what’s your business?

An idea gleaned from Rich Dad, Poor Dad: what’s your business?  Not where do you work – you may have a regular 9-5 working for someone else – but what’s your business?  Let’s apply that to spiritual life.

Q. What does God do all day (for all eternity)?

A. He works.

So what am I doing with my days?  Jesus at 12 years old asked, “didn’t you know I must be about my father’s business?” (Luke 2:49)  I should be working, just like Jesus, at the Father’s business.  His business should be my business.

What’s God’s business?  It’s His creation, including the lives of every person.  He made it all, owns it all, and loves it all.  Sure there are times we tick Him off, but that’s true of every artist and his artwork, every mother and her child.

What does He do in and for us?  He guides us into maturity.  He trains and equips us.  He gives us work to accomplish (“feed my sheep”).  We can do these things too: we can lead others into maturity (as Paul did), we can train and equip others, we can give others work to accomplish (see James).  In this way we become stakeholders in the kingdom, each of us putting our blood, sweat and tears as an investment into eternal things.

division is not of God

I admire my wife’s gifts and passions, all the more because they’re so different than my own. One of her passions is unity. Any whiff of division makes her spirit uneasy.

1Co 12:25 And so there is no division in the body, but all its different parts have the same concern for one another.

Work to preserve the peace. Forgive hurts that have caused division.

Eph 4:2-6 Be always humble, gentle, and patient. Show your love by being tolerant with one another. Do your best to preserve the unity which the Spirit gives by means of the peace that binds you together. There is one body and one Spirit, just as there is one hope to which God has called you. There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism; there is one God and Father of all people, who is Lord of all, works through all, and is in all.

Keep a lookout. Our enemy uses division to make us weak. He knows how strong we are when we’re united.

focus

Peter walked on water. A normal, loud-mouthed, cowardly, typical man, walked on water. Until he took his eyes off Jesus.

I’ve been trying to figure out what that means for my daily life. My prayers have lately been all about me: How can I serve you best? Where do you want me to go? Even though my intentions are good, God’s answer is, “forget yourself for a minute, and tell me you love me. Worship me because I’m worthy.” And as soon as I stop praying about myself and fretting about all the areas of life I’m not succeeding in and just tell him how much he means to me, my spirit frees up. Suddenly he gives me ideas and energy to do what he wants.

A wise friend said life is really simple. We just make it complicated when we start looking at ourselves. When we look at Jesus, everything works and life is simple. We can walk on water, but only if we focus on him.

priorities

What has priority in your life? I have a friend who I’d like to know better, but I can’t seem to connect with him. It seems he has other priorities… my wife thinks one of them is “status.” I guess since I don’t have much of that, he doesn’t see the need to spend much time with me. If it’s just a personality thing, I can handle that. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea. But if there’s an issue with status… this story popped out at me today: Olympic gold medalist Tim Montgomery sentenced to jail.

Notice his statement:

“I’ve had everything I ever wanted in life. I’ve stood on the top of the mountain,” Montgomery told the court. But now, “the gold medal, all those people cheering, that was part of another world. … In jail, my status is gone.”

It reminds me of Ecclesiastes. Pursuing anything other than God and his will is vanity. The fastest man in the world becomes just another inmate.

I see some irony in that my only motive in trying to befriend this guy is to build into his life, to help him consider where his priorities should be. Not by preaching at him, and not by criticizing him. Just by spending time with him.

Not that I have everything figured out – of course I’m learning too.

free destiny

I’ve been pondering the concepts of free will vs. predestination for a while now.

Scripture talks about a person’s choice in several places. Remember the king who was told by a prophet to strike the ground with some arrows (a symbolic act like a battle cry)? He struck the ground three times, at which the prophet said “why only three times? If you had struck the ground five or six times God would have given you total victory. Now you’ll only see partial victory.” So God wanted to do something through this king, but his acts affected his destiny.

Flipside: Romans 8:29 says God chose (predestined) certain people to become believers. The Greek word means “to limit in advance.” So before I made any choices about right and wrong, heaven and hell, my way or his way, God chose me to be a believer. How? Why did he decide this? Ephesians 1:5 says “according to the pleasure of his will.” In other words, because he wanted to.

Reminds me of my two year old asking “but why?” over and over, my last answer being “because I’m your Papa.” What I mean but can’t communicate to her yet is that I have only good and kind intentions, and her best interest at heart, and even though she may not understand my will she needs to trust me.

So what’s the trick to retaining your free will (God didn’t create robots) but staying on the path he desires for you? Obviously to choose his way. But how do you know which way is his way?

See my last post.

direction without knowledge

Have you ever had to make a decision that affected not only the direction of your life, but of others’ lives as well? Did you have as much information as you needed to make that decision? Did you have to guess, or take a leap of faith?

I want more than anything to please God, to do what he wants me to do, what he made me to do. So why doesn’t he give me explicit directions? Why does he ask me to make decisions in the dark? Wouldn’t it be a lot easier and less error prone if he just spoke from heaven, “On June 23rd, I want you to go here and do this”?

I’m coming to think he wants me to grow to the point where I can operate outside of rational processes. He breathed the breath of life into my spirit for a reason. Yes, I have a mind, and yes, it is a powerful, useful thing. I’m thankful for the gift of intellect, and it’s not my intention to bash it. But… God’s thoughts are so much higher that my meager attempts to rationalize and plan and foresee must look pretty silly to him. I think this is one reason he lights our spirits on fire, so that we can understand him (and therefore work with him and communicate with him) on a plane higher than human reason.

So the challenge now is to be sensitive to the little spiritual clues lying about: an odd thing an acquaintance said recently, old prophecies spoken over my life long ago, a dream a friend had about me, a confluence of “circumstances” that tend to point … where?

Lord, give me wisdom to understand your design for my life, especially when I can’t see the forest for the trees. And give me the faith to step out and make tough decisions even when I don’t know what will happen and can’t explain it to others.