Who Will Go?

God does not always ask us to do the easy thing.  Sometimes it is the hard thing, the unpopular thing, the one thing you never wanted to do.  I remember a moment long years ago when I heard in my spirit a call to preach.  I was not yet eighteen, packing up clothes to go to Young Harris College, and was absolutley certain that I wanted nothing to do with this call to preach which was echoing with such urgency in my heart.  It would take me another six months to come around to the place of saying "Yes" to what I knew God was calling me to do.   

God calls us to a lot things.  Some take up a life time and some can be accomplished tomorrrow.  Regardless of the time involved, there may well be some reluctance to launch out on something which seems impossible even though God is pushing for it.  The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah was told that he was appointed a prophet before he was formed in the womb and born (Jeremiah 1:5), but there were times he longed for another way.  His prophetic work did not put him on magazine covers and make him man of the year, but instead, turned him into a prophet no one wanted to hear.  There were times so difficult he wanted to call it quits.  "If I say, 'I will not mention Him, or speak any more in His name,' then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot." (Jeremiah 20:9).  Jeremiah wanted to quit this hard work of God, but he could not.   

Many of us have experienced such a reality.  There have been times when the Word of God puts us in such an uncomfortable place with those we want to like us, or a place where the task to which we are called is so overwhelming, or in some moment of spiritual quandry which shakes our faith.  Honesty requires us to admit that we have been put in places by God and like Jonah, we may have refused to go, or we may have balked to the point of angering God as did Moses.  Kingdom work always cuts against the grain of human practicality and common sense.  It is hard work.  It should not surprise us since the One who calls us is the One who walked to Golgotha burdened with a cross wondering all the while, "Who will come and go with Me?"