Just Do What You Can

If you’ve known me for a while, you know I’m a bass player and music fanatic…I can’t get enough of it, in any form. And you know, I really love a good old radio! There was something so satisfying in the snap of those old radios as you turned them on. The static would hiss just a little. Somewhere in a distant broadcasting station, a source was sending a message. Maybe it was music, maybe it was news or a radio show. That message sped over the channel to your car or to your living room like it was meant just for you.

In that moment, you had one job: to receive that message. This involved a couple of steps. First, you turned on your radio. Then you turned those knobs looking for the sweet spot. You searched for that one place on the dial where the static was low enough, where the message came through loud and clear.

In this season, many of us are struggling to understand what God is up to. We want to hear from him, but we find ourselves weary and frustrated. In these times, I like to say that we need to worry about the knobs on our side of the wall.

It probably doesn’t come as a surprise to many of us that God is the source of life. He’s not just the source of biological life, but of our spiritual life, which is being renewed day by day. He is frequently trying to reach us through His Word and His Holy Spirit with the message of the gospel.

In this season, we have one job: to receive that message every day. We can only control the knobs on our side of the wall. That means, first of all, that we need to trust God with the knobs on his side of the wall (which is everything else). He is our source of life, he has the words of life, and he knows exactly how to reach us.

Are we listening?

It didn’t matter how much work a radio station put in, if we never turned on the radio. If we didn’t turn our knobs, dial it in, and let the static fade, we would miss the message completely.

Are we spending time in the presence of God, ready to hear what he wants to say? Are we tuning into His frequency, or are we searching for our peace in the media and the news cycle? We have been given a strange gift in this time, the craziness, the busyness, and the static has been turned down for many of us. Are we taking advantage of that silence? Or are we trying to fill it with something else?

Brothers and sisters, our God knows what he is doing. He has been faithful with the knobs on his side of the wall. Dare to trust him. Our job is to be faithful and intentional with the knobs on our side of the wall. There is so much that is out of our control, but with what is before us, let’s be faithful.