I think most of us desire to be loyal to our King. The real struggle is our expectations of what that loyalty will produce. I think many of us, especially in the American church assume loyalty to Christ leads to earthly blessings, or that loyal obedience should result in stability, peace, clarity, or at least fewer problems in this life than disobedience would bring. But what happens when being loyal to Jesus doesn’t improve your circumstances, but complicates them? What about when faithfulness costs you a future you thought was promised? Relationships, security, reputation? How do you process obedience when it leads to grief instead of comfort? Here’s what most of us are unprepared for: Scripture never promises that covenant loyalty will protect us from pain. But it will prepare us to walk through it. Failure to understand this causes us to become disillusioned, resentful, and quietly begin to loosen our grip on loyalty. If we don’t comprehend that tension, we’ll start reading our grief as failure, our sorrow as punishment, and our suffering as some kind of evidence that we’ve stepped outside of God’s will. This morning, we’ll face that lie honestly, to see what God is truly doing when loyalty and obedience to Him hurts, and to hear Scripture’s comfort: Grief isn’t the absence of faith and loyalty, but very often, in the life a follower of Christ, the evidence of it.
