What can John the Baptist’s father teach us?

What can John the Baptist’s father teach us?

Read Luke 1: 1-24:

What was the cause of Zechariah’s punishment? What made him hesitate to believe the angel’s message? What similar temptations to unbelief do you face? Why ought Zechariah to have believed and why ought we to believe?

Zechariah was punished by not being able to speak until his son was born. He did not believe that God could/would give him a son because he and his wife were too old. Zach made a very common mistake. He looked at his situation thru the eyes of the world and not the Word. God called him to job that required faith, but Zach “knew” that people his age did not have children. Rather than have faith in the message that was sent by the Creator of the universe, he relied on his own worldly understanding. How often do we do this? Every day? God calls us to job’s that we cannot do with only our worldly understanding. That is the beauty of God’s calling. We can do things that we can already do. God wants us to do things that we cannot do…without him. This is what faith demonstrated is. This is the opportunity God gives us to trust in him daily.

You will also notice that God’s mission was going to be completed with or without Zach’s initial faith. There are always two ways to learn things, the hard way and the easy way. Have faith in God and do what he says even if it makes no worldly sense. That is the easy way… But we rarely do that. We insist on balancing both the world view and God’s calling. Because of his initial distrust in God, Zach would complete the same mission only without the ability to talk. Why did God decide to “teach” Zach thru this method? Could it be that this would force him to “think” before he speaks? (What is the opposite of talking?) Could it be to force him to “listen?”

When God asks us to do things that we cannot accomplish without him, it is a gift. It is an invitation to grow our faith and reliance on Him.