Obedience—The
Great Uncovering
Luke 1: 18 NIV
Zechariah asked the angel, “How can I be sure
of this? I am an old man and my wife is
well along in years.”
Have You Considered What Is Below Your Surface?
When I was in high school I made a decision that was
not completely conscious but had long lasting ramifications for me. Somewhere around my sophomore year I started
playing basketball at gradually increasing degrees of priority. It reached a point where I was playing
basketball every evening after school for three to four hours and on weekends
ten hours a day. I wanted to increase my
jumping ability and so I began wearing five pound ankle weights around and
using them to jump rope. I lifted
weights to increase my upper body strength and ran to improve my
endurance. It became obsessive for me,
this drive to become a great basketball player.
I did not have confidence in my ability though to make the high school
team until my senior year when I finally tried out for the varsity. What I did not realize though as I chased “my
dream” was how little concern I had for what my parents wanted for me. I did not care that by playing basketball all
the time I wasn’t doing any schoolwork and I was rebelling against them and
their wishes. I was going against the
direction of my school counselor who tried to get me to work harder at school
and at a certain level, which I did not yet understand, I was rejecting the
plan God had for me. I was not made by
Him to be a world class athlete. He had
shaped me for academia and I didn’t want what He wanted for me. There was something deeply buried in me that
drove my need to prove my worth on a basketball court day after day rather than
fit in with what my parents as well as my God wanted for me.
We rarely think of “doing what we are told” as
uncovering hidden secrets about ourselves.
We usually don’t like being bossed around by our parents, by our
teachers, by police officers, by our supervisors at work or by the IRS. And whether we are “good Christians” or not,
we certainly aren’t usually happy to have even God tell us what to do. But there is a fascinating side to our
reactions to being bossed around that might be of great value to consider and
that is the depths of insight we gain about ourselves when someone…even God,
tells us what to do. Today we will begin
to explore this consideration and see if there might be much we can learn about
ourselves when it comes to obedience.
There is within the birth narrative of Christ a most
interesting study in human personality. We
find in it the strange and wonderful account of Zechariah, a Jewish priest who
was old and had a wife named Elizabeth who was barren. He was in the Temple of Jerusalem, having
been chosen by lot to light the incense there.
It was a great honor for him to do this and so it was a big day for
Zechariah to be alone at the altar doing this highly esteemed priestly
duty. But there was something not quite
right with Zechariah; as his encounter with the angel Gabriel uncovered.
Without warning, the angel Gabriel suddenly appeared
at the right side of the incense altar.
Zechariah’s visceral reaction to the angel standing before him tells us
much of the supernatural quality of this visit.
When Zechariah saw him, he was startled and was gripped with fear. (Luke
1:12 NIV) Zechariah might have been startled by a fellow priest showing up out
of nowhere in the eerie splendor of the Temple but his reaction was much more like
that of one who had seen a ghost. Whatever followed from this encounter would
certainly be significant perhaps even life-changing. In a split second of awareness Zechariah must
have come to this conclusion that he was “in for it”. The angel though was not there to wreck
Zechariah. Quite the opposite! His declaration though was one Zechariah, clearly
was not prepared to hear. "Do
not be afraid, Zechariah; your prayer has been heard. Your wife Elizabeth will
bear you a son, and you are to give him the name John.” (Luke 1:13 NIV)
The immensity of the angel’s proclamation cannot be
overstated. It was after all an angel
who said it and his presence alone terrified the old priest. Perhaps more importantly, at least for our
discussion here, Zechariah and his wife were old, childless and as far as the
couple knew, Elizabeth was barren and for her it was disgraceful to not be able
to have children. Later, when she found
out she was indeed pregnant, her reaction makes it clear how devastated she had
been by her inability to have children. “The
Lord has done this for me," she said. "In these days he has shown his
favor and taken away my disgrace among the people." (Luke 1:25 NIV) After announcing the shocking news of a
coming son, Gabriel, the scary angel then gave Zechariah a clear command about
raising the child. He is never to
take wine or other fermented drink, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit
even from birth. (Luke 1:15 NIV)
But before all the angel promised Zechariah came to
pass, Zechariah had no experience with God giving him such monumental
gifts. We know he had been praying for a
child…most likely for decades. The angel
even said the coming child was an answer to his praying so most likely he had
been praying faithfully for a long time.
