One Obedience at a Time

Recently a friend of ours was going through a major time of transition. She knew the Lord had asked her to lay down what He had currently entrusted to her so that she might step into something new. But she was finding it hard because it seemed that there was no one who would carry on her work. She felt as if all that she had done would be lost and this was troubling her greatly.

One day as she was taking some quiet time, suddenly the Lord spoke to her heart, "Karen, why are you trying to build a monument to yourself?"

"What Lord, what do you mean?" she answered.

"Why does it matter to you so much whether or not things will continue on in the way you envisioned them and created them to be?"

"Because Lord, I put years of my life into what You called me to do and tried to do it with excellence as an honour to Your name. But now it seems like nothing will remain - it will be as if I was never even here and it just seems like such a waste of my time and life."

"The problem, Karen," the Lord continued, "is that you are looking for your fruit in the wrong place. The fruit of your labour is not in what you accomplished in the natural; the true fruit is in your obedience to Me. In everything you did, no matter how small or large, you were seeking to hear Me and to be obedient to Me with all your heart. And every obedience in every moment of time created a memorial altar before Me."

As He said this, suddenly Karen saw a vision. She was standing on a vast plain and as she looked across it, she saw thousands of little piles of stones.

"Don't you see, Karen, this is your legacy. It doesn't matter if the things you have done here on earth are perpetuated or repeated. With every obedience, you erect another altar and another altar and another altar. This is the memorial of what you have done and it is eternal and nothing and no one can ever change that.

If you can grasp this, Karen, things of this earth will not bind you. You won't have to hold on to the past or to your accomplishments as a proof of your significance. You will be completely free to just live with Me in the present, one obedience at a time."

This is what the Lord is longing for all of us to understand in this season of transition. No matter what we have done, no matter what the outcome in the natural - whether glorious or disastrous - as long as we have been obedient to the Lord's voice, according to the measure of revelation that we had, our obedience has built a memorial altar before Him that is eternal. And so we can let go of the past, of our successes and our mistakes, close the old doors and look forward with excitement and faith to what lies ahead, knowing that wherever we are going, we are going with the Lord.

We encourage you over the rest of this consecration time to ask the Holy Spirit to reveal and to help you to close any open doors from the past season so that you can be rightly positioned for all the new doors God will cause to open before you in the days that are coming.

With much love

The Watchmen Team