7 Submit yourselves therefore to God. Resist the devil, and he will flee from you. 8 Draw near to God, and he will draw near to you. Cleanse your hands, you sinners, and purify your hearts, you double-minded.
13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”— 14 yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. 15 Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” 16 As it is, you boast in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil. 17 So whoever knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, for him it is sin.
Psalm 37:4-5
4 Delight yourself in the Lord, and he will give you the desires of your heart. 5 Commit your way to the Lord; trust in him, and he will act.
I've been chewing over James 4:13-14 & 17 in my mind for a couple days now. In children Sunday Schools or youth groups, this passage is usually tied with making money or getting rich. The message is so much deeper than that.
I've been writing letters to some friends I have who are graduating from high school and trying to figure out what advice or wisdom I should give them that I didn't have when I graduated from high school. Looking back, I've realized that I was viewing my future as a compromise between me and God. I wanted to major in Elementary Education so I could be a light to kids in public schools. Don't get me wrong, there are definitely people who are called to do that and it is not an easy calling, but the problem was with my mindset. "Today or tomorrow I will go and become a teacher for awhile and after I've worked enough I'll get married, have children and be a stay-at-home mom" (again, nothing wrong with that if that is your calling). Notice how I critiqued James 4:13 for myself. My motives were pure and admired by lots of people. I love children and legitimately wanted to help them. It was going to be my ministry. I was sure God understood that and would bless it. This is the double-mindedness James 4:8 above is referring to.
This is the interesting part, I hadn't picked my major initially for the purpose of ministry. It was a degree, it was a guaranteed profession, a job I knew I would enjoy, and I'd get summers off to travel and teach English or something, very me oriented things. Around this time was when Brandon Heath's "Give Me Your Eyes" was popular and I seriously considered the message of the song:
"Give me Your eyes for just one second.
Give me Your eyes so I can see everything I keep on missing.
Give me Your love for humanity.
Give me Your arms for the brokenhearted, the ones that are far beyond my reach.
Give me your eyes for the ones forgotten.
Give me Your eyes so I can see."
It wasn't until I started thinking of it as a ministry that my heart began to change. I prayed and asked God to give me His eyes and to show me how He felt about those around me. When I began to see with His eyes and reached out to those around me, I realized a school was not my ministry. This was about the time I took my first linguistics class.
This was a period of intense growth in my spiritual walk. I was mourning a failed relationship and hurting when I came across Psalm 37. The whole chapter is about trusting God, delighting in His character, and giving Him everything. I began to draw near to Him and find healing in the character of God and committing myself to Him. Yes, I had already been saved, but "committing your way to the Lord" is a daily act. When we commit our way to Him daily and delight in His character He fulfills our desires because He gives us those desires. I desired to serve Him no matter what that looked like. I discovered that God was calling me to something far greater than what I had thought He would bless. He was calling me to a life of service and sacrifice for His glory.
If the Lord wills, I will finish my application with Wycliffe and leave for the field in about a year. I will serve Him as much as I can wherever I am until then. My life has been radically changed. I never thought I would do missions. I never imagined how God would change me over the last four years. I never imagined how much He would shape my desires to His desires. I never imagined how simultaneously difficult and wonderful it would be. I trusted Him, and He acted. In my life and in the lives of the people He's helped me see.
I encourage you, brothers and sisters, to pray for God's eyes. I encourage you to delight yourself in Him and trust Him. Know what your true calling is and do it.
He just might radically change you.
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