He was a priest and he knew all the mechanics of praying for what he
wanted…he had to have understood the scriptures promoting prayer and asking for
what you want and need. Perhaps he even
did quite a bit of teaching on prayer but at some point it seems, Zechariah
quit believing God would answer his most important prayer of all. How do we know this? Consider Zechariah’s reaction to the
declaration that he would have a son! Zechariah
asked the angel, "How can I be sure of this? I am an old man and my wife
is well along in years." (Luke 1:18 NIV) The angel Gabriel was not at all pleased with
Zechariah’s response. The angel
answered, "I am Gabriel. I stand in the presence of God, and I have been
sent to speak to you and to tell you this good news. And now you will be silent and not able to
speak until the day this happens, because you did not believe my words, which
will come true at their proper time." (Luke 1:19-20 NIV)
Clearly the angel knew, and was not guessing, that
what may have seemed a quite natural reaction to being told that as an old man
with a wife who was an old woman who never before had been able to have
children that they as a couple would have a child was not a good reaction at
all…it in fact revealed something very wrong with Zechariah.
At first it seems a bit harsh of the angel to take
away like this Zechariah’s ability to speak.
Of course he did regain his speech after the baby was born so it wasn’t
permanent, the Lord’s disabling of Zechariah but it certainly was a strong
message sent by God. There was something
very wrong about Zechariah and the command of God to raise the child he was
about to receive in a certain way helped uncover what was perhaps hidden to
everyone but God Himself. Remember that
the angel Gabriel did not need to come to Zechariah to tell him he was going to
father a child; that would become all too obvious in a few months. What he did need to know in advance was how
this child would fit into God’s overall plan and how he was to raise the
child. The mother, if the baby was to be
alcohol free, would need to be alcohol free herself even while she carried the
baby. That command required immediate
attention. So when the command of how to
raise the coming child within God’s plan for him came, it was uncovered that Zechariah
had lost his faith in God to answer his prayer.
“How could this be” he asked.
Indeed, how could it be if God does not answer our big prayers? Zechariah was deeply wounded by what he had
faced for so many years and he had buried that hurt for so long that it was not
easy to be done with it.
Consider just how far Zechariah had fallen from
being a praying man. Despite the fact
that Gabriel clearly was supernatural and Zechariah knew Gabriel was an angel
sent by God, he still could not accept the possibility that God suddenly would
do for him what he had for so long been asking God to do. Not even an angel, who brought him great fear
by simply being before him, could shake the deeply rooted unbelief in God to be
able to answer his prayer. Many of us
would say that if an angel spoke to us in person, we would believe everything
there is to believe in God. But maybe we
wouldn’t. Maybe we have such buried
brokenness that we have for years hidden from view that not even an angel could
shake us of it. But, maybe, God with a
simple command can uncover what is broken inside of us and through our
obedience heal that place of brokenness.
Zechariah was bound up in doubt and disappointment
that maybe no one but his wife guessed existed.
Perhaps this is reading too much into the matter but maybe it isn’t. As
we will see, it seems to be a spiritual principle. Elizabeth had to follow a command and she did
it. She had to raise her child free of
alcohol. This would have meant her
abstaining from it too. There is a
slight detail in the account of the son’s birth that is subtle but of great
value to us. Pay careful attention to
what is said. When it was time for Elizabeth
to have her baby, she gave birth to a son. Her neighbors and relatives heard that the
Lord had shown her great mercy, and they shared her joy. (Luke 1:57-58 NIV) Notice that the neighbors and relatives
shared in the joy Elizabeth had. No
mention is made of Zechariah’s joy. Is
it possible that Elizabeth was the only one of the two who was happy to finally
be a parent? Was not Zechariah also
happy to be a father? Of course he
was. But the expression of that joy
needed a simple act of obedience to completely heal the pain of his buried loss
of faith in God. There was controversy
among family and friends of the elderly couple.
Elizabeth and Zechariah knew that God wanted the child to be named John
but that seemed preposterous to everyone else.
But then Zechariah asked for a writing tablet, and to everyone's
astonishment he wrote, "His name is John." Immediately his mouth was opened and his
tongue was loosed, and he began to speak, praising God. (Luke 1:63-64 NIV) It was only after Zechariah obeyed God in
what many of us would say was a small matter but for Zechariah it was a
tremendous moment of victory because in the act of declaring the name of the
child to be the name the angel told him to give the son, he revealed his
complete belief in God’s work of giving the child to them. It was in that one bit of obedience that
Zechariah’s joy was unlocked and his unbelief and broken feelings about God
healed.
Could it be that like Zechariah, there is a command
of God that is revealing buried brokenness of soul? Is it possible that if you in faith did what
God says to do in the matter you might be healed of that brokenness and it
would be replaced by joy? We will give this
fuller attention later but for now, consider the possibility that there is
something God has told you to do and you have been stopped dead in your tracks
by some past hurt or wound that you have buried and by rejecting out of hand
God’s command to you, the wound is just festering within you and keeping you
from bubbling joy. What great joy might
we all have if we did what God tells us to do?
May it be that in our disobedience to some simple matter, we have been
our own worst enemy? Could it be so?
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