Today's Devotional

 

 December 16, 2008

                                                                                                                        

Subject:  Insanity? I Call It Persistence 

2 Kings 5:10 - 11 "Elisha sent a messenger to him. He said, "Wash yourself seven times in the Jordan River, and your skin will be healthy and clean.
But Naaman became angry and left. He said, "I thought he would at least come out{of his house}, stand somewhere, call on the name of the LORD his God, wave his hand over the{infected} place, and heal the skin disease." 

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Because I like to make my high school students think, I answer most every question they ask with the words, "it depends."  Whenever I ask a question also, that is usually the first response I am looking for before I ask "why does it depend?"  So it really gets to me whenever I hear clichés or simplistic expressions that are meant to convey a foregone conclusion.  Here is one that you've surely heard, but perhaps never thought about how wrong it could be.

You'll sometimes hear this in business conferences or lectures and I've even heard it from the pulpit.  "What do you call doing the same thing and expecting different results?"  The answer is supposed to be "insanity," but whenever I hear it I'm thinking, "persistence."  

Reality is that sometimes God asks us to do "crazy" things, like move a mountain or walk around it over and over again, and to us, while it may seem crazy, God is doing something.  

In the passage above, Naaman was like many of us.  He didn't want to do the same thing over and over to "finally" arrive at a certain outcome.  Of course the end of that story is that his friends asked him why he didn't just do what God (the angel of the Lord) said.  He then realized how "insane" it was not to do what God was saying and did it and was healed.

In our fast-food culture we want results yesterday, but God hasn't accelerated time because we've sped up our lives and I think that sometimes He tells us to do things over and over again to prove that point.  

So today understand that you can do the same thing and get different results.  It simply depends on why you are doing it in the first place.  If you're doing it because God told you to, I can guarantee you that things are going to change and change for good.            

Carlen