Ezekiel 3:7 ESV
But the house of Israel will not be willing to listen to you, for they are not willing to listen to me: because all the house of Israel have a hard forehead and a stubborn heart.
God has told Ezekiel, in this chapter, that he is to go to the House of Israel and warn them. He then tells him, "Oh, and by the way, they won't listen." I struggle with that. Why would God call someone to a ministry that he knows will be ineffective? Why would he call him to preach to people that he knows will not listen? Is it possible that we have been evaluating ministries by the wrong criteria? Maybe the success of a ministry is not based on how big it is or how many people it reaches, but on how faithful the minister has been.
That beings up another question. What is the basis of ministry and how do we evaluate faithfulness? There are three truths here for Ezekiel. First, his message to the people must first come from his hearing God. He is instructed to eat the scroll God gives him. It is sweet to the taste. He is then told to give God's words to the people. The words he just ate are the words he is to communicate. If we are to effectively and faithfully minister God's truth to a lost generation then we need to make sure that his words are going deep into our own belly first. The depth our being needs to be filled and affected by God's truth. Ministry flows out of that. We need to be careful that we never fall into the place of thinking that we know it all and that we no longer need to spend quality time in God's word.
Second, Ezekiel needed to embrace a new definition of success. For Ezekiel, success was not measured by numbers of converts. Success was not measured by transformed lives or transformed communities. Success was measured solely by faithfulness. That runs cross grain to American thinking where we are always evaluating success by numbers. Where is the most effective place to invest my money? Who is the person with the most potential to invest my time and energy in? What is the most successful ministry to put our money and energy into? Certainly there is a stewardship aspect to this that we need to consider. We only have so much money, so much energy and so much time. Yet, the idea of listening to the Spirit and faithfully following somehow gets lost in the discussion. Ezekiel is simply called to faithfulness.
That leads to the third truth Ezekiel needed to understand. While he was to faithfully proclaim the truth of God's words to a people that would not listen, he was only to speak when the Spirit moved him to speak. We are really good at strategic planning, goal setting, and organizational structure. What we're not so good at is listening to the Spirit. True faithfulness necessarily flows out of a heart saturated with the word of God and sensitive to the leading of the Spirit of God.
Father, forgive me for the times I have failed to listen well either to your word or your Spirit. Today may I listen well to both.
By His grace,
Rick weinert
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