We Don’t Have to Be Miserable to Follow God

We do Bible time each day as part of our homeschool day. Whenever Gabe can, he joins us, and he leads two days a week.  I lead the other days. We mix it up. Right now, Gabe is leading us through the Sermon on the Mount, and how we can obey those words of Jesus. Other days we are reading about Old Testament heroes, and we often share stories of examples of people living out their faith today or in history. 

Last week, we read about George Whitefield.  I had heard of him, but had never known much of his story.  Eric Metexas has an entire chapter on him in the book “If You Can Keep It: The Forgotten Promise of American Liberty”, and it was amazing! 

(Picture credit: Christianity Today.com)

George Whitefield lived in the 1700’s in England. At first in his life, he thought that he had to earn God’s favor, so he made up some extreme sacrifices for himself that he thought would please God. He gave up all things he liked: food, laughter, even praying with friends.  He prayed all night laying on the ground in the rain, he gave up even hygiene and looked like a wreck.  And then he had an encounter with God where he realized that Jesus simply said to believe, and that this grace is a gift, not earned.  

After that dramatic conversion, he became a preacher to thousands in England and the American Colonies.  By the time of his death, he had been heard by 80% of the people living in the colonies!  This was important because his message of grace for all (not based on social class or denomination) and  grace as a gift (saved by faith, not by doing good things) started the Great Awakening here.  He also helped unite the Americans around the ideas of equality and caring for the poor. Back then, those ideas were not universally believed, but today we take them for granted! His faithfulness brought the good news to thousands (some say millions?) of people! 

After we talked about him, I asked the kids what we could learn from his life.  Here are their answers. 

1. Even if you are only a ‘lowly servant’, God can use you. (George couldn’t afford to go to college, so he went and worked as a servant to the college students.) 

2. Only keep enough money for ourselves and give the rest away. (He gave away money and raised money for orphans and the poor throughout his life.)

3. God wants everyone to know that He loves them. We can share this with  people that others don’t want to talk to. (George preached to coal miners in England at a time when they were outcasts… his message of God’s love often brought the miners to tears, which made “white trails on their faces blackened with coal dust.”)

4. If we follow God, He will give us friends when we are lonely. (At first, at college, George was lonely because he was just a servant and not allowed to talk to the students. But later, the Wesley brothers befriended him and invited him into their club.) This was encouraging to me, as we get ready to go to a new place and are trusting God for new friends there! 

and my favorite answer, 

5. We don’t have to be miserable to follow God!  (Just as George realized that he couldn’t make God love him more by giving up his favorite foods and things, we don’t have to give up our pizza (the Landes family official food) or laughter to follow God!) There will be plenty of hard times in life, whether we are following God or not. But Jesus calls us to obedience over sacrifice, and promised to be with us all the way.  This means following Jesus is sometime hard but not miserable! In fact, God’s comfort is what gets us through the hard times. 

This should be our family shirt! 

I love when we all learn together from the examples of faithful men and women who have gone before us!