One Voice

What do you want to be when you grow up?  Where do you think you will go to university or will you do a trade?  Where do you see yourself in 10 years? In five years? Do you have a plan?   Do you know what your talents and giftings are?

All good questions.  And ones we have answered over the years.  Some answers became our reality and some we have forgotten along the way.  We are encouraged to choose best path with the greatest chance of success and it seems as if everyone around us has a voice in the choices we make.

Abram was a man called by God.  He clearly heard The Voice of the Lord say to pack up and go.  Go to the land I will show you.

Can you hear it?  The voices around him?

“Abram, why are you leaving town?”

“To go somewhere.” 

“But where are you going?”

“To the place the voice will show me.” 

Uh huh.

But he went.  He knew what he had heard and he acted on it.   He had heard the God of the Universe tell him that even though he didn’t have one child, God would make him into a great nation.  That through him all the families on earth would be blessed.  Abram believed.  Abram packed up and moved.

And when he got to the land of Canaan, God said I will give all this land to your descendants and Abram worshiped him. What a gift!  To hear His voice, to move in obedience and to receive confirmation once there.  God is good!  Abram was chosen. Abram was loved.  Abram knew that God had a plan for him!  A clear, laid out plan.

Then famine strikes.  And Abram, trusting in God’s plan, seeks the Lord for wisdom of what to do next. 

No. That’s not in scripture.  Instead, scripture says that Abram was “forced” to head to Egypt.

This man that God was going to make into a nation, looked at the beauty of his wife, wisely knew she would be sought after by the powerful and hatched a plan. Created a lie.  So that he would live.

What?!?!  He had heard the voice of God!!  He had a promise! A plan!  And still in the midst of life, he panicked, resorted to wisdom of the day and lived a lie that cost him.  Cost him relationally with his wife.  He gave her up to another man to save his skin!   Cost him in the eyes of the people he lived with. They kicked him out of the country!

He forgot WHO he was and WHOSE he was.  Abram was chosen by God to be His people.  To walk with Him in faith.  To live his life out with the promise of fruitfulness. 

Too often, like Abram, I forget that I am chosen and instead live by the voices in my head.  You are not good enough.  What do you think you could possible share with them?  You don’t do things like that parent or that pastor or that wife or that daughter.  If only you were better, maybe things would be different.

I forget that I need to listen to only ONE voice.  In the noise of the multitude, it is the one voice that whispers “in THIS time, in THIS place, I have chosen you.  It is not a mistake.  You are not my second choice.  You are one that I choose to be wife, mother, daughter, pastor, friend to those that I give you.”

Nothing more, nothing less than myself.  Because my God says so.  And today that is more than enough for me.