Obedience, Regardless of What it Looks Like, Will Produce Good Fruit
A few years ago we found ourselves being a little battle fatigued after not seeing the fruit we thought we would see after saying yes to something the Lord asked us to do. It's one thing to say yes to the Lord about something that you don't have a prior history with, however when it comes to saying yes again to something that didn’t seem to work out well the first time, it takes a lot to risk once again. It was just such an occurrence when the Lord asked us to invest our time and resources into making another worship album. We knew that there was a sound and a message in us that needed to be released through song, but we also knew that we didn’t have any physical means to make that happen. Combine this with the fact that we weren’t sure of our emotional capacity to lay ourselves out there again after the seeming failure of our previous album.
Even with all the limitations staring us in the face, we decided to proceed with our big yes to God. There's a miraculous story we can tell on another day about the process of creating the album, but ultimately God gave us wisdom, guidance, and resources for us to pay the 70 thousand dollars it took to produce the album.
On the night that our album was released, we invited all of our friends and family over for a celebration. Unfortunately, there was a huge storm that swept into town that night and most of our friends weren’t able to come and be with us. As we looked around the room and only saw a few people around us, we started to become discouraged as the enemy took advantage of the situation and began spewing lies of failure once again. It was difficult not to give in to those lies, but in the middle of the storm, we decided to worship and give glory and honor to our King. Towards the end of the evening we got a text from our producer with a screen shot of the Christian music chart. There we were, right between Mercy Me and tobyMac. What a surreal moment to see our names on the same chart of people whose music we grew up listening to.
As I was thinking about this story, I felt that the Lord wanted to bring encouragement to us today. Every one of us has a unique story with our individual yeses to what God asks of us. Sometimes our obedience results in obvious good fruit, but then there are times when we say yes to God that it seems like a failure. The result of our yes to God often looks a lot different than what we thought it would, but regardless of the outcome, we need to keep trusting the Lord, and not give the enemy's lies influence over our future decisions. We need to have the confidence to know that whatever results looks like from the outside, it will produce something good, because God's promise to us is that He is working all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose.
