SUBMISSION

Hebrews 12:9—Moreover, we have all had human fathers who disciplined us and we respected them for it. How much more should we submit to the Father of our spirits and live!

I’ve never put a floating floor in before but in theory it looked simple. All I had to do was line and glue the tongue and groove wooden slats together tightly and presto my floor should be complete. But by the fifth row of sliding wood together a problem arose. Gaps were appearing. So I took a hammer and tapped on a metal crowbar against the offending pieces to make them fit. Alas, that resulted in the fragile tongues breaking. The harder I pressed the more damage I caused and the greater my irritation at anything that moved or breathed.

Then I found a wooden block with a groove installed that was meant to help me tap the floor slats into place. If I had taken the time to look for this piece I would not have mangled the wood. Hmm. The best intentions wrongly applied may reap ruin where victory was in sight.

God gives me a beautiful wood block with a groove installed. It is called the Bible. When it is fitted to my life the Holy Spirit is able to tap me into the perfect place of God’s will. I stand in the gap and my place is important to His kingdom. But when I ignore His Word and attempt to do things my own way I end up mangling myself and all that I am next to. Is this oversimplified? Perhaps! But the reality is that without submission to the Word of God, we can never expect to live in a way that pleases God. I know what happens when I try to build and don’t closely follow the instructions. And I have seen what happens when I negotiate life ignoring the Bible.

The word submission gets a bad rap in our sophisticated age. But there’s a “phist” in sophistication that is strongly clenched in pride. It’s not brilliance that makes a person resist obeying God it’s pride. I see what my floor looks like when the pieces fit together correctly. God help me to submit to Your Word that I would serve in accordance with Your will for Your glory. God help us all, Your children, to wear submission as a blessing that the world might see what it looks like when You do Your perfect work in us!

Inspiration
It is easier to engineer things than determinedly to submit all our powers to God. We say we must do all we can: Jesus says we must let God do all He can.—Oswald Chambers in The Moral Foundations of Life