I have looked in the mirror way too long, analyzing my own life. He taught me this year that it has so much more to do with being sanctified to Him through a loving relationship, bringing His glory and restoring the earth to the Him than it has to do with trying to overcome sin and being a ‘good’ person.
He then, started to have me question ‘my calling’. Edgar Laubscher said to me recently, “So many times we get caught up in the mistake of asking the Lord what His will is for us specifically instead of just asking what His will is in general.” I am a culprit. I do the same thing. I find myself not acting because I don’t hear his will for my life in that moment or acting outside of His will because I don’t think to ask Him at all. But it makes so much more sense to operate in the general will of the Lord for the world.
If you act out of the Spirit as a chosen disciple, how will you stray? I am not saying not to be sensitive to specific requests He has of you but to act in His general will fully at all times by assuming your called position. If we all learned to assume our election as ambassadors for Christ (read 2 Cor. 5) the world would change and everything in it. The Church would change. The way we exist and co-exist. Our purpose, perspectives, and attitudes. We might actually start to live by the standards God has called us to and then our understanding of life would start to make sense.
There is so much more to life than you can imagine. Please start asking questions. My life has been changed forever because the Holy Spirit is making clear to me a reality that I never understood. I am experiencing a spiritual life that I never knew existed. No one person could have made this life clear to me, only God himself. I never understood what it meant to have abundant life in Christ. If you would have asked me about that two years ago I would have told you they were words in the Bible.
It is not what we do that determines who we are. it is who we are that determines what we do. I don’t labor in the vineyard with hopes that God may one day accept me. God has already accepted me and that is why I labor in the vineyard. -neil Andreson
