Marc's Minute #4
The bi-weekly quick "K.I.T." equipping you with Knowledge for your Head, Inspiration for your Heart, and Tools for your Hands {9/2/23}
Feature Focus
How do we figure out God’s will?
The focus of this issue is a post I wrote one year ago that helps us answer this question, but probably not in the way you have usually heard it answered. I hope you take a few minutes to read or listen to the article and let me know your thoughts.
This is a topic near and dear to my heart because I think we have inadvertently led many young people astray with our advice about what God wants them to do with their lives.
Here is an excerpt:
“I want to know God’s will for my life.” Have you heard someone express that sentiment? Have you thought it yourself? The Church has been happy to answer this question for people. We have books, sermons, and resources telling us how to find God’s will, answer God’s call, and live in such a way that we miss neither.
The problem is the popular notion of answering God’s call or finding God’s will is so strongly tied to our contemporary condition of occupation obsession. We live in a context that has young citizens go to school for years where they have to decide on a career path for life. Then, they go off to college and spend tons of money to specialize in a particular field of study. We are hyper-focused on having everyone figure out their career, and what they will do for the next 40 years, and this context drives our teaching on God’s will.
What we end up with is a series of conversations about whether it is God’s will for a person to be a doctor or a teacher, to attend this university or that university, to devote their lives to this occupation or that one. There are enough current sociological reasons why this is unwise, including the fact that the job market is ever-changing and many of the jobs young people will occupy may not even exist yet. Thanks to technological advances, more work is remote and the workforce is more mobile, switching from one role to another or from one company to another more often. Also, there is the proven fact that our metrics for ranking students and colleges (grade point average, SAT tests, college ranking reports, etc.) are all based on misleading, inaccurate junk data. For these reasons alone, we should abandon much of how we direct young people to discern God’s will for their lives.
But I am here to argue an even more significant reason. God doesn’t work this way. It is bad theology from the start. All the problems listed above are society’s problems in general, but this concern is ours as Christians to resolve. Pastors, teachers, parents, and youth leaders, we can and must do better.
Read or listen to the rest of the article here.
Keep It Simple Strategy
If you are meeting with friends, in small groups, or just working on your own faith journey, then check out this week’s simple and reproducible practice tip that you can try anytime. Remember, you can always find many more FREE materials at Grace In Motion.
PRESCRIPTION vs. DESCRIPTION
Today’s simple and reproducible tip that you can apply anytime you are reading something in the Bible, whether you are alone or in a group Bible study, is to ask the question, “Is this PREscriptive or DEscriptive?”
It is important to note that most, or all, of the letters in the New Testament are occasional letters, meaning there was an occasion, or cause, for them to be written. None of the writings occurred in a vacuum, but rather each is responding to a very particular context. With that in mind, just because something is being described for us to know what happened then does not always mean it is being prescribed for us to know what should happen now.
In fact, more often than not, that is probably not the case. Most of the issues we encounter warrant more research and deeper reflection than just plucking verses or stories out of the Bible and saying, “See, this is what we should do. The Bible says so!” That can actually be a dismissive way of handling such a sophisticated historical and spiritual text as the Bible.
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