Who Is Really Calling the Shots? - Stories Change Hearts

Ezekiel 6:14b – “…then they will know that I am the Lord.”

Ezekiel was one of the priests taken to Babylon when Judah was conquered the first time. That would have been difficult enough for anyone. But after living in a foreign land for a while, God called Ezekiel to be a prophet to His people who were living in captivity.

And God had a message He desperately wanted them to hear.

The problem was, they weren’t listening.

So God had Ezekiel do some of the strangest things imaginable to get their attention. These weren’t just bizarre acts. They were living object lessons designed to pierce the hearts of people who had become spiritually deaf.

God gave Ezekiel His words and told him to preach hard messages to the Jews in Babylon. He had Ezekiel build a miniature model of Jerusalem and demonstrate the coming Babylonian siege, complete with siege ramps. He told Ezekiel to lie on his left side for 390 days and then on his right side for 40 days as a picture of Israel and Judah bearing the consequences of their rebellion. He even told Ezekiel to eat very limited amounts of food and drink very little water to demonstrate the coming famine.

Think about that.

For days, months, and even years, Ezekiel became a walking, talking sermon.

So what was the point of all of this?

God tells us in Ezekiel 6.

Again and again, God says what the result would be:

“…then they will know that I am the Lord.”

Wait a minute!

Didn’t they already know that?

Wasn’t that the message from the very beginning of Scripture?

Yes, they knew it intellectually. But somewhere along the way, they had stopped living like it was true.

And I wonder if we sometimes do the same thing.

We sing about God being Lord. We talk about Jesus being Lord. We even call Him “Lord” in our prayers.

But what does it really mean for God or Jesus to be Lord?

It means He calls the shots.

And that’s where the rubber meets the road.

We don’t always want someone else calling the shots in our lives. We want to make our own decisions. We want to do what we want to do. We want God to bless our plans rather than surrender our plans to Him.

We can call Jesus “Lord” with our lips while still being the lord of our own lives.

And God says that’s not enough.

The people of Judah had forgotten who was really in charge. They had turned away from God and toward idols, and God’s judgment was coming because of their rebellion. Ezekiel’s message was not simply, “You are going to suffer.”

It was much deeper than that.

“You are going to know that I am the Lord.”

Sometimes God allows circumstances into our lives that get our attention when nothing else will.

Sometimes He has to strip away the things we have been depending on.

Sometimes He allows us to discover that the things we thought we could control were never really under our control in the first place.

And sometimes the hardest lesson we can learn is also the most important:

God is God.
I am not.
He is Lord.

So let me ask you a difficult question.

Is there something happening in your life right now that God may be using to remind you that He is Lord?

Don’t waste the lesson.

Stop.

Listen.