Every year your church
grows a year older and loses
vitality IF
new choices, decisions, and actions are not made
Disobedient children and God's love
When you ask a child to do something, and they do it immediately there is a strong sense of joy and respect that you feel. In fact, you even feel loved by that child because they have OBEYED you.
Now imagine children were basically robots without a choice. Suppose you only had to push a child's nose like a button and it would just operate without any further prompting. Initially, that may sound great. That sounds wonderful in fact...until we remember back to the joy and the love we felt when the child CHOSE to obey what we asked of them. If children were only robots, there would be no sense of love. There would be no real obedience; there would only be programmed response.
Sure kids make choices that frustrate us as well, but there is great love in their obedience.
God could have created us as programmed robots who just need to have the "ON" button pushed to go on doing what we are supposed to do. But God created us with a choice and a will, because our choice to obey God is loving. When we CHOOSE to obey God, I think he feels loved and respected and honored at a much more multiplied level than I do when my child obeys me.