Keep Saying Yes

Sometimes I am like Jonah. Recently, I want to be like Jonah a lot of the time. Jonah told God No. Jonah ran. Sometimes I want to tell God No. Sometimes I even want to run. I’m sure that if you are honest, you are like Jonah too.

Following Jesus is not always easy. God asks big crazy things of us, and they don’t always turn out the way we want. He asked Jonah to go to a hateful nation and share a message of repentance. He asked Abraham to sacrifice his only son that he has waited decades for. He asked Joshua to march around the city he was trying to conquer for seven days. He asked the disciples to leave their careers and their families to follow Him.

He asked our family to quit our jobs, raise support, and move to another country to care for the fatherless. Then, only months later, He asked us to move back home and care for the fatherless of our own town. Now yet again, He is asking us to say “Yes” to something big and scary and so far outside of what we envisioned for our lives.  I want to say No. I want to run. I want to pull a Jonah.

But here’s the truth: if Abraham didn’t say yes, he would have never seen God provide the ram. If Joshua didn’t say yes, he never would have seen the walls fall. If Jonah didn’t eventually say yes, he would have never seen a whole nation come to repentance. If the disciples didn’t say yes, they would have never witnessed the miracles first hand and would have missed the chance to walk with Jesus.

What if we miss the miracles that God wants to do in our own lives because we say No? What if we miss a chance to walk with Jesus because we run?

Friend, we have to keep saying Yes. We have to say Yes to the hard. We have to say Yes to the big. We have to say Yes to the scary and the inconvenient and the things we downright don’t want to do. We have to say Yes to the orphan. We have to say Yes to the widow. We have to say Yes to the foreigner. We have to say Yes to the broken. We have to say Yes to the lost. We have to say Yes to the God of the Universe.