Who’s in charge around here?
Posted by Adam Desmond on March 22, 2010
This Sunday was a great example of what is so cool about CrossLand, or more specifically, how God does things at our church. This happens almost every Sunday, but this week it really shows what God is doing in a powerful way.
What God likes to do is show us, basically, how little we matter, and how important we are.
Read it again.
Our God is a God of paradoxes. I would hate to think about trying to be a Christian without embracing the paradoxical nature of the Christian walk. Many have fallen away from the faith due to the seemingly insurmountable obstacles these paradoxes present (Narrow is the way…). But if you can embrace them, the world literally opens up to you.
So we make plans in our church. We’re very intentional about what we teach and when and how. And we’re always very careful to make sure that those plans are God’s plans and not ours. One way that we can tell that they’re God’s plans is the amazing way that things get linked together. For instance, our Sunday School class is working through the book of James, and Sunday we were talking about how we presume to make plans when we really have no idea what will happen tomorrow, when we are just vapors. How arrogant to think we know what will happen.
And then we got to hear the sermon Buddy preached about the sovereignty of God, and how the gospel of Christ was not given to us by men, but by God, through His chosen servant, Paul. Paul says that he was chosen before birth to be an apostle.
Now think about that one. God chose Paul (or Saul) before he was born, yet allowed him to persecute the church before revealing Himself on the road to Damascus. Many Christians died because of Saul. Surely this wasn’t God’s will.
Yet we are still vapors. We still only see in part. In order to judge whether or not this should have happened, we would have to know more than God.
It is certainly possible that Paul disobeyed God by persecuting Christians, and by doing so merely delayed what God’s plan was for him. But I think it’s also possible that Paul needed to fail, he needed to go down that dark road, so that God could show Paul the light. Maybe those Christians who were persecuted and murdered allowed Saul to become Paul. But the whole point is that we don’t know; only God does. We assume so much. We think we understand, when the reality is that only God truly knows anything, and that which is revealed to us comes from Him.
And God showed us this picture of His sovereignty by tying together the passage in Galatians and the passage in James on this Sunday. These passages were hand picked by God to fit together perfectly in order to illuminate His plan for us. What a wonderful way to show us just how little we can see on our own, and the lengths He goes to provide His children with His wisdom.
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