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Just keeps knocking

 


Amos 4:13

God forms the mountains and creates the wind.

He reveals his thoughts to humans.

He makes dawn and dusk ⌞appear⌟.

He walks on the high places of the earth.

His name is the Lord God of Armies.

 

Thought for the day – Just keeps on knocking

It's 1709 and in the country town of Epworth, the Epworth rectory is on fire, and a five-year-old John Wesley is stranded at an upstairs window. The neighbours climb on each other’s shoulders, a human ladder, and snatch him out moments before the roof caves in. John Wesley never forgot it. For the rest of his life, he called himself a brand plucked from the burning, language that echoes the flames of Amos 4:11.

 

Now read Amos 4 and keep an ear out for the refrain. God sends hunger. Then drought. Then blight, plague, and overthrow. After every one of them comes the same sad line: yet you did not return to me. Five wake-up calls, all unanswered. I know more than a number of people who will say that is the sign of a cruel God but personally I think it’s a God who simply refuses to give up.

 

We need to tread carefully here. Not every hardship is a message from heaven, and to be honest Amos never says that it is. But he does show us a God who keeps coming after His people. That’s what’s called prevenient grace. God moves first, long before we think of moving toward Him. But I want us to hear God’s heartbreak in that refrain, though. They could have turned. God knocks, but He never kicks the door in. Grace always comes first, and it never forces.

 

Then verse 12: prepare to meet your God. That sounds ominous But the One we’re meeting is the Maker of mountains and winds, and He has spent a whole chapter chasing us down. So, my question for you today is: ‘What’s knocking in your life this week? What have you been politely ignoring?’


This blog post is part of the Walking the Way Podcast series. All views expressed in this essay are those of the author. This essay is freely available under Creative Commons License with Attribution-ShareAlike, allowing users to share it in other mediums/formats and adapt/translate the content as long as an attribution link, indication of changes, and the same Creative Commons License applies to that material.

 

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0


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