Day 2-Audacious, Not Foolish

Bible Reading: Judges 16:4-23

You probably have that friend or colleague that has the tendency to totally miss the point of a conversation. Tell her a funny incident that happened with your mum, and then in two minutes you’re defending yourself about not being gender insensitive, or an ingrate for all your mum’s sacrifices over your life, and so on.

Some people might seem extreme, but if we’re honest, we all have the tendency to miss the point of any conversation.

We read about Samson today. I think Samson totally missed the point of the conversation God brought him into. Samson had supernatural strength. He was full of the ability to do really audacious things. Samson would kill a lion, kill a thousand Philistine men with the jawbone of a donkey, and so on. But just a little walk down the line and Samson has his eyes plucked out, grinding in a Philistine prison.

At what point did Samson miss it? How did Samson move from audacity to captivity?

I think that God’s call to audacity is so clear over every believer, but audacity is not a basis to be foolish. Audacity is a clear conversation that we must not miss the point on. I’ll share with you two tips to keep your heart guarded on a journey of audacity:

1. It is foolish to think more about doing something big than doing something right

Audacity is never just about doing big things. Audacity is first about doing right things. God in his own way blesses our right steps with ‘bigness’. Audacious people are people that get so sold out to a right cause, not people who pursue the biggest things possible. 

You think about a young amazing boy partnering with Jesus to feed five thousand people. He didn’t set out to do something big, he simply gave his five loaves and two fish to do something right- generosity. It is Jesus who makes a big deal out of what is right. 

Don’t be all about a pursuit to feed five thousand or fifty thousand or even five hundred thousand by all means, that you embrace a wrong pathway to it. Don’t idolise big things. Be big on right things. The Lord may lead you through seasons of what looks very ordinary. After all, the true value of what is done in the name of the Lord can only be seen through the eyes of eternity.

2. It is foolish to rate outcomes over obedience.

In a similar vein, don’t idolise outcomes. Samson kept going down a pathway of disobedience, simply because the outcomes had not yet caught up with him. Again and again, he played flirting games with what was holy and sacred. In fact, at the last moment, the Bible says he assumed he would ‘get up as usual’, but suddenly realised his strength was gone. Did his strength actually leave suddenly? Samson had all the while been on a journey of disobedience that just took a process to come to fruition. Simply put, Samson became audacious in the extents that he could dare disobedience, rather than in the extents that he was obeying God. You can call it reverse audacity!

If we rate outcomes over obedience, we will become comfortable to walk in disobedience, simply because the outcomes are not yet bad.

In your journey of audacity, let obedience give you joy!  Find more joy in your audacity to obey God than even in the beautiful outcomes that follow through from obeying God. The big deal about a conversation on audacity is that you can obey God, not that you can produce great outcomes.

But obeying God in its own time and process will always produce God-sized outcomes! 

Let’s be people that don’t miss the mark of the conversation. Let’s not become audacious in a wrong way. Let us be audacious in the marks of our inner drive to obey God and to do what is right.

Something To Pray
Pray today for the Holy Spirit to purify your heart in all your pursuits. Pray for a journey of audacity that is rightly focused and rightly pursued.