A heart of gold....a heart of Job.

Job 1:1 There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was blameless and upright, and one who feared God and shunned evil.


So then the devil decides to be a big jerk and try to mess with Job. And he does. He kills all Job's kids, destroys his home, and takes all the livestock too.

The very next verse after we receive all the bad news is this:


20 Then Job arose, tore his robe, and shaved his head; and he fell to the ground and worshiped. 21 And he said:


“ Naked I came from my mother’s womb,

And naked shall I return there.

The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away;

Blessed be the name of the LORD.”

22 In all this Job did not sin nor charge God with wrong.


Okay, so when I saw this part, my jaw literally dropped. And I got to thinking what life would be like if your first response to pain, confusion, and utter chaos was WORSHIP. What if we stopped getting angry, and we fell to our faces and worshipped the King of this life and the next? Job is for real, my kind of man. I want to find one like him.


So, it gets worse. After Job's response, the devil got more ticked and decided to mess with Job too. So he makes him all sick and in all this pain. And Job's wife is like, " JUST GET MAD AT GOD AND DIE!!!"

And here he is, my man:


Job 2:10 But he said to her, “You speak as one of the foolish women speaks. Shall we indeed accept good from God, and shall we not accept adversity?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips.


And this got me to some more thinking! Why is it that we can accept good things from God and bring HIm praise, but when something goes wrong, we turn our backs on Him? That sounds like shallow friendship and companionship to me. In good or bad, in sickness and in health- these are the words that resonate as love. Someone who only wants us on the good days is not really a friend at all. What bad friends we often are to God.


This is not to say that Job was a jolly ole fellow after all this, skipping threw the fields like a ray of sunshine. No, he mourned. He asked and questioned why he was even born. He hurt. He was human. All in chapter three, Job vents his sadness and mourns his loss.


The difference, I think, between us and Job is that he "did not sin with his lips". Job was not a statue. He was a living, breathing, emotional, human being. BUT he knew that God was in control. He knew that to the depths of who he was, not just with his head. He knew it and he truly believed that what God had in store was good. Now, he might not have understood, and he grieved and cried and questioned, but Job's worship was not something he had to search for. His genuine response was to fall before God's throne in humility.

I think on what my first response is to difficult situations- worship? Surely not. Most of the time its a roll of the eyes, a curse word whispered in my mind, or an automatic annoyed attitude. My prayer today is not to understand God, or to never experience the ups and downs of life as they come, but that the core of who I am will reside in worship, and reliance on my Savior.

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