We recognize stubbornness when we see it because we have all been there ourselves. Notice that the people blatantly said, “we will not listen to you!”\u00a0They offer no excuses or blame shifting; they simply admit that they are just willful in their stubborn disobedience toward God\u2014willful disobedience. What a scary place to be, when we have hardened our hearts against God so much that we no longer even try to justify our stubbornness. God wants us to stay soft and pliable in our relationship with Him so that He does not have to discipline our lives.<\/p>\n
We see ourselves in the humorous, old story of the village blacksmith, who had a young son who was very strong-willed and always wanted to push the limits. One morning, when the blacksmith was forging new horseshoes, the boy came to take a look at them. \u201cThat\u2019s close enough!\u201d the blacksmith warned his son. \u201cThose are still hot.\u201d After a few minutes, the young boy inched closer to the shoes that were cooling on the steel-topped bench. \u201cSon, those are too hot to handle. Don\u2019t touch them!\u201d the father scolded. Finally when he wasn\u2019t looking, the boy inched up to the finished horseshoes, grabbed one, and then dropped it immediately, shaking his hands about. \u201cSee what happens when you are not satisfied with what I tell you! You got burnt didn\u2019t you?\u201d In quiet stubbornness, the boy replied, \u201cNo sir, it just didn\u2019t take me long to look at them.\u201d<\/p>\n
“LORD, we desire to serve You by being pliable in your hands today.”<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We recognize stubbornness when we see it because we have all been there ourselves. Notice that the people blatantly said, “we will not listen to you!”\u00a0They offer no excuses or blame shifting; they simply admit that they are just willful in their stubborn disobedience toward God\u2014willful disobedience. What a scary place to be, when we […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9552"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9552"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9552\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9554,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9552\/revisions\/9554"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/packinghouseredlands.org\/devotional\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}