I don't often feel like God "calls" me specifically to do things. I think that's a semantics thing we like to do. The way I see it there's not that many times where there's a specific path that undoubtedly needs to be chosen, that we need to figure out by praying really hard. God is powerful and sees all things. He knows what my decisions will result in, He knows what He's doing. He's not going to throw up His hands and yell at me for ruining His plan if I don't find the one right answer in every decision in my life. I couldn't mess up His plans if I tried. He's already won, as we always say.
Often I feel God's direction to be something at a higher level. Higher in the sense that it's a direction or an idea that maybe I should test out or think about. Perhaps God will guide me ("call me") to think about why I feel and think the way I do about certain people, what's underneath that's causing that? Maybe God even would "call me" to work with youth, or to invest some time and effort into ___ area of my life. Try a new thing out. Hang out with new people. Maybe even a specific person. Praying about a certain topic. Often it is much less specific as it is a general direction.
Recently this whole 'sharing the gospel' thing has been on my mind a lot. Making disciples. I say it with a tone of sarcasm because my mind immediately goes to this check-list mentality where I feel like I need to simply tell more people more often that Jesus died for their sins.
I've even gone as far as to say that I felt God was "calling me" to do that more. I was getting all prepped up and ready to throw some ultimatums at some lifelong friends of mine who aren't Christians.
A wall was thrown up in front of me, thankfully. God basically took a second to humble me so that I'd realize it's not me telling people that Jesus died for their sins that allows people to have genuine relationship with Him. He needs to do that, and He's much better at it too.
Jesus talks about people being saved in the bible as a "harvest". What I was pointed to however, was that seeds need to be planted in the first place for there to be a harvest at all. Jesus talks about that too.
Sometimes God will create an opportunity for us to talk to someone who needs to hear about Jesus, and for us to tell them that He died for their sins, is alive today, and wants to save and love them. But most of the time it seems to me seeds are just needing to be planted. A lot of them are falling on paths, being choked out by weeds, etc.
My instinct when I felt that God was guiding me to something was to formulate it into a job description and try to just do it. Complete it. It seems to me though that God doesn't always give us the pleasure of a complete job description. He wants us to trust that He's got it under control and He'll direct us where we need be.
The more I dwell on that the more I take peace in not knowing things. The grey areas of life. I think there's a ton of value to always be seeking what God's will is for your life, to being open to things that you don't always feel like are the right way. But even though I think there's value in always praying and seeking guidance, there's extreme peace and value in starting to take some steps despite not having the full picture yet.
I don't really understand this whole process of seeking God's guidance yet. I just know that it's not waiting for God to give you a full and complete outline on things. We don't need to know all that. It involves being open to direction by recognizing that if we were always in the driver's seat we would crash and burn pretty quickly. And it also means trusting that God's actually the one driving sometimes even though you're the one with your hands on the wheel and feet on the pedals.
I think one of my main beefs with trying to always identify what God is "calling" us to do, is this idea that we're always 100% conscious of it. Sometimes God is doing stuff in us that we never even knew was happening. We didn't have to pray a single second about it and look at that He's already done it.
I think I underestimate what it really means to be saved. What it means to be born again. To have the Holy Spirit within me. The Spirit isn't in me and working through me only in times when I ask Him what He's doing and then try to help Him. That can screws things up a lot. Sometimes all I need to do is shut up. That's harder than it seems, apparently. I'd much rather have a job description sent to my prayer GMail inbox, than I would trust that even though I don't know what's going on, that God's still got this.
No comments:
Post a Comment