Old Testament Snapshots Series

Let's take a look at an old favorite story. The story of Jonah and the big, mondo, Horkin-big fish. We can learn a lot about God from the story of Jonah. We can also learn a lot about us from this story. Very often we are just like Jonah. God tells us to do something hard, we say "No way God." God takes us through lessons (sometimes very hard lessons) to teach us who He is and what He wants from us. God wants us to look at Him and not at the thing that He has asked us to do. Sometimes when God asks us to do something, we imagine the task and how big it is. When we do this, we take our eyes off of God. God wants us to trust Him so that He can show us how powerful He is. So many times we've put God in a box, making him smaller and less powerful than He really is

Sometimes we get caught up in talking and forget that God gave us two ears with which we can hear each other. God also gave us spiritual ears that He uses to communicate with us. God is a relational being. That means that He created us so that we can have a relationship with Him, our Creator. But sometimes we fill our lives up with so much noise that we drown God's voice out. In order to hear God, we need to be tuned to Him. If we don't practice this "tuning in" process, it can go way out of whack. It disappoints God when we go through our lives without actually listening to Him and He desperately wants to communicate with us. Even when we go to prayer, we don't listen. We usually have a list of requests for Him, so we talk to Him instead of listen. Don't get me wrong. There is nothing wrong with talking to Him. In fact, He wants us to talk to Him. But sometimes He just wants us to listen

Sometimes you and I live a life that is so noisy that we can't hear God, even if we were listening. Now, when I talk about living a "noisy" lifestyle, I'm not talking about noise you can hear with your ears. I'm talking about noise that your heart hears. Sometimes we fill our lives so full with "stuff" that we crowd out God. When we make our lives so busy that we don't take the time to just listen to God, that's when our lives become too noisy to hear God. Samuel had to learn to "hear" God just like the rest of us. At an early age Samuel spent his time learning about God from a priest named Eli so that he would learn to hear God's voice. Samuel would need to hear the voice God as the high priest during the time of King Saul and King David.

No one can use the excuse that "I can't obey God because I don't know what the rules are". God has made it really clear that we, as followers of Christ, are to act a certain way. He doesn't want us to act the way the rest of the world around us acts. He wants us to be different. So God gave us rules to live by throughout the entire Bible. Not only did He give us rules to live by, He also gave us a huge example of how we are to live. He sent His son Jesus, dressed in a skin suit (God in a Bod) to earth so that we could actually see how we are to behave. Jesus was everything that God wanted in us. Now, He doesn't expect us to be perfect like His Son but He does expect us to try to live by the rules He set for us.