Topic: Love, Trust, and Obey God’s Details [RICK WARREN Devotional 7 May 2020]
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Love, Trust, and Obey God’s Details
“Trust GOD from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own.”
Proverbs 3:5 (The Message)I am not a detail person. I have a hard time giving my attention to small parts of something for any significant period of time. What about you? Are you detail-oriented?
Do you know who is? God. God cares about every little detail of life.
Have you ever stopped to look closely at nature? Take a flower, for example. Each flower is filled with so many intricate details.
And think of the human body. God says that he even numbers every hair on your head. He cares about the details.
Because he is a God of detail, he not only wants you to obey him, he’s also interested in the details of how you obey. God wants you to obey him in the right way and for the right reasons.
There’s an example of this in the Bible. A man named Naaman was ill with leprosy. He went to the prophet Elisha and asked what he should do.
This is the message Elisha sent: “Go, wash yourself seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will be restored and you will be cleansed” (2 Kings 5:10 NIV).
Naaman was insulted. He had expected a dramatic healing from the prophet—not bizarre, humiliating instructions. But his servants talked him into following God’s detailed instructions, even though he didn’t understand them.
The result? “So he went down and dipped himself in the Jordan seven times, as the man of God had told him, and his flesh was restored and became clean like that of a young boy” (2 Kings 5:14 NIV).
Do you think there was special power in the water? Absolutely not. Naaman was healed because of his obedience. He had faith. He obeyed God completely.
When you obey God completely, you’re showing that you love him and trust him. When you love someone, you often do something the way they want it done just because you love that person. And when you trust someone, you do something how they want it done because you trust they know best. So when you love and trust God, you do things the way he wants them done. You obey him completely.
Faith is trusting God in the details of life. Proverbs 3:5 says, “Trust God from the bottom of your heart; don’t try to figure out everything on your own” (The Message).
- What examples from nature or from your own life show how God cares about details?
- What does it mean to obey God in the right ways and for the right reasons?
- Naaman hesitated to obey God because God’s instructions sounded crazy to him. What crazy-sounding thing has God asked you to do? Are you ready to obey?