Who are we Really Serving?

“Rebecca” the Zambian, well, Rebecca and I are still enjoying life and hoping for a bright future together.

We continue to pray together at least a couple of times every day, although her bar study obligations are cutting into our schedule. We pray about general things early in the day, and later on, we intercede. Sometimes we intercede for people we care about, and sometimes we intercede for people who are annoying.

We talked about something we have been avoiding discussing. We want to know whether there is any point in having her complete her bar exam, which will take several months, when the process delays our getting together and also interferes with what we do.

The obvious concern is this: is studying for the bar exam a responsible thing to do, which will bring Rebecca closure and help her to leave Zambia as a success, or is it a worthless time sink which will only hinder us in what we’re supposed to do for God? Also, is our desire to be together coloring our judgment?

She just texted me, sending a crying emoji and this: “Class 6 hours straight.”

One of the hallmarks of controlling men is that they interfere with women’s educational and career opportunities. You persuade a woman to let you provide all her support, you tell her she doesn’t need to go to school or work, and then if she complies, she is trapped if the relationship doesn’t turn out to be what she wanted.

I am not a controlling person, but I’m leery of looking like one, and what if I drop dead before things work out? What if she changes her mind about me? She would have invested a lot of time in bar study, and she would have to do it all again.

But does it make sense to look at things that way? Doesn’t it go against faith? God has aligned us extremely quickly, in a very short time, and we are both Spirit-led believers who insist on living by faith instead of relying on our own judgment.

During the last few days, we asked God to help us make sure nothing we give him is defective. This turned out to be relevant to the discussion of Rebecca’s plans.

God criticized the ancient Jews for taking defective animals to the temple to be sacrificed. Some of them took animals that were crippled or blind. They didn’t give God what he wanted. Also, a number of people in the Bible got in very serious trouble for performing sacrifices their own way instead of God’s.

Under the new covenant, we do the same thing when we try to plan our own lives and do what we want for God. Most Christians don’t hear from the Holy Spirit because of bad doctrine that separates them from him, so how do they serve him? In self-righteousness. They do things that look good superficially, but God is not involved, so the results stink like rotten meat.

The world is full of churches and ministries God never wanted to exist. People build orphanges God doesn’t approve of. They go on missionary trips he didn’t sanction. They think God approves because they’re being nice and working hard, but they displease God and spread rot through the church. They make Christianity look bad. They fill our ranks with people who just want to show off.

Doing things God never asked you to do, and then claiming you do them for him, is taking God’s name in vain. It’s a major sin. It’s like putting a three-legged lamb on the altar.

Yesterday, during our first prayer session, Rebecca told me she had dreamed about a nun who ran the Catholic school she attended. She is not Catholic; she just attended the school. If I recall correctly, in the dream she needed money for something, and the nun provided her with a few coins.

To me, it sounded like God was showing her church people walking in the flesh were not able to do much for her.

I think money usually represents faith and power.

After we prayed, I watched Youtube. First, I saw a video by an obscure man I like listening to. He has a tiny audience. He died from a drug overdose, and he was revived. While he was gone, he was in hell. In the video, which is only a few days old, he said he felt he had to talk about something he realized in hell. He said he realized nearly all of what we do is worthless because God is not in it.

After that, I watched a recent Mark Hemans video, and he preached about the same basic thing. He said human beings who are not led by the Spirit do what seems right in their own minds, offending God in the process. For example, he cast spirits out of a woman, and she began sobbing and shaking. A misguided person tried to cheer her up and help her stop, and Hemans put a stop to it. She needed to go through the pain of deliverance. He said the person who interfered was showing human love, but it was actually detrimental. God’s love required the woman to experience deliverance properly.

I didn’t seek out videos about human self-righteousness. They just appeared while I was looking at recommended videos.

From a human perspective, it appears that the right thing is for Rebecca to take the bar exam. Is that how God sees it?

Today and yesterday, Rebecca has been swamped. You would think Resurrection Sunday would be a day of rest in a Christian country, but both days have been filled with scholastic obligations. In Zambia, Resurrection Sunday and the day after are official holidays, so the people who hold classes take advantage of the time to pack extra work in. It’s frustrating, and it’s also a great illustration of the tension between worldliness and devotion to God.

We would like to get together for the first time sooner than June, which is when she expects to have her first period of free time, and we would like to get together permanently sooner than September, which is the month when she finishes her school obligations. The thing is, God isn’t the only one who might want this. Our flesh wants it. We are tired of connecting by phone when we could be sitting in the same room.

Sometimes God and the flesh agree. Sometimes we just think they do.

This is where we are.

I won’t worry. God will show us the right thing to do, and he will keep us on course. It will be wonderful if we can accelerate things.

If anything changes, I will show up here to write about it.