For I have laid upon you the years of their iniquity, according to the number of the days, 390 days [representing 390 years]; so you shall bear the iniquity of the house of Israel. – Ezekiel 4:5, Amplified Bible (AMP)

Our service to God is not guaranteed to be joyful, rewarding, or pleasant. Many times it is. Many other times, it isn’t.

Imagine for a moment that God called you to a mission field, and in that mission field this was the method by which you were to deliver His message of repentance:

• Shut yourself up in your house
• Draw a picture of the city (or town or village) you live in on a piece of flooring tile and set it on the floor
• Place a toy army – complete with camps, battering rams, and a seige wall – around the tile so that it looks like the army is laying siege to the tile
• Take a big plate of iron and set it up between you and the tile
• Being bound with ropes, lay down on your left side for 390 days in a row and stare at the iron plate
• After the 390 days is up, turn over onto your right side and stare at the iron plate for another 40 days
• Prepare and eat the same meal – barley cakes and water –  every day at the same time
• Go outside your house every day for the next 430 days so you can cook your barley cakes in the sight of the people, using cow’s dung, rather than wood, as the fuel for your cooking fire

After engaging in the preceding message for one year, two months, and five days, what would be your answer be to the question, “Are you having fun yet?”

Ezekiel had the task of proclaiming God’s message in the form of an object lesson, and the object lesson he portrayed was one of great sorrow and pain to come. In order to portray the message with the proper gravity, he had to endure some vestige of that pain and sorrow himself. By living like he did for 430 days, and by the people around him seeing how he lived, Ezekiel’s message carried more weight than it would have had he only verbally proclaimed the warnings of God.

Sometimes God calls us to deliver a message, but He doesn’t stop with just the command to “go and tell.” Sometimes, He brings circumstances into our lives that, after we’ve lived through them, will give our message more weight. The circumstances we live through will make our lives an object lesson for others to learn from, and because of our experiences, others will take greater heed to God’s message through us.

Unfortunately, taking “heed” doesn’t always equate to “obeying.” God may make us an object lesson, and by doing so He may grant extra weight to the message we’ve been tasked with. But, we may be greeted with the same response Ezekiel was greeted with after he became an object lesson: total rebellion. No matter what we have to go through to become the messenger God wants us to be, there is no guarantee that the message will be accepted, or even respected, by other people. It may, instead, bring upon us derision and persecution. None of that matters, however, because our reward for obeying God is not found in the accolades of men. Our reward is found in the words, “Well done, though good and faithful servant,” coming from the lips of God, and those words will come from His lips only when we willingly do what we are told to do, whether other people like it or not.

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