Hi Friends! At long last, I am officially back. I did end up taking an extra two weeks because I didn’t accomplish what I thought I would by the of my originally slated end, mainly getting a little bit ahead. However, it was a good and helpful time and coming back later actually lines up well with what God taught me (or rather reminded me) while I was taking a bit of a break.
Both times I’ve taken Sabbaticals, I’ve been reminded of the awkward tension that ultimately, everything is caused by God, but he also calls us to partner with him. I often get off kilter on that, thinking that things depend on me. This tension between God’s grace and our effort is one of the many paradoxes of the Christian life. I want to focus on a few of these awkward paradoxes the rest of July. I’ll start with this weird one where God is working and we’re working, but mostly God is working.
This paradox affects every aspect of our lives. This week’s post will look at the tension in more general terms. Next week’s post will focus on three places we can really see it at work: 1) in our relationship with God 2) in our relationships with others and 3) in our work and calling. First, what’s the issue here?
God Is in Control
How much we do and how much God does in this world is a really confusing conundrum. On the one hand, we know that God is ultimately in control of everything. Nothing happens without him causing (or allowing, there’s some debate here theologically) it to happen. We never do anything on our own, it is always God at work in our lives.
This is hammered home over and over again in the Bible. Ephesians 2, the book of Romans, pretty much every story in the Old Testament shows that God is at work, often despite our best efforts. We think we’ve messed up (think Joseph’s brothers selling him into slavery as one big example), and then it turns out that God used that thing in an amazing way. We were trying to do one thing (think Balaam trying to curse Israel) and God does the exact opposite and makes it fit perfectly within his plan.
We Are Still Responsible for Trying
However, that doesn’t mean that we just get to sit on the couch, eat a bag of chips, and wait for God to do stuff for us. He expects us to participate. In fact, he even tells us that’s it’s imperative that we participate. He tells us in Matthew 25 using two different stories (The parable of the talents and the parable of the sheep and the goats), that we are to use whatever God’s given us for Him. We can’t just hide or bag of gold or ignore the people around us. We are called to invest our talents and be on the lookout for ways that we can be God’s hands and feet on earth.
What Does This Tension Mean?
So how are we to view our role in the world? We do what we find in front of us to do. We can’t ignore the talents or opportunities we’ve been given. We should even seek out new ways to use our talents and help others. However, at the same time, we have to hold our plans, dreams, and schemes lightly. We recognize that ultimately success or failure is not based on our own efforts but by God’s will.
Grace means getting what we don’t deserve. That goes both ways. That means that despite our worst mistakes and biggest mess ups, God can still give us success and good things. The opposite is also true though. Despite our best efforts, we might not succeed at we put our hand to. We have to be okay with both aspects of God’s grace, taking the bad and the good.
Maybe the hardest part of this is that we also have to accept the grace of God in the lives of other people. We can’t get bitter when other people get what they “don’t deserve” (even if they really don’t deserve it). Nor can we put ourselves on a pedestal and pat ourselves on the back for all the good things we’ve accomplished. Instead, we have to acknowledge that all things, good or bad, given to us or to others, play into this balance of grace and our own efforts.
Again, this awkward tension impacts every area of our lives, and next week we’ll look at three specific places.
Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash
[…] My blog post last week focused on the tension between God’s role and our role in our lives. Ultimately, God is in control of all things. However, we are still responsible for taking action in our own lives. This can be kind of messy to think about, but it can also take the pressure off of us. To demonstrate how this works, I’d like to look at three different areas in our lives where this tension often manifests: our relationship with God, our relationships with people, and our work. […]
[…] There are multiple ways in which God calls us to hold two seemingly competing things in tension. We started this series looking at the tension between God’s power and our responsibility. Last week, we looked at three […]