"Trust God and do the next thing."
This "signature" statement of Oswald Chambers' may seem self-explanatory, or it may not. It certainly is self-explanatory, but it's deceptively deep. It functions in much the same way as Luke 12:27: you have to find your way into God's very heart and stride in order to truly get hold of it.
Please don't take from this that I'm saying I've "truly gotten hold of" the profound discipleship secret summarized in this quotation. However, one of the reasons I haven't written much on this site for a while is that God has had me in training, working on this very principle. He's been preparing me for this training for some time, but He now has me actually working at it. Oswald was a very good choice of mentor, because he is both sweet and relentless -- like Jesus Himself, but easier for me to identify with on a practical level.
I'm at the baby-steps stage, but that's OK. I was ecstatic, in fact, to notice recently that the word "very" appears in what our Lord said in Luke 16:10:
"He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much"
Faithful in a VERY little thing! But not just any very little thing. It's easy to be faithful in those very little things that have been second nature to us for years. I'm faithful in a lot of little things, but I'm an outright rebel about others. It's the tasks we cleverly avoid that are at the center of our chronic unfaithfulness. These avoidances really stick in God's craw, as the saying goes, because we feel so smug in continuing in them. Over the years they become part of our identity.
God started with a mundane task that's one of my most-avoided "very little things." I've been quietly checking off each time I complete this task, and the consistency has been improving. What's begun to happen in my world as a result is extremely tiny-looking; most people would blink and miss it. But this tiny-looking change represents the very burgeoning of Jesus' powerful resurrection life within me, and it all started with a nudge from my dear brother-mentor's joyful, wonderful approach to life and faith: "Trust God and do the next thing."
“Whatever He says to you, do it.”
(Mary, concerning Jesus)