Raise Your Action

“Actions speak louder than words. Let your words teach and your actions speak.”

- Anthony of Padua

Our 18-month old grandson, Emery, recently started blood curdling screaming whenever there is a loud noise (like our dog barking). Crocodile tears pour down his tiny little cheeks, and he runs with lightning speed straight to our daughter and hides behind her.

As I listened to Joel Thomas this past weekend talk about the loud noises all around us over the last year and a half, I started to feel like our little Emery. I’m tired, and I want to run and hide when there are loud, deafening opinions about all that is happening in our world.

The truth is that we all have loud voices wanting attention in our lives. Voices that tell us we should seek recognition, success, comfort and power. But as we learned this weekend, the life Jesus calls us to live is an inverted life,one that includes rejection, sorrow, sacrifice and weakness.

Hebrews 11 lists the heroes of our faith. What made them heroes? It wasn’t that they were successful or powerful. What earned them a place in the “hall of fame,” wasn’t how loud their voices were, but the loudness of their actions… steps of faith and obedience that earned them that place of honor.

Noah, Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Joseph and Jacob are all listed in Chapter 11, as well as many others. (Take a minute and read through the entire chapter.) What makes them unique is that they all believed better things were possible with God. Rather than raise their voices louder, they did the hard thing by trusting his promises! When you get to the end of the chapter, verses 39 and 40 read:

These were all commended for their faith, yet none of them received what had been promised, since God had planned something better for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.

God had planned something better. He filled them with hope, not for fame and wealth, but for an eternal future. As the hymn goes, “Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe, sin had left a crimson stain, He washed it white as snow.”

Joel asked this weekend, “How much does your voice sound like the voice of Jesus?” A voice of compassion, love and grace. Not the voice of pride, but the voice of sacrifice. I’m asking Jesus right now to make me more like the heroes of our faith, who took steps to be not the loudest voices, but to Raise Their Actions. It excites me to think about what God can do through each of us when we are willing to live an inverted life!

“The empty vessel makes the loudest sound.” - William Shakespeare

Pastor Pam

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