Sermonette: Hunting Dogs

I love dogs. Someone doesn’t have to spend much time around me to realize that not only am I a dog person as opposed to a cat person, but I simply enjoy being around dogs. I’ve appreciated just about every dog I’ve ever met. I prefer big, furry hunting dogs, but little dogs are amusing to me also. A few years ago, I had a 50 lb coonhound/terrier cross named Ed. He looked quite a bit like a skinny Labrador retriever, but relates to people completely differently. I found this out when I was training him as a puppy.

See, Ed proved to be difficult to train because while he looks like a stupidly-faithful Lab, he isn’t. Labrador retrievers live and die to earn their master’s approval. You can break the spirit of a good, hunting Lab with a look or by withholding the all-important “good boy.” Ed, on the other hand, doesn’t die for my approval. Because of his coonhound father he has his own agenda which doesn’t include a passionate drive to make me happy and earn my approval. For him, fetch is about the pursuit of the ball, not returning it to me and getting the pat on the head.

Now, as I thought about this difficulty in our relationship, I came to a starting realization. When hunters talk about "good" or "bad" hunting dogs, or "smart" versus "dumb" hunting dogs, they aren’t talking about brain power – no, they’re talking about obedience and a desire to obey. An intelligent dog wouldn’t jump into freezing water to fetch a duck, only to immediately give it away. No, only a very obedient dog would do that. These are the desirable dogs – dogs that completely put themselves aside to please their master. Ed isn’t this way. Coonhounds have been bred to work largely without humans. They need to think, make decisions and outsmart their prey with little or no human interaction or help. Because of this, we had to work out new training methods with quite a bit of frustration.

It was during one of our regularly frustrating training sessions that the other side of my realization hit me: is this how I am with God? Am I a Lab who faithfully follows everything Jesus tells me to do? Am I willing to put my life on the line to please my master? Or am I a lot more like Ed than I want to admit? Honestly, I believe that I’m a lot like my dog that so often frustrated me. I doubt God’s commands. When I feel the Spirit leading me, I question, I wonder, and I say to myself “is this what you really want?” I read and I preach things from the Bible and I have to fight my nature, because my nature tells me to soften his commands. My nature is to make the words and truths of Jesus easier to swallow. Even when I do good things, more often than not I do it because I seek the joy I get from it, not the pleasure it gives God.

While the world may call a questioning soul a good thing, in hunting dogs and God followers, it’s not very helpful. When we choose to follow Jesus, we are supposed to drop everything and follow him, including our fierce independence. We should pursue Jesus without doubt and without a second thought – not unlike an approval-driven Lab. When our master asks us to do difficult, seemingly impossible things, we shouldn’t doubt or think, we should run as fast as we can and jump as far as possible out into the frozen water, trusting that our master knows what’s best.