Be Done

It is not enough to acknowledge God's will; we must act on it. Christianity is not a spectator sport. Being Christian is not a passive undertaking (which may be an oxymoron, but that's okay). As much as it pains me to say it, words are not enough. Not to suggest that words are bad; in fact, words are often necessary, and saying the words, speaking--up, from the heart, our minds (or more importantly, our souls)--is essential to our Christian walk. I am not suggesting silence, though it occasionally can be a good thing. I am asserting that actions, including the act of speaking, are central to our walk with Christ.


Christ admonishes us to act. He tells us that we are to go into the world and do things: we are to help the widows and orphans, we are to shine a light into dark places, we are to render unto Caesar. We are told to do. Too often, I feel, we settle for being instead of doing.


When my high school students study the American Transcendentalists, focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, we talk about the difference between living and existing. Thoreau comments, in Walden, that he wanted to "live deliberately. . and not, when [he]came to die, discover that [he] had not lived." We explore the idea of how a person can die without living, and we usually come to the understanding that the word live must have, at least in Thoreau's mind, more than one meaning--that one may exist (live in the biological sense) without experiencing life (live in the philosophical sense). It seems to me that being Christian can take on the same shades of difference.

We can look at being a Christian as what we are or as what we do. If we choose the former, then being a Christian means nothing more than a title. Of course, my immediate thought as an example is the title teacher. We have all probably experienced classes with someone who has the title of teacher but who is not, actually, a teacher. A teacher teaches; a teacher purposefully engages students in activities that lead (or push) the students toward learning. I hope we have all experienced that teacher, also. As Christians, we have the same choice as the classroom teacher: we can call ourselves Christian or we can do the things that make us Christian.

I am not suggesting that we can actually do anything to save ourselves. Salvation is only possible through the grace, the mercy, and the love of God, through Christ, who died on the cross to redeem us from our sins. The resurrection is the proof of our salvation. Nothing we do, nothing we could possibly do aside from believe and accept, could ever save us. So, I am not saying in any way that what we do leads to salvation. On the contrary, I am saying that our salvation leads to what we do.


If we are truly saved--if we have experienced the heart-change that is salvation through Christ Jesus--then we should probably feel the Holy Spirit moving us toward action. (A friend of mine recently suggested that the Holy Spirit is the forgotten part of the Trinity, that we may embrace the Father and the Son, but that the Spirit is forgotten, possibly because it seems too much like superstition--we, as a culture, tend to view everything supernatural as superstition; but, as Christians, we should recognize that the two ideas are not automatically connected, that there are "more things in heaven and earth. . . than are dreamt of in [our] philosophies.") Finding the Holy Spirit and its message to us should be a crucial part of our walk with Christ. We should open ourselves to the message, and we should act upon it.

None of this is to say that the amount we do or the kinds of things we do ingratiate us with God or that we can in any way do enough to move us closer to God. We should not view the things we do as points or as steps toward the goal of being with God--we should see that being with God is the reason for doing these things. We have to understand the direction of the cause-and-effect relationship: we act because of our relationship with God; our relationship with God is not because of our actions.

As already mentioned, the actions we undertake should be directed by the Holy Spirit; nevertheless, most of us will persevere in thinking about what we should be doing instead of listening to God for directions. It is (probably) part of being human. We will continue to look at the people sitting in church with us, and we will continue to compile mental score cards, listing the things others are doing or have done, identifying the "pew-sitters" and the over-achievers among us. The problem with doing this, aside from the fact that what others do is none of our business, is that we cannot see the big picture, as God can. It is like my students who always want to know the grades others have received on assignments because they need to compare their own performance against the performance of their peers, and they cannot accept that they need to compare it against the standards I have set. We, like my students, need to understand that each one of us is an individual, with individual needs and individual skills. God does not grade on a curve. What someone else has done (or not done) has no impact on what I need to do.

Beyond this, we also have to consider that we cannot, we should not limit our view of actions to the church. We tend to compartmentalize. We see church as the only venue for God and anything having to do with God, so we limit our thinking about possible actions to those things that happen within the confines of the church. We are Christians wherever we may be. We can do things in any environment. God's kingdom, as we have already noted, is all of his creation, so the things we are called to do may have to be done someplace other than the church building. Of course, things still have to be done in the church: classes must be taught, business must be managed, things must be done. However, we cannot limit ourselves to church-related actions because in doing so we are, in effect, trying to limit God.

