Choose Your Fear

The soul starts to fall asleep as soon as we say “No” to God.

It’s easy to mistake this for a period of holy silence from the Lord. But when we say “No,” the silence comes from our end and not God’s. It's not that God has stopped speaking to us, but rather that we have stopped speaking to God.

We know that if we start speaking with God, we’ll hear again the command we don’t want to obey. We'll read the news we don’t want to receive. We'll remember the call we don’t want to heed.

God is awake and waiting, and we have fallen asleep.

Jonah feared where the call was leading. So he fled to Tarshish and slept through divine storms of discipline sent by God to help his soul remember.

There is always a “Tarshish” that we run to after we turn down the call. It’s the shadow life that we settle for to distract our hearts from the divine dream.

"So the captain came and said to him, 'What do you mean, you sleeper? Arise, call out to your god! Perhaps the god will give a thought to us, that we may not perish.'" (Jonah 1:6)

When we snooze through the call, pagans outdo us in piety. We forget the fundamentals, the simple act of calling on our God.

Until we remember:

“I am a Hebrew, and I fear the LORD, the God of heaven, who made the sea and the dry land." (Jonah 1:9)

The sleep ends when we remember who are are, who God is, and what we should fear. At the moment of remembrance, we leave the nightmare of neglect and enter into true Sabbath rest. We enter into the ease of the Master—the Better Prophet, asleep in the stern (Mark 4:38).

If you’ve said “No,” go back. Because Christ hurled himself into the heart of the sea, sinners can call out in the storm and find grace in need (Jonah 2:3; Matthew 12:40).

It’s time to choose your fear.

Will you fear what the call leads to?

Or will you fear who is leading you?