My life is by no means any kind of norm.
Yet, I insist that if God can do certain works in my life, that justifies believing He can do something similar in your life. He may not; I can’t pretend to have Him in some kind of box. That’s what got Israel in trouble, and it’s how churches shut out people who don’t conform to the expectations such churches establish for their members. So don’t follow me, but learn from my experience in that other sense, that it shows you what God can do.
God is able. We seldom give Him room to act. Too much of what He does excludes us because we don’t include His power and prerogatives in our calculus.
When I was in college, I was already convinced that God was offering me a destiny I could not imagine. I had an unshakable sense that His hand was on me, and He was ready to use me if I would be available. I was agreeing to be shaped by His power, even though I wasn’t fully cognizant then of just how radical that would be.
As I look back, I can see a thousand ways where He was in control of things, and I honestly don’t feel like I’ve missed out on much that He has offered. It’s not that I have no regrets, but that a substantial majority of what He wanted for me did happen. I haven’t missed much, because my heart tells me so.
Still, I must confess that it came at a high cost sometimes in terms of things I had to sacrifice and forsake, things that I really thought I wanted. I know now that those things would have made my life far worse. They would have hurt me and hurt people I care about.
God can do something similar for you. I firmly believe that the mix of things He plans for you will not quite match the mix of things in my life over which He exercised His divine sovereignty. There will surely be some overlap, but there are plenty of things wherein my choices didn’t make much difference to Him. Yet there were plenty of things where He expected me to surrender and wait for His hand to provide.
This is my testimony: He will do that with you, if you submit to Him. I’m utterly certain of it.
I’ve been exposed lately to a lot of words from people trying to make the world a better place. That’s all fine and dandy if that’s the best they know, but this world is going to Hell, and their ideas will go with it. Nothing we do outside of God’s sovereign will is going to outlive this fallen realm. When Christ comes back, the only thing mankind has accomplished that will remain is the marks of the Cross.
I’m not interested in making the world a better place. The most useful thing I can do for this world is demonstrate shalom. My words are surely a part of that witness, but the final issue is that I cannot help people in any way except to show them what God has revealed. That doesn’t mean I deny all the human knowledge and wisdom; I deny that any of it matters eternally. I am required by God to distance myself from people who honestly believe that their human pursuits matter.
So I do what I’m convinced my Lord wants me to do. I’m not all that concerned about the outcomes. I’ll live with the natural consequences, but that’s not why I do those things. I do them because I cannot be faithful and do otherwise. So I do what I do and let God handle the rest. It doesn’t matter to me if the common man can make any sense of what I do.
This is my calling, my mission. It ends up that I have little to say to the mass of humanity, because they don’t want divine revelation. The only people who can even grasp what I’m doing are just a few folks here and there who sense a similar calling on their lives. I’m the shepherd to those who can’t find a place in any other flock.
The people who are drawn to my ministry aren’t very conventional either. Whether or not the world would be better if the norm was closer to me is a question that cannot be resolved in this life. I sense that my mission requires me to act like the answer is “no.” But by the same token, I really have nothing to offer folks who aren’t drawn to where I am, way out on the fringe.
