My thoughts on Deliberate Rebellion

Alright so it's day 3 of Music Orlando and let me just tell you that Orlando might be the most boring city in America when the temperature drops below 40 degrees.....it seems like everything they have to do down here involves a lot of walking.....outside.....so I'm bonding with my hotel room each evening, but anyways.....

So I'm currently sitting in another music reading session this morning and we just heard a rocking, foot-stomping, "Glory" shouting Southern Gospel barn-burning song.  This song got a lot of the folk's blood-boiling and you could almost see foam and saliva running from their mouths....however I was not one of those folks.  Song wasn't my cup of tea because it had no identifiable melody anywhere in it, but this post is not about the flaws of Southern Gospel music..it's about thievery!!

So this guy a few rows ahead of me was very close to going into cardiac arrest at the end of the song due to his immense excitement and love for the piece.  Now, let me explain to you quickly how a music reading session goes...you show up, they give you packs that have one copy of each piece of music that you will be hearing and looking at, you sit down at a table and a company rep from each publisher comes up and directs you through each piece.  If you like a piece then you keep it......if not then you put it in the box at the back of the room on your way out where it goes back to the warehouse.

Well there were several other guys around this guy who felt the same way I did about the song, and they put their copy of the music into their personal discard pile....and that's when the other guy who we will just call Thief, went to work.

Thief began going down his table and the surrounding tables right in his area picking up copies of the song that people were going to be discarding to the box in the back.  At music conferences, this practice is frowned upon because it's........basically stealing music.  Thief was trying to gather enough copies of the song to form a complete choir set for his church so that he wouldn't have to spend the appx. $30 bucks it costs to buy a piece.

Luckily Thief came to my table and reached for my copy without even asking.....but Thief did not get my copy because my young hands were much faster than his.  Thief asked if I was going to use it and I replied that no I wasn't and I would be putting my copy in the back.  Well Thief kinda chuckled and went right about his business scoring copies.

Thief was deliberately doing something wrong, right where everyone could see it, and was having a good time doing it!!  I was like, "Wow this guy is a jerk"....I was hoping one of the Music Florida thugs would have him "taken care of" but it didn't happen.

Then I had a reality check.....how many times have I done something that I knew was wrong, and I did it deliberately.....and probably enjoyed myself immensely while doing it!!

It got me thinking that this is an area that gets a lot of us believers into a lot of trouble.  I think God understands when we slip into sin....not saying He likes it or encourages this practice, but I fully believe that He is aware that it's gonna happen due to the fact that we're.....well we're human.

What I mean by "slipping into sin" are all those times when we have a reaction to a situation, a reaction that happens in the blink of an eye, and maybe that reaction doesn't quite line up with God's will,.... or all those times when a conversation or a thought process suddenly slips down the opposite slope of holy and righteous thought or speech, and we end up saying something or thinking and dwelling on something that we are usually later ashamed of....those moments where we slip into a sin without planning out our actions or reactions......it's those times that I believe God understands our inadequacies as humans.

But what about all those other times....you know the times when we plan out a deliberate act of rebellion against God's will....or we take that step in a process that we know will obviously lead us away from God's will.....or even the times when our whole body, soul, stomach, conscience and everything within us tells us that something is not a good idea, but we go ahead with it anyway because we think that we can manage it, handle it, or work it out on our own to somehow benefit us in amazing ways?   It's in those times that I feel that God really wants to take us out behind the wood shed for a little tough love.

We see Scripture full of stories of people just like us, people who couldn't control their human desires and people who deliberately rebelled against God in some way shape or form......and have we forgotten how those stories end?.......usually not great....if you've forgotten go back and read the book of Genesis as a little reminder.

I don't know if I'll ever be mature enough, intelligent enough, spiritually-grounded enough to totally stop all my deliberate rebellion against the Lord, but if I had to make one New Year's Resolution then this is it:

Lord please give me strength to stop my deliberate rebellion, my deliberate disobedience of You and help me to regain a reverent fear of You!

I encourage you guys to join with me on this one....

And by the way, you remember Thief.....well he just spilled his coffee all over himself so my morning is complete and the vengeance of the Lord is swift and just!

Have a great Wednesday folks!