The System of Your Life
You’re Responsible
One person said, “Your system is perfectly designed to yield the result you are getting.”
Words like that can sting–rightly so, I suppose.
Life hits the fan, no doubt. But God makes us responsible moral agents in all of it. Christian, you’re never in a situation where obedience to God isn’t an option.1
There’s profound wisdom in Dumbledore’s words, “It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”
Don’t Double Down
The wrong response to these ideas is to double down in your personal will… to resolve more deeply and work more diligently. You may need to resolve and do, but I’m convinced there’s more to the picture.
Choose Dependence
God’s system is perfectly designed to instigate your dependence. God wove the fabric of the world with the wisdom of both Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. God ordained the circumstances of your life–from location to family to trials to health.2
Our responsible moral agency still finds friction with the futility and volatility of the world and the reality of death.
What if God designed your life so that you would learn to pray?
Maybe I can make the logic more clear.
God calls you to be a responsible moral agent in His carefully ordered world.
God is taking you and the world toward His desired end (His glory).
Your responsibility/agency and God’s sovereignty do not contradict or allow for either to be denied. You need to make choices, obey, and work while God is in total control.
If you go out into the world and decide to do your own thing–it will lead to brokenness and pain that God intends to instigate prayer of repentance while there is still time. Ultimately, self-will leads to condemnation.
If you go out into the world and decide to do God’s thing in your own strength–it will lead to frustration, discouragement, and pain that God intends to instigate prayers of dependence while the Lord tarries. In time, the Spirit will sanctify you toward dependence if you are Christ’s.
If you go out into the world and prayerfully do God’s thing– it will still be very hard, but you will enjoy the fellowship with God that Christ won for you and glorying in Him as He intended.
God’s system is perfectly designed that you would pray!
Will you make that choice today?
1 Corinthians 10:13 No temptation has overtaken you except what is common to mankind. And God is faithful; he will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, he will also provide a way out so that you can endure it.
For more on this–read “Of Divine Providence” from The 1689 Baptist Confession of Faith https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-5