God Has His Ways
By Dennis Pollock
In the Psalms, we are told:
“Today, if you will hear His voice:
Do not harden your hearts, as in the rebellion,
As in the day of trial in the wilderness,
When your fathers tested Me;
They tried Me, though they saw My work.
For forty years I was grieved with that generation,
And said, ‘It is a people who go astray in their hearts,
And they do not know My ways.” (Psalm 95:7-10)
God wants us to be able to hear His voice, and He says that we must not harden our hearts. Interestingly, hearing God has to do with our hearts, not our ears. God does not say, "If you will hear my voice, get the wax out of your ears." We are told that if we want to hear God, we must have a tender heart. He uses the Israelites who followed Moses through the wilderness as an example of those who did not have a hearing heart and grieved Him for 40 years. And then God tells us about the main problem with these people: "They do not know my ways."
God has ways! He has standard patterns and means by which He interacts with His creation. To know God and spend time with Him is to learn His ways. People have ways, patterns of behavior, and routines that they regularly practice. And when a man and a woman first get married, they usually do not know each other's "ways" very well. They know that they love each other and find each other attractive, but there are all kinds of ways their new partner possesses, of which they are entirely ignorant.
Living Together
Until they begin to live together, there is much that they will never know about one another, regardless of how many dates they have, how many romantic dinners they enjoy, and how many movies they watch together. But after their marriage, they live in the same home, eat their meals together, spend every morning and evening together, play together, discuss problems that arise, dream together, and yes, they will surely argue with each other from time to time. And over the years, they will learn the ways of their partner. This is natural, normal, and nearly inevitable.
I met my wife, Benedicta, while preaching in Nigeria. She used a camcorder to record the meetings, and we became acquainted. I found her incredibly attractive and was able to get her phone number. After countless hours of talking with each other over the phone and a brief trip back to Nigeria for an engagement party, about six months later, we were married.
But I could not immediately bring her back to Texas to live with me, even though we were married. The visa process drug on, and it took over a year for her to get her visa and join me. Strangely, our country allows millions of illegal immigrants to come across the border every year these days, but with us trying to do it legally, it took a long time. I was able to meet Benedicta in some of my African missions during that time, so we did get to see each other every few months, but this could not compare to living together as husband and wife. Even though I loved her, I knew I would never really know the real Benedicta until we began to live together. I prayed that the Lord would open the door for her to come and join me so that I could discover what our married life would look like. Finally, the day arrived, and Benedicta flew from Lagos, Nigeria to Houston, Texas, where I happily picked her up and brought her to her new home. As I write this, 15 years later, we have been delighted to learn each other’s ways through the years.
Daily Routines
When Benedicta sees me in the mornings reading my Bible aloud in my recliner, she is not shocked or startled. This is what I normally do. If we were to go to a church that offered doughnuts, and I walked right past them and never touched them, she would not gasp in amazement. She knows me very well and she knows I don't eat doughnuts: not today, not tomorrow, and not ten years from now, if the Lord should give me that long. After living together, working together, having Bible studies together, eating meals together, and shopping together, there is not much I do that surprises her, nor does she surprise me too often. She knows my ways and I know hers.
God, the Creator of Heaven and Earth, has His ways. He has ways of how He works, He has ways that relate to what He expects of His children. He has certain things that grieve Him. The Bible tells us: "Grieve not the Spirit of God." And some things please Him. Amazingly, some people please Him. The angel told Mary, "You have found favor with God." (Luke 1:30).
Starting Out
When we initially come to Jesus for salvation, we usually don't know much about God. We know Jesus loves us, that He died on the cross for our sins, and that He rose from the dead on the third day. But often, we know very little else. We are not so different from a wife who marries a man she is attracted to and has just moved into his house. She truly loves her husband, but there are a lot of his ways, of which she is completely ignorant.
Fast forward fifty years. She now knows her husband almost as well as he knows himself. She knows his habits. She knows what pleases him and what angers him. She knows his routines and daily patterns. Fifty years of life together had given her confidence in her husband and a knowledge of his ways, his habits, his propensities, and his reactions very, very well.
And so, it is with God's children learning the ways of their Heavenly Father. Of course, God is much too big, too great, and too complex for us to learn all His ways, and to say we know everything there is to know about Him. But we can gain a basic understanding of the ways of God. It will take a while. At first, our knowledge of the ways of God may be a simple thought: "Jesus loves me, this I know. For the Bible tells me so." But over time, through reading the Scriptures and walking with God, through sometimes being disciplined by Him for our foolishness, or feeling His smile on our lives for our faith and obedience, we become knowledgeable of the ways of God. This is an incredible blessing, and it will do us good all our days.
In Psalms: "He made known His ways to Moses, His acts to the children of Israel." (Psalms 103:7). This is why the Israelites in the wilderness were constantly complaining and failing, and why God was often on the brink of wiping them all out. These people, unlike Moses, only knew the acts of God. They had seen His mighty deliverance from Egypt, they had watched in awe as He parted the Red Sea, they had observed how He had brought water out of the rock. They had surely seen the mighty hand of God in action – but somehow, they had never learned His ways. And their bodies were strewn throughout the wilderness as they meandered around for forty years. They never made it to God's promised land.
Being and Making Disciples
Once we are safely in the kingdom and family of God through faith in Jesus, we must pick up our Bibles and learn the ways of God. We must attend church services and hear good, Bible-based, Christ-centered sermons. We should be present at small-group Bible studies and gain an understanding of God's modus operandi – how He works, what pleases Him, and what displeases Him. And we must learn the value of faith and obedience, and then put these into practice!
Jesus' final instructions just before ascending to heaven were to: "Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 28:19). We are to be disciples of Jesus, learning the ways of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and we are to make disciples, students, learners of the ways of God. This is our calling, and this is our life work. People who have learned the ways of God, and teach others the ways of God, are the most blessed in the world.
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