“Well if God’s called you, it’ll work out.”
I’ve been told this lots of times myself, I think I believe it half of the time. But it’s not true. Not in the way we mean it anyway.
What we’re saying is, you’re going to do this risky seeming thing on the basis of your faith that God wants you to do it, so the risky thing will work out, right? It follows, except it’s not my experience. I’ve followed God into several things in my life that’s it’s unclear why I was ‘called’ (assuming I’m right that I was, but let’s leave that question aside for now), and what I was attempting certainly wasn’t successful in any real sense that I could describe. Neither, in most instances, has it been the kind of abject failure that might make you decide you weren’t called after all, though I’ve certainly questioned these things many times.
The original statement is true in a sense, if God called you, the end for which he called you will definitely work out. The problem is that God does every action for a thousand ends, most of which are hidden from us, and it’s possible that none of them are the grand end that you’re thinking of.
To take an example that isn’t from my own life—imagine you moved to plant a church. Surely that means that the church will grow, even though it might be hard graft? I think most of us would realise that isn’t true objectively but would expect it to be true for us. Sometimes church plants fail. Does that mean that the planter wasn’t called by God? I don’t think that follows at all, the Lord is much more concerned with our character and with the individual person-to-person pastoring we do than in our institutions (though I believe he loves those too).
It may be that the plant served the purposes that the Lord wanted it to. That’s hardly a satisfying thing to say to the planter who upended their life, seemingly for nothing. I wouldn’t recommend it as pastoral counsel, but it’s also true. We can only know God’s revealed will, if the planter was following that as well as they were able with all the mixed motives that all of us have, repenting along the way, then the Lord will be pleased with them.
To take the same example in a different direction, what if the church doesn’t fail, but it never grows very much, it’s small, it’s difficult for one of many possible reasons, and it doesn’t fulfil the promise of the vision it had at the start? Again, that doesn’t mean anyone wasn’t doing what they were meant to. Perhaps a great deal of deeply valuable pastoring has happened to the handful of people in the church. It’s not glamourous perhaps, but no sane person goes church planting for the glamour; or becomes a Pastor at all, honestly.
In both examples, were they successful? From the point of view of the planter’s original dreams, no they weren’t successful. And that’s what they will have heard when someone said the original quote, and it’s probably what the proverbial someone meant as well.
We should cast our minds to the Old Testament Prophets who were called by God to preach that Israel and Judah repent so that they would not be taken into exile. Were they successful? I suspect they didn’t feel it at times, but of course they were. Why were they successful? Because they were obedient.
I think we’ve probably all heard someone tell us that success should be redefined as obedience to God—if not, you’re welcome, it’s true—and we can nod along piously while they say it. Then we’ll carry on running down the road towards whatever successful goals we’re aiming for. It’s not an easy thing to get straight in your head, but I think it’s important for all of us. We don’t follow God for what we get, we follow him because he’s worth following (though what we get is pretty cool: we get God).
I don’t think ambition is bad—though some ambition is (compare Philippians 2 to Romans 15)—I think there’s a godly sort of ambition that aims for godly things. It’s vital that while we set our aims—whether to be a witness in the workplace, a pastor, raise a family to serve the Lord, or my own specific desires and calling that I’ve written about a bit—that they are godly (all those examples are), but that we think that success is being obedient to God. If it fails but we failed well, by which I mean obediently in holiness and repenting of our sin where it is to be found, then that is successful in the kingdom.
So, dear friends, in the name of Jesus, keep going.
Photo by Jungwoo Hong on Unsplash
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