The rebels are the good guys, right? Hey, guys, it’s me again, Douglas. And today I want to talk to you guys about rebellion. Cuz I feel like rebellion is kind of confusing. Cuz I think that the world in general, we kind of celebrate rebels. We celebrate rebellion. You know, I am from the United States and here in the US, we celebrate independent state. We celebrate the 4th of July and we have fireworks and we have barbecues and it’s a great, wonderful day where we celebrate our rebellion against the king of England. And we went from being colonies to being our own country. And we, you know, we celebrate that with fireworks and stuff and in the media, you know, in movies and TV shows and stuff online, you know, we’re always like celebrating the rebels, right? There are a bunch of movies that I can think of where the rebels are the good guys and they’re fighting against the evil bad guy, Emperor, King, whatever. And I don’t want to say that rebellion is always bad, but I do think that it is usually, you know, we see good guys at the rebels a lot, but it’s really not that common that rebellion is a good thing.
To rebel is just to not do what you’re told. To rebel means to go against those who are in charge. Now, there are times to follow the rules and there are times to break them, but you’re almost always supposed to follow. So how can we tell when it’s wrong to do what we’re told and when can we tell when it’s right to do what we’re told? When can we tell when it’s wrong to rebel? And when can we tell when it’s right to rebel?
Well, personally, I think that if someone in charge tells you to do something and you think to yourself, I don’t think I’m gonna do that, we need to ask ourselves a few questions. For one, we need to ask ourselves, like, why do I not want to do that thing? Why do I want to rebel? And that’s a hard question. It’s a simple question, you know, just why do I wanna rebel? But it’s really hard for us to be, you know, really real with ourselves. Cuz I know for me and I think this is true for everybody, it’s easy to justify my own actions or my own feelings. Like the truth could be that I don’t want to do something just cuz I don’t want to do it, right? I don’t wanna do it because I don’t like it. You know, like forgiving people, that’s something that I should do. I don’t like doing it, but it’s right. We need to be really careful and very carefully consider why we want to rebel or why we don’t want to do what we’re told. Cuz sometimes just sitting down and looking at our own motives can show us that we’re being kind of selfish. Sometimes it’s important and sometimes it’s not.
Another question that we should ask is who, like, who is it that we’re rebelling against? Cuz the truth is that people aren’t perfect. There are times, again, this is super rare, really not likely to happen, but there are times where you need to not obey your parents. There are times where maybe you would need to rebel against the government or against your teachers or just anybody who is in charge of you. There might be a time where you need to do that, but there is literally never, ever a time where we should rebel against god.
Honestly, rebellion against god is pretty much the definition of sin. To sin is to rebel against God. God tells us to do something, we say no. That’s rebellion. It’s never okay to do what God says you should not do. And another thing is that it’s never, ever okay to, you know, selfishly use God as an excuse to rebel against someone else or even rebel against god. Like there are some people who do things that is in defiance of God, but they’ll like use God as an excuse for why they do it, you know, they’ll say things like, well, what I wanna do, this thing that I wanna do is a part of me. You know, God made me and I love to steal and God loves me, so it’s okay for me to steal. No, that doesn’t work at all. That is it. That is a terrible thing. So we need to ask who we are rebelling against. And if you’re like, well, I would be rebelling against so and so, you need to ask yourself, would I also be rebelling against God?
Cuz God says listen to the government. God says listen to your teachers. God says listen to your parents. So anytime we rebel ever, we need to be very careful about it. And, you know, the sad truth is that the times where we need to rebel the most, I think, are the times that we rebel the least. The people we need to rebel against are against what I would call the world or the crowd. We hardly ever rebel against the crowd. Like if everybody’s doing something, we hardly ever say, oh, I’m not gonna do that thing. Everybody’s doing it, but I’m not gonna do it. We hardly ever do that. And that’s the time where rebellion is most often necessary. You have a whole bunch of people who are doing the same thing, and it’s a bad thing. And we look at everybody else around us and we say, I’m just gonna go with that. And we don’t rebel when we should. So we shouldn’t just ask, why do I want to rebel and who would I be rebelling against, you know, when we want to rebel? But we should really be asking ourselves these questions pretty much anytime we do anything. Asking, why do I wanna do this thing, whatever the thing is, and would this be rebelling against God? And if you’re. Why is a selfish reason, don’t do it. And if you’re rebelling against God, don’t do it. But if you find yourself in a situation where it’s necessary to rebel, we also really need to ask how.
Because the way that you rebel really matters. You know, on the fourth of July in 1776, the newly formed government of what would be the United States of America officially declared independence from England. America rebelled. And the declaration of independence, it has a whole long list of reasons. You know, I’ve been told several of the reasons and I honestly did not fully understand. And even reading the declaration of independence, I don’t fully understand all the reasons. But from reading it, it really seems like, yeah, it was necessary. You know, it wasn’t just like people being like, oh, we hate the government, but like it was people who were already in the government saying to the king of England, like, all you do is take our money and make it difficult for us to govern. We need to leave. And that rebellion led to war. And sometimes rebellion leads to fighting, but it doesn’t always have to. You know, there are some examples in the Bible of people who rebelled against the people who were in charge of them. And it was fighting. It was like a war. But there are other times where people rebelled and they did it in a very peaceful way. And I feel like as Christians, that’s what we’re called to in just about every situation.
You know, in the story of like Shadrach, Mishek and Ben to go the king, he made the statue of himself and he said, everybody needs to bow down. And anyone who doesn’t bow down and worship the statue is gonna be thrown in the fiery furnace. And in that story, Shadra, Mishak and Abednego weren’t like, well, this is it, boys, and then pull out their swords and start fighting everybody. No, they just said, king, we can’t do that. And that’s a rebellion, big time. And man, 100%, their why, their who and their how were all totally right. Why did they rebel? Because it’s against God’s law to worship anyone but God. Who did they rebel against? He was against their king, who they’re supposed to follow and did follow, except for this one thing where loyalty to him would have been rebellion against God. And they’re not gonna rebel against God. And the way they rebelled was simply to say, we can’t do this even if you have to throw us in the fiery furnace and even if God doesn’t save us, we’re not gonna do it. That was definitely the right way to rebel.
And so my challenge you guys today is that, you know, even though we see rebellion almost always in a positive light, we need to be really careful about rebellion. Anytime you’re thinking, I’m not gonna do that thing that this person in charge me told me to do, I’m gonna rebel. You really need to ask yourself why you want to do this thing or not do this thing. Who would you be rebelling against? Is it against people or is it against God or both? And if you’re gonna rebel, how can you rebel in a way that most honors gun? Like I said, it is super rare, but there are times where rebellion is necessary. And if it ever is, we need to be sure that we’re doing it for the right reasons and we’re doing it in the right way.