Being Christian, then, means acting Christian, means doing. We must make ourselves receptive to Holy Spirit, and we must act on the message we receive. To do otherwise would be to deny God in our lives.

Your Will

Will means desire. God's will, then, is God's desire. We are told to do something with God's will, with His desire. What we have to do comes in the next section. First we have to figure out what God's will is.

Some people know exactly what they want, all the time, every time. They go to college and never even think of changing majors. They job hunt like a jungle cat stalking a wildebeest. They propose marriage, buy a house, start a family all with no hint of any internal struggle, no second guessing, no qualms. They even order dinner decisively.

Other people just let things happen, floating along on the whim of whatever current happens to catch them. They drift into and out of college programs, they happen upon jobs, they bounce from relationship to relationship. Often, they take whatever they are given because that is what is there and that is what is easiest.

Then there are those of us in the middle. We do not always take whatever life offers, but we often hesitate or vacillate when making a decision. Our choices and conclusions come after a struggle. We take control, but we are not always confident in our course, and we sometimes doubt our own choices. I changed majors a couple of times. I had a long succession of part-time jobs before I became a teacher, and I became a teacher in an almost backwards kind of way, getting my master's degree in English before going back to get a teaching certificate. Perhaps most telling, I have been known to drive aimlessly around town looking for some inspiration about where to eat.

To oversimplify this, there are three kinds of people: those who know exactly what they want, those who take whatever they are handed, and those who question every choice they face. The question, then, is how do these groups handle the concept of God's will. Does one group have an advantage over the others? Does one group better know the nature of God's will or how to respond to it?

The people who know exactly what they want might seem to have some sort of edge here because they are decisive; however, they have a huge stumbling block: they know exactly what they want. To respond to God's will requires that we look past our own desires and our own perceptions. We have to put aside our wants and needs to open ourselves to the possibilities God presents. God's will must supersede our own, and for people driven to stay on their own track, this might be difficult.

The people who take whatever they are handed face a different kind of challenge: they have no filter for judging whatever comes into their lives, so they do not differentiate between God's will, their own will, or the will of something outside themselves, whether that be society's will, Satan's will, or the fortune from a cookie at a Chinese restaurant. Someone might suggest that God's will, since it is from God and God is omnipotent, would always come first and so be the choice of members of this group. But God does not work that way; if He did, there would be no point to free will, a concept we will tackle a bit later. God's will requires us to acknowledge and accept it, and that requires that we actively choose.

The final group, those of us who question, might probably be the largest group of the three. These folks try to figure out the best possible alternative in any given situation. These folks have elements of both of the other groups: there is an element of making the decision based on our own agenda, much like the first group, and there is an element of taking the easiest path, like the second group. However, this third group is a bit closer to the correct approach than the other two simply because there is some element, however small, of attempting to discern the correct choice.

This idea of discerning a correct choice gets back to the idea of free will, the idea that God allows us the opportunity to make our own choices. We can see from the whole Tree in the Garden story that having free will and using it successfully are different. God allows us to make choices, but that does not mean that all choices are equally acceptable. Our challenge, then, is to align our free will with God's will. The question remains, though, of how. What is the key to discerning God's will?

Unfortunately, there is no magical method of discovering God's will. Though it is always there, it is up to us to find it. That means we have to do something: we have to work in order to access the interface with God (and find His will). We probably all have some idea of how this might work: prayer and reading the Bible. Our communications with God usually take these two forms: we pray, each in our own way, each prayer its own particular message; and we read God's Word, searching for God's message to us.

Prayer and Bible-reading are necessary to the process, but they are not the only elements. Both of these actions can be very self-centered activities: we control what goes into the prayer and we may choose what we read in the text (and how we interpret what we read). In order to achieve the revelation of God's will, we often need to do a thing that many of us find very difficult: we need to be still. In order to hear God's will, we have to listen, we have to open ourselves to His voice, and that requires that we stop, that we focus our attention on Him. Too often--and here I am referring to my own experience since I cannot speak for anyone else, but I sense that others may have the same or similar experience--we throw a prayer in the general direction of God and, possibly, look at a couple of familiar sections of the Bible and expect that we will be guided toward the correct choice. We have to slow down. Things do not happen according to our schedules. We are not in charge.

God's will should be the controlling force in our lives, but for that to happen, we have to give up our own misguided attempts at control, and we have to listen to God's voice. Before we can do anything, we have to know, and in order to know, we have to find. The search for God's will is our daily task, and we have to be prepared to accomplish that.