When Saul was confronted with his sin, he explained and excused himself, revealing his disobedience and his mistrust in the Lord. He followed his whims rather than seeking the Lord’s guidance. Saul’s life tells us that rebellion is the result of pride.
Rebellion will move you from a place of blessing and safety to a place of danger and disaster.
Saul and David are perfect examples of a rebellious heart and a submitted heart. Neither men were perfect. But what sets them apart is the posture of their heart. Saul’s heart was consistently rebellious, while David’s was consistently submitted.
Submission is the act of yielding to the governance of authority. Some synonyms include obedience, surrender, acquiesce, compliance, consent, and pliability.
We live in a rebellious generation who feel it is their right to sit in judgment of those in authority over them. Christians are no exception. Rebellion against God-appointed leaders is the same as rebelling against the Lord and leads to nothing but trouble. As our commanding general, the Lord says, “Get into ranks and follow me. I will not lead you into temptation, and I will deliver you from evil.”
But we sometimes say, “No, I don’t want to follow today.” So we fall out of ranks, do our own thing, and get into trouble or hurt. Then we blame God for not protecting us. We are also tempted to rebel against human authority. We have two biblical responsibilities regarding authority figures: pray for them and submit to them.
The only time God permits us to disobey earthly leaders is when they require us to do something morally wrong before God. The Bible teaches of our responsibility to submit to the following leaders:
Being submissive to human authority demonstrates faith. As you submit to God’s line of authority, you choose to believe that God will protect you and bless you and that all will go well with you. Ask God to forgive you for those times you have not been submissive and declare your trust in God to work through His established authority lines.
So, how do we know if we are moving in rebellion in an area in our life? Here are fifteen characteristics to weigh.
Merriam Webster online defines the verb rebel as to oppose or disobey one in authority or control, act or show opposition or disobedience, or feel or exhibit anger or revulsion. Synonyms of rebel include defiant, disobedient, incompliant, insubordinate, rebellious, ungovernable, unruly, wayward, and willful. Two more synonyms of the verb rebel are mutiny and revolt.
Rebellion vs. submission. Everyone makes a choice when responding to authority in their life. There’s really no middle ground. Either you’ll choose to submit to God and the authority established in your life, or you’ll rebel. No middle ground means that you can’t choose to submit in one authority area and rebel against another.
So, what does rebellion look like? Let’s begin with the definition. Watch the Facebook Live here.
Don’t stay bound up in judgment. Loose yourself and others with these steps. Remember, say them out loud.
We are the problem. In Thinking Christian, I suggest, “When we have not offered a faithful digital presence, it is, in part, because we did not have a good idea of what it meant to offer a faithful ‘analog’ presence.”
We have always had a problem with greed. We seem to want the wrong things for the wrong reasons, thereby losing any reasonable grip on what it means to choose God over greed.
We cannot lose sight of the fact that exaggerated spectacles like Vegas and the gossip-column-framed-as-investigative-journalism have something in common: they wouldn’t exist without us.
Our desires begin to form us spiritually through economic systems in which we are, to one degree or another, willing participants. Greed often results in the accumulation of wealth. The fact that greed often results in wealth, however, should not blind us to other objects of greed.
Greed, we might say, is about the incessant pursuit of something deemed so valuable that obtaining it pushes out gratitude and contentment. We no longer “seek first God’s Kingdom and His righteousness” but set it aside to chase what has become the object of our misdirected desires.
Our desire to be fulfilled by something other than God, overreach God-given boundaries in pursuit of our own aims, and set agendas for God that relegate him to second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) position reflect the sort of self-centeredness that allows greed to flourish.
While Paul may rejoice at the spread of the gospel even when it is motivated by selfish ambition (Philippians 1:15-18), he isn’t endorsing selfish ambition.
Greed is rooted in our unwillingness to take direction from our Creator so that as we identify the objects of our desire, we give ourselves over to reflect those objects rather than God’s glory.
Arguably, even our most legitimate desires, when left unchecked and redirected by God, can limit our ability to love God and neighbor.
If we (individually or collectively) allow our desire for virtues, such as truth, justice, accountability, holiness, unity, or love, to overshadow God, we offer a false picture of Him to the world.
In our portrayal of God, He begins to look more like us. We suggest that God conforms to our desires and serves our purposes.
When decisions about what to say and when to say it are conditioned less by slow, deep, Spirit-led discernment than on what will drive page views, greed rules the system.
When we consume such messages and, through our likes, shares, views, and downloads, request more of the same, greed becomes a natural logic.
They supply because we consume, and we consume because they supply. There is no particular end toward that which we are aiming for because “accumulating more” means we never have enough.
But what are we greedy for? It seems we are greedy for the security that comes from stories that confirm our beliefs, reduce or eliminate ambiguity, and remind us that there are people out there who are far worse than we are.
We are greedy for information that reinforces our experience, allows us to go about our day-to-day activities, and confirms our preferred understanding of God. Media, even some Christian media, can form us into the image of something other than Christ.
Christians seem willing to accept such an assertion when it comes to pornography, violence, or other such vulgarities, yet we don’t often consider the idea that other forms of media are capable of distorting reality and cultivating misdirected desires.
If we become greedy for such media, we may find that we have engaged in a sort of idolatry in which the god presented in the media becomes “real” while the real God is increasingly lost in the noise.
To put it differently, greed does not have to involve an increase in material goods. It can also involve the accumulation of information that allow us to live comfortably.
As theologian Jürgen Moltmann notes, while wanting to be like God is only one side of sin, “The other side of such pride is hopelessness, resignation, inertia, and melancholy…Temptation then consists not so much in the titanic desire to be as God but in weakness, timidity, weariness, not wanting to be what God requires of us.”
Here’s a good rule of thumb to know if it’s a reason or an excuse…every reason MUST have a resulting action. A reason takes accountability. Excuses shift blame.
You can have RESULTS or EXCUSES, not both. You get to choose. Here are some tips for how to stop making excuses.
Persecution Live 