Psalm 119:60 Obedience is Enough

I will hasten and not delay
to obey your commands.

Psalm 119:60

In 1985, God made it clear to my wife and I that He was presenting us with the opportunity to be foster parents.

We had just recently learned that we were unlikely to have biological children of our own.

I had never been inclined toward adoption or foster parenting.

We were hesitant to become intricately involved in "the system", with all it's governmental regulations and oversight.

And yet we saw God's clear command in James 1:27.

Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.

We had both been raised in churches where more emphasis was generally given to the latter part of that verse than the former, but nevertheless, the mandate to look after orphans and widows is clear.

And so we dove in. Through the decades that followed, we had reason to wonder on more than one occasion whether God intended to follow through on our obedience by giving us every blessing we desired.

We did our level best to follow the commandment-with-a-promise of Proverbs 22:6.

Start children off on the way they should go, and even when they are old they will not turn from it.

But sometimes that verse has seemed a mockery of what happens in the real world. Great patience is required to see that result come to full bloom, whether your children came to you biologically or otherwise.

God laid another great opportunity in our path several years later when it became clear the Mizzou Christian Campus House prison ministry needed our help, and then our leadership.

The opportunity was put in front of us in a manner that would have been difficult to ignore, and the command was clear in Matthew 25:36 & 40.

I was in prison and you came to visit me.’ . . . ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’

And, as seems to be true of any great challenge to obedience, there have been times when we would have preferred to see a few more tangible results and blessings from obedience.

Most of the women we teach and counsel in prison leave and go on with their lives, and we never hear how they're doing. Those we do see again tend to be the ones who wind up back in prison, back in the chapel, sometimes repeatedly.

Of those we hear from or cross paths with on the outside - usually because they land in the same city as us - the vast majority of them, sadly, fail to continue in the same level of faithfulness they showed while in prison.

It can be hard to keep on obeying when the "return on our investment" appears to be so minuscule.

It can also be difficult to keep on going when the level of assistance we've received in the ministry has often been minimal or non-existent. We've come close to calling it quits a number of times - closer than most people know.

We pray, asking for help, asking to see the results, crying out for a little encouragement. The help comes, but not as much as we need. The results do appear, but it's hit and miss. The encouragement comes like like a trickle of water from a crack in the granite face of a cliff \.

But God is enough. Obedience is enough.

The Lord does not ask us to succeed in what we do for Him. He simply asks us to obey, to do, to go.