Have you ever thought that the reason God asks so much of you is because He NEEDS you, that He can’t fulfill His vision without your help? While God does ask much of you and does do work in and through you, He doesn’t actually need you. God already knows the future and is sure to bring His vision to fruition. So why should you even bother obeying Him or depending on Him?
Think back to the story of Abraham and Isaac. Abraham learned that God would meet his needs if he chose to obey. And while he was called to sacrifice his son, in the end his son’s life was spared, and a great test of faith and dependence took place. God wasn’t trying to figure out how much faith Abraham had; God is omniscient. God was trying to teach Abraham to depend on Him and to trust His voice. God didn’t call Abraham to retire but to go higher! This is something He asks of all of us.
Scripture is full of people trying to do things in their own strength. God had promised Abraham that he would be father to many nations, yet Sarah was unable to bear a child. She took matters into her own hands by giving her Egyptian slave Hagar to Abraham. Hagar gave birth to Abraham’s first son, but everything was gone about in a sinful way. Had Sarah waited for God’s timing, she wouldn’t have felt the need to speed things up. Sarah did eventually give birth to Isaac, the son Abraham would be asked to give up.
Remember that you can’t love anything—your child, your ministry—more than you love God. When God tells you to move, you move! This has been my life over the past few months (God asking me to do things I don’t fully understand), and it hasn’t always been easy. As much as I love God, His thoughts are higher than mine. “Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us” (Ephesians 3:20). Let God be the center of your life! He has, as the Bible says, things in store for you that you can’t even ask for or imagine!