If God is leading you and you decide to ignore Him and then sit around wondering why God isn’t moving you, you are not looking for His leading you are looking for Him to affirm your plan. That’s just not going to happen. Henry and Richard Blackaby (Experiencing God Day by Day p 297) point out how Jonah ignored God when God wanted Jonah to go to Nineveh. Yes I understand Jonah’s issue. Hey Nineveh was a bad place, it is full of people who have no reticence to make war on their neighbors and do it in a really brutal manner. OK, but this idea, so prevalent today, that God is only going to give you nice, easy guidance is so wrong. Then we have the chutzpah to wonder why God seems to be leaving us in our own little hovel, not providing us with guidance. If you won’t get up and take the first step, how can He guide you to the next step? We want everything revealed to us while we sit back in our Barcolounger, and can’t understand why it’s not happening. He’s only going to reveal to us what He wants us to know, but sometimes it takes an active response on our part, if we don’t do that there’s not point in further revelation on His part. If we are faithful to follow God’s guidance, He will move you along, He will trust us with more.

So many people presume to make demands on God such as: “I need to know it all right now and You have to do it or I won’t believe in Your. I always find it very interesting when people decide to bargain with God. How do they figure that they have anything to bargain with God? How do you figure that God owes you anything or everything up front? Reminds me of the line, Jack Nicholson, in a A Few Good Men “you can’t handle the truth”. If you can’t take the first step, the truth just isn’t going to make any sense.

We know that we learn everything step by step. We presume to believe that God is just supposed to hand everything right over while you won’t even make the move that He’s showing you to make. Why should God trust you to do anything if you won’t even start? Why do we think we have to know the end of the plan, or we just won’t cooperate with God?

If you’re sitting around waiting to be blessed, but won’t follow His guidance, why do you presume to believe that you should be blessed, or be in God’s will. Sure sometime we know following a particular path is going to create a trial in our life. The disciples didn’t know where God was moving them and for the disciples they endured difficult lives, that often ended in martyrdom. But don’t you think that they have been truly honored and gifted in heaven and the resurrection, to eternity, because they followed God’s will?

We have got to give up this idea that we have to be in control. We have a very finite understanding of everything, God’s is infinite. When we trust God’s moving sometimes we can see the miraculous and astounding. The Ninevites did repent and turn to God. The miraculous can also be in very ordinary things too. But as the Blackaby’s point out: “What God says to us next will depend on how we responded to His previous word to us.”

They end up with this advice: “If you have not received a fresh word from God, return to the last thing God told you and examine your obedience. Is the Lord still waiting for your obedience?” They refer us to Jeremiah 33: 1-3. Jeremiah was also in a dangerous situation, but in contrast to Jonah he responded and followed God’s directions and God moved Jeremiah along to where he needed to be. We can be like Jonah and try to “outsmart” God (yea, sure, let me know how that works out for you), or: “Seek to be like Jeremiah, and properly respond to your Lord’s instructions the first time.”

Even though God seems to be asking you to do a lot of difficult, unpleasant things, I have found that it’s easier to follow His guidance, because when I don’t I’m left alone in my unpleasant little dead world.