Have you ever prayed and asked God for direction, only to get an answer that made you wonder if you heard Him correctly? You were expecting something that made sense, something reasonable that you could actually explain to somebody else. Instead, the instruction you received left you sitting there thinking, “God, You really want me to do that?”
I think one of the biggest misconceptions we have about obedience is believing that God’s instructions will always make sense to us. We expect that if something is truly from God, we should be able to understand why He is asking us to do it. But when you look throughout Scripture, that simply isn’t the case.
God told Abraham to leave his country and go to a place He would show him. Abraham didn’t receive a complete itinerary before he left. He had to move based on what God had already said. Joshua was instructed to march around Jericho when there were probably much more logical military strategies available. Peter had spent the entire night fishing without catching anything, yet Jesus told him to go back out and let down his nets again. None of those instructions were particularly impressive from a human perspective, and some of them probably sounded ridiculous. But obedience required them to trust God beyond what made sense to them.
It is easy to obey God when His instructions agree with what you already wanted to do. It becomes much harder when He tells you to walk away from something you were praying would work or tells you to wait while everybody around you appears to be moving forward. Sometimes God will give you an instruction that challenges what you thought your next season was supposed to look like, and that is usually when we start asking for confirmation.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with making sure you heard God correctly. Discernment matters. Every thought that crosses our minds comes from God, and we should never use “God told me” as an excuse to make reckless decisions that contradict Scripture or godly wisdom. However, there is a difference between seeking clarity and repeatedly asking God the same question because we don’t like His answer. Sometimes we already know what God said. We simply want Him to say something else.
We can spend so much time trying to understand why God gave an instruction that we delay actually following it. We tell ourselves we are praying about it when, if we are truthful, we are negotiating. We want God to explain how everything is going to work before we move, but God does not always give us that explanation.
Think about Peter in Luke 5. He had been fishing all night and caught nothing. Fishing wasn’t a hobby for Peter. This was his profession, and he knew those waters. So when Jesus told him to launch out again, Peter had every natural reason to believe it wasn’t going to work. Yet Peter responded, “Nevertheless at thy word I will let down the net.” Peter acknowledged that his experience was telling him one thing while Jesus was telling him something different. He could have allowed what happened the night before to determine what he did next, but instead, he chose to trust the instruction.
Many of us struggle because we want the instruction to make sense before we obey it, while God may be asking us to trust Him before we understand what He is doing. There are also times when we obey only the part of the instruction that feels comfortable. Saul did this in 1 Samuel 15. God gave him specific instructions, but Saul decided to make adjustments. When Samuel confronted him, Saul initially insisted that he had obeyed God, but in reality, he had obeyed only the parts he agreed with.
We have to be careful about doing the same thing. Partial obedience can feel spiritual because technically we did something God said. But if we intentionally change His instruction to make it more convenient for us, we are no longer following His direction. We are following our edited version of it, and that can be a hard truth to accept.
Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust in the LORD with all thine heart; and lean not unto thine own understanding.” We quote that Scripture often, but living it is different. Trusting God with all your heart means there will be moments when your understanding cannot be the deciding factor. If everything God asked us to do could be completely explained by our own reasoning, there would be very little need for faith.
Sometimes obedience will require you to move without knowing exactly what happens next. You may have to release something you thought you would keep or take a step that other people do not understand. We also have to remember that obedience does not guarantee the process will be comfortable. We sometimes assume that once we obey God, everything should immediately start working in our favor. Then, when things get difficult, we begin questioning whether we heard Him correctly.
Difficulty is not always evidence that you made the wrong decision. Sometimes you can be exactly where God told you to be and still encounter resistance. That is why our confidence cannot be built solely on circumstances. There will be moments when you have to remember what God said before everything became uncomfortable and trust that His instruction has not changed simply because the situation has become difficult.
You may eventually understand why God told you to do it. You may look back years later and realize that His instruction protected you from something you could not see at the time. There may also be situations where you never receive the full explanation, and trusting God means accepting that we do not always have to understand His reasoning to follow His direction.
So, if you know God has given you an instruction and the only thing holding you back is that it doesn’t make sense, perhaps the question is no longer, “God, why are You asking me to do this?” A better question may be, “Do I trust You enough to obey even when I don’t understand?”
Sometimes the instruction will not make sense until you get to the other side of your obedience.
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