Changing the world for God can sound easier than loving the people close enough to frustrate us. But that’s precisely what God calls us to by calling us to honor the first “neighbors” we’ll ever know: our parents.
Pharmaceutical commercials fill the screen with daisy fields and frolicking joy so you’ll tune out the side effects. Are God’s Commandments filled with killer side effects, too?
When a mess lands in our lap—whether it’s the fallen world’s doing or our own—the natural move is to grab control and start fixing, doubling down on whatever we think will work. In Genesis 28, two sons of the same broken family face that same moment, and the difference between how they respond reaches right into the choices we face today.
Gaps make us uneasy, so we fill them by hook or by crook—inventing tidy origins for old phrases or forcing plans into place. Genesis 27 opens on Isaac’s household doing the same around the blessing he means to give, each scrambling to close what feels unfinished.
We instinctively read our circumstances as a verdict on where we stand with God—ease means favor, famine means failure. In Genesis 26, Isaac is stranded in exactly that famine, holding a promise that the land and its people seem to be disproving, and God’s answer to him isn’t immediate relief but something harder to trust.
It’s easy to hunker down when life gets complicated. We’ll just manage what’s in front of us and quietly wonder whether God’s bigger plan still has a place for us in it. Genesis 24 takes us to the story of a family facing down that same question.
We’ve all set out to pursue what we think God wants, only to watch the road curve in ways that make no sense. How do you trust Him when His path seems to undo the very promise He gave? In Genesis 22, Abraham faces exactly that moment as God calls him to offer Isaac.
Knowing where we want to end up is easy; trusting that faithfulness will get us there is another matter—especially when the path looks like a dead end. Ruth 3–4 traces ordinary people facing exactly that tension, each called to let go of control at the moment it costs them most.
In the Book of Ruth, Boaz finds a vulnerable widow gleaning in his field and he has to decide if he’ll do more than what the law requires. We, like Boaz have to answer the question Will love dictate we give more than the bare minimum? That’s much easier to tell others to do than for us to do ourselves.
We’ve all looked at this world and thought, it just doesn’t seem like God’s will is being done. Underneath that thought is a deeper fear that God’s reserve of will and ability runs dry the way ours does. That fear is exactly what Jesus targets when He teaches us to pray “your will be done.”