The Sensitiveness of the Loyal by Oswald Chambers
Lord, suffer me first to go and bury my father.
We are called to serve One. He is the only One that deserves our lives and our time, our loyalty.
When Jesus calls, there is the ordeal of conflicting loyalties. Probably the most intense discipline we have to go through is that of learning loyalty to God by the path of what looks like disloyalty to our friends. This is stated in its profoundest form in Luke 14:26—“If any man cometh unto Me, and hateth not his own father mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be My disciple".
Learn to estimate the disproportion in your loyalties. A man will put his Lord to open shame before he will be disloyal to a friend. But when any soul learns how to lay down his life for his Friend, Jesus Christ, other people promptly become shadows until they become realities in Him.
When a sense of loyalty to father or mother perplexes you, picture Jesus showing to you His pierced hands and feet, and wounded side, and thorn-crowned head, and hear Him say—“Think, what that must have meant to My mother, and it is I Who call you to follow Me.”
No one could have had a more sensitive love in human relationship than Jesus; and yet He says there are times when love to father and mother must be hatred in comparison to our love for Him. The sense of loyalty to father or mother or friends may easily slander Jesus because it implies that He does not understand our duty to them. If Jesus had been loyal to His earthly mother, He would have been a traitor to His Father’s purpose.
Obedience to the call of Christ nearly always costs everything to two people—the one who is called, and the one who loves that one. We put sensitive loyalty to relationships in place of loyalty to Jesus; every other love is put first, and He has to take the last place. We will readily give up sin and worldliness, but God calls us to give up the very closest, noblest and most right tie we have, if it enters into competition with His call. Beware of the inclination to dictate to God as to what you will allow to happen if you obey Him.
Oswald Chambers, So Send I You: The Secret of the Burning Heart (Hants UK: Marshall, Morgan & Scott, 1930).
