far as God was concerned?

Why was Adam’s first confrontational error listening to his wife?

And unto Adam he said, Because thou hast hearkened unto the voice of thy wife, and hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee, saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life; (Genesis 3:17)

Why was Ahab judged for the sins that clearly were his wife’s, some that he knew nothing about?

Seeking peace at the expense of revelation is detrimental to one’s relationship with God. Seeking stability of a relationship as a compromise is an assault to God’s authority.

But the question to ask is really one. Who is God to you? What is your understanding of who God is?

You see, you live out the kind of God you serve. Just like chewing raw onions will give out their smell long after you have chewed the last bit, your life will live out the kind of God you serve (or to some, are served by).

The second thing follows. Assuming you serve the God of the Bible, how much of Him do you know? How do you know Him?

Does the God you serve speak? How does He speak if He does so? How much authority does His voice carry? Is that voice subject to anything else? Finally, does He speak to you?

I am not against marriage as I enjoy one and have enjoyed it for twenty years. But I will be like Ahab if I sought a great marriage at the expense of God’s orders or calling. And I am saying this because I have had a few hard knocks from God as I sought to appease my wife when an order came that was not acceptable to her (not that it was to me as well when I received the command)

At one time I was at the point of death when I asked God what was wrong. He told me that I was not doing what He had ordered. Of course I explained that I was still trying to make my wife understand so that she could accept to follow. God shocked me by telling me that He had not given the order to her.

Were it not for the fact that I had been going through severe judgment, I simply could have trashed that voice, or tried burying it. It was so contrary to what I had been brought up believing and taught again and again as I heard instructions on marriage and ministry.

And the voice was unmistakable. God’s call supersedes everything else. Our comfort, even life should prostrate to that voice.

But I must be careful to state that we must remove proxies from that voice. We must know how to distinguish that voice from similar voices. We must be in a position to hear that voice for ourselves without needing some other receiving brokers to hear for us.

My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: (John 10:27)

You see, it is only when the voice is clear that you will be able to know whether you are defying it or not. A fuzzy image can be interpreted whichever way, but a clear image has no differing interpretations. It is the same with God’s voice. Compromise and alternatives appear because an order is not very clear. Sarah must have made Abraham reexamine or reinterpret the promise for him to sleep with Hagar for a son. Yet it is also important to realize that it was Abraham and not Sarah who had to deal with the issues resulting from that detour.

I am not saying that God does not speak to women, only that in a marriage the divine order is contrary to our humanistic structure and that the man is answerable to God in the way He responds to God’s orders.

I am also not trashing the fact that God speaks through people because it would be saying that you are reading my guess work. I am saying that God seeks to speak to you in as clearest way as He can. Only His voice should be beyond second guessing or interpretation.

We are told to test prophecy and prophets from the Old Testament to the New because their word is not absolute. That word can be so accurate yet be shaded with personality as to lead astray.

Seek to hear from God for yourself. Let secondary messages be for confirmation or assurance and not clarity. Let the final source and determinant of clarity be the Bible, God’s infallible word.

And the Bible is what trashes most prophets as they do not lead those they cheat (and that word is put with emphasis), those they prophesy to. They will quote the Bible without giving the impression that others should spend their time reading it, unless it is the passages they are using to deceive.

I am not talking of cults here. There are enough ‘orthodox’ preachers who have swayed to extremes even cults are ashamed of in their twisting of scripture and God’s voice to their advantage. There are some whose doctrine and scriptural application is without visible fault yet they are deceivers as they do not seek to connect their people to be able to clearly hear from God so that they can continue listening to their sermons and buy their books to fund their opulent lifestyles.

According to the Bible, the test of a true minister is someone who is able to make people so connected to God that they would render him jobless if God does not bring in other people for the same.  That is why Paul was able to reach city after city with the Gospel of Christ in not very many years. Someone who keeps people coming and coming and asking for more is an aberration of a true minister of Christ. A true minister and church is the one that is in the business of releasing ministers, and effective ones, to the ends of the earth. A church that fears to confront sin for fear that the offerings could go down is clearly not the church of Christ, unless we are talking of a false Christ. A church that is proud of swelling its membership as a balloon instead of spreading like a vine is as confused as fish in an aquarium. A church that celebrates increasing its membership through getting members from other churches instead of those they have lead to Christ  is… (let me not continue as I might break a few hearts)

If your pastor or whatever else they may be called is the ultimate in the direction God gives, I am afraid that he can be summarized as someone after a full stomach and nothing else. Else he would be spending enough effort helping the least among his congregation to also hear God’s voice for themselves. If he is the only one who can preach, I am afraid you are following a bloated ego crook who does not know the least about the ways of God. But sadder still he may be leading from the direction of the enemy of our souls.

Christ intends for us to be hearing His voice continuously. That is His expectation. Otherwise you would not be His sheep but a goat that knows enough to live without any guidance. And that is why it is very difficult to see a fat goat where there are enough pastures. I found it interesting that the places with the fattest goats are deserts where they are more like scavengers eating anything they can find as there is nothing to choose. Incidentally those are the places people go for goat meat. That is what happens when we do not value God enough to seek to accurately hear His voice. Remember this?

Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the LORD, and whose hope the LORD is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit. (Jeremiah 17:5 – 8)

Making people the source of our revelation places us in direct danger. And it is worse because God has made it clear that He wants to guide us Himself and not by proxy, whatever else they may call themselves. He wants us to her His voice for ourselves.

We do not need to go atop mountains to be able to hear that voice. The prayer closet is the place we need to make that connection. Otherwise we may be visiting heathen high places where we could easily hear voices other than the only one we should be hearing. The Bible and an expectant heart are the things you need to clearly hear from God.

How does God lead you?