So, like, you all know by now how I can go all Pollyanna on you at any moment on any day of the week.

But this is not one of those times. If you needed a light-hearted-la-dee-da post today, well, you'd better click to the next blog because actually I'm going to speak against a Pollyanna-ish sermon which is preached from many pulpits. The one which says,

 "It's impossible to mess-up God's plan for your life. If you disobey Him, He'll just put a band-aid on your boo-boo, ignore your whole 'mistake' and let you proceed without any discipline or reaping from what you've sown or feeling pain from your regrets or seeing any real harm happening."

Disobedience, to me anyway, comes with a much higher price tag than that.

I'm going to list just a few examples of the high price of 'missing God', true examples which have happened to me, people I have known, or people I've read about. You can decide for yourself if it's possible--as Christians--to mess-up God's plans for not only your own life, but the life of others:

We can become a foreign missionary when God planned for us to stay home. We can stay home when God planned for us to become a foreign missionary.

We can eat ourselves into an early grave, missing hundreds of opportunities to share Him with others or drink ourselves into an early grave or take enough drugs to get us there.

We can be like the Israelites and spend forty years making an eleven day trip and like Moses who disobeyed God and died without entering into the promised land.

We can arrive at our retirement years not having saved-up money for them and then find ourselves having to work hard at an elderly age, struggling to survive.

We can ignore the voice which told us to send a Christmas card with the plan of salvation to your elderly neighbor who most likely didn't know Jesus and then, years later, watch his 90-year-old body being carried out of his house.

We can wait too long to become physically active, take lousy care of ourselves and then live in chronic pain.

We can wait too long to learn to roller skate, become a gymnast, play sports, at least not without great risk. (That quote, "It's never too late to be what you might have been," does not always apply.)

We can hear that an elderly woman in our church would like us to visit her on her deathbed, wait too long out of the shyness, and then hear she has passed away.

We can not control our emotions and find ourself having an affair, destroy our marriage, wound our children. 

We can be obnoxious and critical at our 'God Blog' and cause people to race away from God, rather than toward Him.

We can ignore the voice which tells us to prepare for a different occupation/job loss, then in a few years, be fired/released from our job, unable to find one in a different field and be full of regret that we didn't have money saved up. 

Wow, downer Debra today, right? Oh, but sometimes we all need warnings, to wake up, to walk wisely so the road ahead won't be pitted with regret ruts.

Am I saying we should go around feeling guilty or afraid? Of course, not. I've written tons of posts saying just the opposite. Here's one as an example.

No, I'm just saying that disobedience to God--the ignoring of that still, small voice--can come with a huge price tag. There's a reverential fear and awe of God which I believe we're losing, something which has been replaced by a,"Whatever will be, will be" attitude.

Uh, no. That, my dear, is too scary to even imagine. God provides something miraculously better--when we listen and obey.



******


"My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge..." ... Hosea 4:6


******