Will You Receive It?

“And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man

…Wherefore hast thou despised

the commandment of the Lord, to do evil in his sight...

Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house;

because thou hast despised me,

and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife”

--2 Samuel 12:7-10

Faith had been praying all night long that the Lord would change her boyfriend’s heart. She loved him, but she knew he wasn’t right for her, at least not the way he was. She thought, “if God would only answer my prayers”, it would make all her decisions worthwhile. For instance the decision to not take the job promotion that she had worked so hard for, seemed right if it meant saving her relationship with Larry, or so she thought. It would also make the decision to sleep with him before marriage right, if it meant she wasn’t going to lose a piece of herself, right? More importantly, God changing Larry’s heart, meant one more for the kingdom, and what could be better than that she thought, right?

Well perhaps some of us find ourselves in similar situations, maybe not exactly like Faith, but similar in the sense that we pray for things expecting a certain answer. We pray thinking we know God will answer the way we want, after all God’s forgiving and He cleans up all our messes, right? He cares and He wants us to have what we want, right? And while God is forgiving and He does work all things out for our good, He’s also just, and He also chastens those He loves. What?

Yes, in fact David experienced this first hand. The Bible records that David was a man after God’s own heart, yet David sinned. David had an adulterous affair with his captain’s wife, while he was away at war. In David’s decision to have an affair, he really didn’t think his actions all the way through, as Uriah’s wife got pregnant. Now David needed to cover his mistakes up and when that failed, he had Uriah killed, but God saw and He knew even if Uriah never found out what David had done. So God sent the prophet Nathan to let David know that for his actions, there were serious repercussions. But David, didn’t realize that Nathan was talking about him when he was sent, in fact he thought, “who could this man be and shame on him,” only to find out that he was this man.

It’s the same way with us, we like to know that God is pleased with our actions, whether they are at home, school, work, or church. We go about our daily lives forgetting to forgive those who’ve wronged, show love to those who mistreat us, lend a helping hand to those who use us, to trust God when it scares us, shake doubt when it taunts us, or even walk in truth when it hurts us. In those moments, we don’t necessarily want to know that we’ve disobeyed God or ignored His voice and we certainly don’t want anybody else to tell us either; but God in His mercy lets us know when we’re off the beaten path that He has set for us and sometimes He sends others to tell us. David listened, but will we?

Correction is necessary, but is not always easy to receive. Today maybe there are some areas of our lives that need changing and God’s been trying to get our attention, let Him change those things—it may not be the answer we want to hear, but it’s the answer we need to hear in order to get all that God has set aside for us in this lifetime. Let’s receive God’s word!