Free to Choose Boldly
With our 2008 Commencement less than three weeks away, I am keenly aware of the excitement and nervousness that grip our graduating seniors (and their parents!). Covenant has provided the context for mind-stretching, relationship-building, discipline-creating, gospel-orienting study and life. Now it's time to move into the next stage of God's providential calling. Many of them have long-term plans in place for jobs, graduate schools, missions, weddings – clear next steps in pursuit of God's specific callings. But some are unsure about exactly what they should be doing and where they should be doing it. And they continue to think and pray and inquire, finding work and homes "for now" as they look ahead.
This is a time when many graduating seniors would love to hear that voice from heaven announcing the future and giving out work assignments! Stories of such clarity, as worthy and wonderful as they are, often lead the rest of us – the vast majority of us – to a kind of discouragement about our own futures. In the absence of God's voice, how do we know what to do? How do we find the right path? How do we avoid missing God's purpose for our lives?
Mark Dever, senior pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, DC, wrote recently about "the bondage of 'guidance,'" the desire for a subjective sense of leading which "is too often, in contemporary piety, binding our brothers and sisters in Christ, paralyzing them from enjoying the good choices that God may provide, and causing them to wait wrongly before acting."
This past week I spoke with a Covenant student who is deeply troubled by the lack of a sense of God's leading and a specific path. He seems to be paralyzed in just the way that Dever describes, in bondage to the expectation that God simply must provide the blueprint of his future before he can take the next step.
Dever comments on his own sense of God's calling to ministry on Capitol Hill: "I realized then (and now) that I could be wrong about that supposition."
I was free in 1993 to stay in England, or teach at a seminary, either of which would have been delightful opportunities. I understand that I was free to make these choices. But I chose, consulting Scripture, friends, wisdom, and my own subjective sense of the Lord's will, to come to DC. And even if I were wrong about that, I had (and have) that freedom in Christ to act in a way that is not sin. And I understand my pastoring here not to be sin. So I am free. Regardless of the sense of leading I had.
I encouraged this student to define his options, to consider his own desires and capabilities, to weigh pros and cons, to get the counsel of wise folks who care about him, to faithfully and prayerfully assess the options in light of Scripture in order to detect disobedience in any of them – and then to choose! I earnestly believe that, as long as the path is not sinful, God will be delighted to bless him as this first step leads to others and this one very partial view leads to further vistas.
My father felt, deeply and continually during his high school years, that God was calling him to pastoral ministry, and he never wavered through college and seminary and almost sixty years of ministry life. And yet I am convinced that he could have followed a very different path, putting his considerable gifts and energies to work in business or education to the glory of God. Of course, looking back, we can be sure that God was directing his steps; his life's work was just as God intended. But from the front side, it was a combination of his sense of call with the encouragement of family and friends, his marriage to my mother, and decisions about college and jobs – for each of which he did NOT have clear spiritual guidance but rather made choices based on what seemed at the time to be the best way forward.
Three years ago, our oldest son graduated with a degree in English and a heart for the church, but without a firm path to follow. So he took a job in a small investment management company providing customer support and financial analysis, and he also entered a ministry internship program at a wonderful church in the Hyde Park area of Chicago. As the months passed, the opportunity to go to seminary opened up, still in the Chicago area so that he could continue his internship, and he is now completing the second year of his Master of Divinity program and moving into a near-full-time role at the church as the pastoral intern for the church's third congregation on the near west side of Chicago.
My wife would tell a similar story about God's unfolding plan after college graduation: a period of odd jobs (working at a day care center, teaching private piano lessons, temp office work) and hopeful expectation as I did my graduate work at Vanderbilt, and then to her delight the opportunity to pursue graduate studies herself.
My own experience supports the point as well. While I was "sure" that I wanted to teach philosophy and headed straight into graduate school, the years have demonstrated that the path of God's providence is often – always? – very different from what we planned and could have ever known.
So how did I decide to move from college teaching to business to pastoral ministry to the presidency at Covenant? It was, as Dever says, the wonderful combination of providential timing, wise counsel, fervent prayer, examination of Scripture, and the sense of God's releasing purpose. Each opportunity seemed to gather up a variety of factors that made the move make sense to us.
We are free to walk forward boldly. God has given us minds and talents and desires; he commands us to live obediently according to the Scriptures no matter what our circumstance; he brings us friends and mentors; and he puts before us opportunities and pathways. As long as the path is not sinful, we can feel free to make the very best decision we know how to make, trusting that God is directing our steps and will lead us into his blessing.
Published on 14 Apr 2008 at 3:18 pm.
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