A Mandate for Greatness: How to Yield to God

Alright, we’re back at it again guys. Today I want to talk about yieldedness. If you know me, you know this is something that I talk about a lot, because it’s a major key to walking with God successfully, but it isn’t something that we tend to talk about practically. We’ve got amazing songs like “I Surrender” by Hillsong, or “Refiner” by Maverick City Music, but the lyrics in those songs don’t always translate into our every day living. So I’m going to do my best to break the concept of yieldedness down into something super simple, easy, and most important of all, applicable, because if we don’t live these things we have no reason to talk about them.

To start, check out this passage from Hebrews 3:7-8:

Therefore, as the Holy Spirit says: “Today if you will hear His voice, do not harden your hearts as in the rebellion, in the day of trial in the wilderness…

Don’t just gloss over these words. Let them sink in and sit with you. We’ll come back to them in a moment.

A temptation of living in modern western culture is to settle into the idea that God is like all of the other things we have in our lives that we engage with at our wishes. He’s very important to us when we go to church, or when we’re engaging in something that we think has some sort of moral weight. But when we’re at work, or at the gym, or hanging with friends, we turn God off in the same way we turn the TV off when we’re done watching it, or put the weights away when we’re done using them. If you feel like that’s you, don’t feel left out. We all struggle with this.

But let’s lay down that idea for now and pick up the truth, where God is actually the one with the reins in our lives. He tells us what to do, not the other way around. How does that change the way we live?

First, when God is the one doing the directing, where you’re going is actually dependent upon His direction, so you have to adopt a posture of actually asking what the Lord wants you to do. How often do we ask the Lord before making decisions? How involved are we willing to allow Him to be in our lives? How important is His direction to us? Are we willing to move forward without Him? Why? These are great questions to ask ourselves, they will shed light on where our hearts really are. In order to step into greatness, we can’t continue to be afraid of seeing where we really stand with God. If we’re standing far off, it isn’t because He doesn’t want us to be near Him. At any time we can draw near to the Lord.

Second, it isn’t enough to simply hear the voice of God, and discern the direction He wants us to walk in. We have to actually be willing to take steps in that direction. And be warned: not all of the direction God gives is comfortable! Sometimes it doesn’t even make sense when you first step into it. But as time goes on, it bears good fruit, because the Lord is always leading us into good things. Ephesians 1:3 says that God has blessed us with every spiritual blessing. Everything that God has to give, He desires to give to us, so much so that He gave His most precious thing (His only Son) so that we could receive the ultimate blessing of eternal fellowship with Him, which includes every blessing that you could possibly imagine, and (according to Ephesians 3:20) exceedingly and abundantly beyond that! The gospel is called the good news for a reason! So obeying the Lord isn’t the curse that we often act like it is.

Anyway, this combination of steps is exactly what Hebrews 3:7-8 is referring to. It says, “Today if you will hear His voice…” Notice, it doesn’t say if you can hear His voice. It says if you will. So we do have the ability to discern the voice of God. And this makes sense; how cruel would it be for Jesus to say that it’s better for us that He goes back to the Father and gives us the Holy Spirit, when we could plainly hear the voice of Jesus, but the voice of the Holy Spirit is an oddly cryptic whisper… or how cruel would it be to call the Holy Spirit our Comforter and Teacher, when He has no way of leading us into all truth because we can never see where He’s going? I would like to suggest to you that the single greatest hindrance in our ability to discern the voice of God is the wrestling we do with whether or not we can. As soon as we move past that struggle, hearing His voice feels natural. I would encourage you to take whatever steps you need to in order to put that war in your head to bed once and for all, the Lord didn’t teach you to think that way.

But after you hear the Lord’s voice, don’t harden your heart. This is where yieldedness comes in. The Lord never imposes His will on us, because there is no love in controlling others, and God is love. This is not to say that God isn’t all-powerful; He most certainly could impose His will on us and make us do exactly what He wants to do at all times. However, God has no interest in that. What He desires is our willing partnership with Him. So He will instruct, and He will make the direction He would like us to go in extremely clear. But we will always have the choice of softening our hearts and yielding to His direction, or hardening our hearts and turning away.

