Impressing God

We do not have the same authority as the king of Judah to demand obedience to God’s law, but we have a domain over which God has given us rule: our inner life, our household, our sphere of influence at work, in friendship circles, our place of ministry, the resources he has given us to advance his kingdom. God has given us the irresistible witness of righteous character, the power of respectful persuasion through mind and voice, divine enablement through spiritual gifts, and the external tools of money, position and power—all of which are things in our possession that we can leverage for the advance of his kingdom. And when we use what we have us to lift up the good in such a compelling way that the bad is exposed as bankrupt, then we are living the impressive life before God.

Going Deep // Focus: 1 Kings 15:11-14

Asa did what was pleasing in the Lord’s sight, as his ancestor David had done. He banished the male and female shrine prostitutes from the land and got rid of all the idols his ancestors had made. He even deposed his grandmother Maacah from her position as queen mother because she had made an obscene Asherah pole. He cut down her obscene pole and burned it in the Kidron Valley. Although the pagan shrines were not removed, Asa’s heart remained completely faithful to the Lord throughout his life.

Do you want to impress God? I do! Now of course, that was a hypothetical statement, since not on our best day can we come close to what it takes to impress the Almighty. At our most impressive, our righteousness is as filthy rags before the great and holy God. (Isaiah 64:6) Only by his grace are we brought into any kind of favor at all. We are impressive to him only because we have accepted the righteousness of his Son, Jesus Christ. So let’s be clear about that.

Even still, there were people in scripture that earned God’s favor by their impressive lives of complete dedication to his law. But what we see of those people was that to serve God with such ruthless fervor often meant they were a serious irritation to most everyone else. And therein lies the other edge to the sword: to impress God often requires us to depress people.

What do I mean? Let’s look at Asa. For the most part, Asa was a very good king. Once we get to 2 Chronicles—remember, 1 and 2 Chronicles tells the story of the kings from a different perspective—we see that Asa stumbled a bit in the latter part of his very long and prosperous reign of forty-one years. But for our purposes in this devotional from 1 Kings 15, what made this king so impressive that he was known as good King Asa?Simply this: “Asa did what was good and right in the eyes of the Lord his God.” (2 Chronicles 14:2)

What does that mean, “good and right in the eyes of the Lord?” It means that as the new king of Judah, he took sin head on and crushed it. He was born into a time of spiritual drift in the nation of Judah, and even his parents and grandparents had abandoned the Lord for the worship of idols. We are not sure how it happened, but somehow when Asa was young and being mentored, he came under the godly influence of a person that remains unnamed in scripture. Raised in a cultural stew of idol worshipping godlessness, Asa chose the Lord. And when the opportunity came as the supreme human authority over God’s wayward people, he went after sin on both national and personal rebellion against the Lord with passion and urgency. He removed the places, practices and practitioners of idolatry and restored temple worship. Moreover, he even removed his own grandmother, Maacah, who was queen mother in Judah, because of her idolatry. In a word, Asa dealt ruthlessly with sin wherever it was in his power.

That is why he was impressive in the sight of the Lord. His heart was fully devoted to the things of God, which meant that his heart was fully devoted to destroying the things that were against the law of God.

We can be impressive too, for the same reasons. Of course, we do not have the same authority as the king of Judah did, but we have a domain over which God has given us rule: our inner life, our household, our sphere of influence at work, in friendship circles, our place of ministry, the resources he has given us to advance his kingdom. And he has given us the powerful witness of godly character, the power of persuasion through mind and voice, supernatural ability through spiritual gifts and natural talents, and the external tools of money, position and power that we can leverage for the advance of his kingdom. And when we use what God has given us to lift up the good in such a compelling way that the bad we stand against is exposed as bankrupt, then we are living the impressive life.

Yes, it is only by God’s gift of grace that we impress him, but leveraging his grace to offer ourselves back to him at all times and in every way in full devotion certainly catches his eye.

For the eyes of the Lord search the whole earth in order to strengthen those whose hearts are fully committed to him. (2 Chronicles 16:9)