The Rope That Held

In the 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge, Private Desmond Doss stands before a military tribunal. His commanding officers want him gone. Fellow soldiers have beaten him in the barracks. The entire United States Army is telling this skinny medic from Virginia that he cannot serve without carrying a rifle. And Desmond, quiet and resolute, simply will not pick one up.

His obedience was not to a regulation or a commanding officer. It was to the Lord. He had made a covenant with the Almighty — he would not take a life. And so he climbed that ridge on Okinawa unarmed, crawling through gunfire and smoke, and lowered seventy-five wounded men to safety on a makeshift rope, praying over each one the same desperate prayer: "Lord, help me get one more."

Obedience rarely looks impressive at the beginning. It looked foolish when Doss refused that rifle. It looked reckless when he ran onto that battlefield without a weapon. But by the end, the same men who had mocked him were asking him to pray before they went into battle.

That is what obedience to God does. It confuses the world at first. It costs you something real. But the Almighty has a way of turning our small, stubborn faithfulness into something no one can explain apart from Him.

What has God asked of you that the world says is foolish? Obey Him anyway. He is faithful to those who trust His voice above every other.