The time of rebellion the passage refers to is the famous Exodus story, which has tremendous prophetic significance for this time (as I’m sure all of ya’ll prophetic people know). Catch this. The plan that God gave the children of Israel made absolutely no sense from a human perspective. He supernaturally broke them out of slavery by quite literally making a mockery of all of the most powerful Egyptian gods (study up on the significance of the ten plagues if you don’t know what I’m referring to, each one was crafted specifically). But then He led them to an ocean without any boats, with a bunch of mad Egyptians literally chasing them down to slaughter them all. And the path out of that was, “Hey Moses. Go put your stick in the water.” But Moses had history with God, and he knew by that point that the way God operates typically does not make logical sense (e.g. fires that burn bushes without consuming them and then talk to you, sticks that turn into snakes, and a shepherd going into the halls of one of the most powerful nations at the time, commanding the king of that nation to release his entire workforce, which would undoubtedly destroy his economy). So he yields to God and obeys. And the ocean splits in half.

Stay with me here. They walk through the ocean and are literally led by a pillar of cloud during the day and a pillar of fire by night. So the leading of the Lord is extremely clear. There’s no confusion as to whether or not they’re walking in the right direction. But He’s leading them into the middle of nowhere, towards this “Promised Land” that sounds too good to be true. I mean who’s ever heard of a land flowing with milk and honey? And who cares about the promised land when I need the milk and honey now?? I’m in the desert. There’s no food. There’s no water. So their hearts start to harden, because they don’t understand, and it isn’t comfortable. They start grumbling and complaining. They start saying that Egypt, the place of bondage and literal death (because their sons were being taken from them and murdered because the Egyptians hated them) was better than where they were now, even though they were free.

But God is really patient. He sends them as much bread from heaven as they can eat. He gives them water from rocks. He makes a way where there’s no way. And yet the people who have seen and literally tasted the goodness of God harden their hearts in rebellion. The Lord gives them laws to live by and they literally build an idol to worship because they’re unwilling to come out from where they are and step into what the Lord is putting before them. And the Lord is so angered by this that He only decides to move forward after Moses intercedes for them. So they keep moving forward, and the people keep complaining. And when they finally get to the Promised Land, after having seen the power of God constantly displayed to them, they literally decide to return to Egypt rather than enter into the land God promised them.

This is what it is to harden your heart to what the Lord is doing. YOU WILL NEVER ENTER INTO GREATNESS WITH A HARD HEART. If you want to walk with the Lord in what He’s doing, you must develop a heart posture of yieldedness to Him, even though His leading is beyond what you can understand. So often we say we want to see the glory of God, but when we come into an impossible situation where the glory of God can be revealed (e.g. a land promised to us that’s full of giants), we forget all about how powerful God is and act instead like He’s never done anything for us. We literally reject Him in favor of our own strength and our own understanding, and choose instead to return to the squalor we came from.

But what the Holy Spirit is saying in Hebrew 3:7-8 is that things do not have to be this way for you. You can hear the Lord speak today, and you can keep your heart soft and yielded towards Him. You can walk right into the promised land in ways that your parents didn’t. You can step into the impossible by His leading and see His glory displayed in the form of your victory!

So final takeaways, because I said we would get practical. 1) Listen for the voice and direction of God, and expect it to come! God’s MO is speaking to and instructing people. He’s always done it, and His methods don’t change. So expect the Lord’s direction in your life. Is it always an audible voice? No. But stop telling yourself that the will of God is so difficult to discern and you could never have any insight into what He wants you to do with your life. That’s utter nonsense and highly unbiblical. I’d go so far as to say that it’s heretical, as it directly contradicts so many portions of scripture. So please, let’s let go of that awful idea, it makes us all miserable! 2) Do what the Lord says to do! Don’t shrink back, even if it’s uncomfortable, scary, or seems impossible. Most of the things the Lord will tell you to do, you can only do with Him, so you should actually expect to hear some things that you think you can’t do. That’s where the glory of God is revealed. Let’s not be like the children of Israel who saw the impossible situation in front of them with their eyes and shrunk back after the God of the universe literally swore to go with them. That’s mad lame. We’re not lame. We’re the real deal.

Love ya’ll!

Kaleb