In God's Hands--March 4, 2022

In God's Hands--March 4, 2022

"Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." [James 4:15-16]

It's a humbling thing to say, especially in a culture like ours, but I need to say it: I am not the captain of my own soul... and I am not the master of my own fate.

All apologies and due respect to the poet William Ernest Henley for stomping all over his lines of verse, but it’s just not true. All of us live in the midst of realities beyond our control and bigger than ability to manage. From the pull of gravity and the laws of thermodynamics to the force of the tides and the effects of inflation, we are all subject to powers we don’t get to be the boss of. Pretending we can make the world over in our image is supreme hubris, not to mention terribly foolish. None of us is the master of our own fate, not really—we are all subject to a long list of forces, systems, and structures that we couldn’t get rid of if we wanted to.

But maybe even more fundamentally, the Christian faith should make us question whether the goal in life should be to master our fates or captain our souls in the first place. I say that because for the last two thousand years, Christians have insisted that Jesus, and not anybody else—not even our own selves—is Lord of our lives. To be a Christian is to relinquish final say over our plans, schemes, wishes, and dreams to Jesus’ direction and essentially to say to God with Jesus in the garden, “Not my will, but thine.” The absolutized logic of “You can’t tell me what to do” that is so popular in our culture is at odds with confessing Jesus as Lord, because Jesus calls us to follow him where he is headed. He doesn’t offer himself as a wish-granting genie to take us where we dream of going. And if the Gospels are any indication, Jesus reserves the right to turn our plans and list of life-goals and turn them upside down. To see the stories of Peter, James, John, Mary, Zacchaeus, Paul, Lydia, Salome, and more, it seems that Jesus regularly exercises that right to up-end our expectations.

I think this is what James is getting at when he says it is arrogant to boast about what will “definitely” happen—it assumes both a certainty we do not possess and a claim over the course of our lives that we have surrendered every time we confess Jesus as Lord. Read the letters of Paul, for example, and you'll get pretty frequent asides to his readers where the apostle will say, essentially, "I had been planning to come and see you, but I got arrested again, so we'll have to wait for a reunion until I get bailed out," or "I was intending to go east on my next trip, but the Holy Spirit smacked me upside the head in love and sent me west instead." And that's from a guy who literally wrote a large portion of the Bible!

What strikes me, given Paul, James, Peter, and the rest of the early church's honesty about how often their plans got changed is that they didn't complain or insist on control in those circumstances. They trusted that they were in the hands of Jesus, who would guide them through whatever came their way. They didn't necessarily conclude that God was "sending" bad things their way, or that God was "punishing" or "thwarting" their plans, but rather, they knew that their individual wishes or designs weren't the final say on things. Sometimes it was the powers of the day that changed their plans (like getting imprisoned by the Romans), and sometimes it was a seemingly random turn of events. Sometimes an opportunity opened up that was bigger than they had imagined, and sometimes they found themselves disappointed that a situation didn't turn out the way they had hoped. But in all of it, those early disciples understood that the course of their lives wasn't theirs alone to control--they were followers of the Lord Jesus. And so even when their best-laid plans ran into obstacles or a solid brick wall, they saw their lives held in the hands of God, and they could adapt.

I think this is something we have forgotten in our time, even (or maybe especially?) for people of faith: there is a difference between God holding us through all situations and God promising that our plans will come to fruition the way we want them to. God does indeed promise to hold us, to lead us, and to love us, no matter what may come. But that very clearly leaves open "what may come"--and it may not go according to our wishes, dreams, or expectations. All too often, we let people define "faith" for us as "unthinking belief that what you want to happen will happen," rather than, "confidence that God will make a way out of no way, even if it doesn't look like what we planned for." But God hasn't promised to give us the future we wish for, rather to bring us into the even more beautiful future God has in mind. Realizing that difference also means realizing that I'm not ultimately in the driver's seat. I'm not the captain of my soul--thank God. I'm not the master of my fate--praise the Lord. You and I are in the hands of the one who is making all things new. And that, dear ones, is enough.

It is, to be honest, more than enough--more than all we can ask or imagine.

Lord God, help us to surrender direction of our lives to you, and to accept that we are not the bosses--even of our own lives--that we like to imagine we are.