Church Voices

Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God. These words are found in Micah 6:8, and express the whole duty of man. Unfortunately, I encounter people who are struggling with, in their words, “God’s will for my life”.

God’s will for your life is to do justice, love mercy and walk humbly with God. No matter what the Vineyard teaches you, God is not too terribly concerned with what color of socks you pick out in the morning. Even the decisions we see as really huge, like choice of profession, or which college to go to are not mandated from God. When you sit down and make a decision about what college to go to you are not engaging in a game of spiritual Russian roulette where every chamber of the gun is loaded but one. As if choosing the wrong school puts you outside of the will of God.

Imagine for a moment that you’re a parent. You give your child an X-box along with 10 games. You say to your kid, and tell him, “go ahead and play for an hour, after that we feast with all our family members”. Imagine if before making a decision to play a game your kid spent precious minutes worrying about which game you want him to play, and then after finally making a decision he worries while playing the game if he made the right decision. And then he occasionally switches games and goes through the whole worrying process all over again. Perhaps sometimes he even switches games when he’s having fun because he thinks you want him to. The reality is you don’t care which game he plays, you just want him to enjoy the gift you’ve given him. I think all too often we’re like the little kid in this example wondering which game to play while all God wants is us to enjoy the gifts he’s given us.