“Do Your Duty, Abandon Passivity”…((DTFD, November 7))

(from “Daily Thoughts for Disciples” by Oswald Chambers, November 7th entry)

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“Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.” — Ecclesiastes 2:24

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One great essential lesson in Christianity is that God’s order comes to us in the haphazard. We are men and women, we have appetites, we have to live on this earth, and things do happen by chance; what is the use of saying they do not?

“One of the most immutable things on earth is mutability.” Your life and mine is a bundle of chance. It is absurd to say it is foreordained for you to have so many buttons on your tunic, and if that is not foreordained, then nothing is. If things were foreordained, there would be no sense of responsibility at all. A false spirituality makes us look to God to perform a miracle instead of us doing our duty.

We have to see that we do our duty in faith in God. Jesus Christ undertakes to do everything a person cannot do, but not what a person can do. Things do happen by chance, and if we know God, we recognize that His order comes to us in that way. We live in this haphazard order of things, and we have to maintain the abiding order of God in it.

The doctrine of the sacrament teaches the conveying of God’s presence to us through the common elements of bread and wine. We are not to seek success or prosperity. If we can get hold of our relationship to God in eating and drinking, we are on the right basis of things.

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Taken from Daily Thoughts for Disciples, © 1976, 1994 by Oswald Chambers Publications Association, Ltd., and used by permission of Discovery House Publishers, Grand Rapids MI 49501. All rights reserved.

[[Some words Chambers uses are not used often today — click [here] to look up difficult words.]]

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Brief commentary:
I really don’t think that Oswald Chambers is here, in this devotion, declaring that there is no thing that is truly “foreordained”, since he has talked specifically about things being so in other devotions. With that bit of contextual clarity mentioned, I get the impression that he was merely using language his audience would understand in the context of the day to convey our contemporary message of “Get off your blessed assurance and DO something!”

This is the reason why I personally think that Calvinism, when taken as so many self-proclaimed Calvinists today do, is a destructive and neutering tool in the enemy’s hands. When a person really gets into the mental “mode” of “everything is foreordained”, the practical fruit that comes out of that mindset is typically complacency, fatalism, and a lack of drive to actually go out and accomplish anything for the Kingdom. In other words, it effectively compartmentalizes a person’s faith, placing Biblical issues in its container, while the rest of regular life fits in its container.

When a person genuinely encounters the risen Christ, they are always propelled forward in action of some sort. One of my favorite such encounter is found in John 9, with special emphasis on verses 13-34 — the part where, after Jesus has healed the blind man and he has gone about thrilled and overjoyed at what God had done for him, the Pharisees take him aside and grill him about the mechanics of how and by whom he was healed. His classic statement, given by the Spirit for such a perfect time as that one”

24 So they again called the man who was blind, and said to him, “Give God the glory! We know that this Man is a sinner.”

25 He answered and said, “Whether He is a sinner or not I do not know. One thing I know: that though I was blind, now I see.”

26 Then they said to him again, “What did He do to you? How did He open your eyes?”

27 He answered them, “I told you already, and you did not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become His disciples?” [Epic.]

28 Then they reviled him and said, “You are His disciple, but we are Moses’ disciples. 29 We know that God spoke to Moses; as for this fellow, we do not know where He is from.”

30 The man answered and said to them, “Why, this is a marvelous thing, that you do not know where He is from; yet He has opened my eyes!31Now we know that God does not hear sinners; but if anyone is a worshiper of God and does His will, He hears him.32Since the world began it has been unheard of that anyone opened the eyes of one who was born blind. 33 If this Man were not from God, He could do nothing.”

34 They answered and said to him, “You were completely born in sins, and are you teaching us?” And they cast him out.
(John 9:24-34, NKJV)

God does some amazing thing in a person’s life — be it healing one’s physical blindness or spiritual blindness — and that person goes out jubilant, with potential and Spirit-given ability to overcome obstacles that previously would have stopped that person in his tracks. At that time the people were a bit fearful of the Pharisees, the religious rulers, because if you crossed them, they could cast you out of the synagogue, which to them was catastrophic — they didn’t have “a church on every corner”, each town had a synagogue, and if you were cast out of it, you could no longer attend with your family (assuming they were still allowed in) or those in town you knew. Then once word spread to the various rabbis, you’d likely find yourself “blacklisted” until you made right whatever it was you supposedly did wrong.

For the blind man, there was nothing he could do to “repent” of what had happened — this Man had given sight to his eyes that had been blind since birth, and it was miraculous! How could he call it anything else? But when the religious rulers, the ones who held his ability to attend synagogue in their hands, pressed him for answers and got ones they didn’t like, he was fueled not only to bear witness but to prod them (for a change) with a bit of application-based theology as well! “Why do you want to know — do you want to become His disciples, too?” A man in his sin would not challenge that way (as evidenced by the reaction of the man’s parents to the rulers — passivity and fear); a man touched by God never even thinks about it being a challenge in the first place, merely something that needs to be said!

No wonder why Jesus tells the church at Ephesus in Revelation 2 that it needed to return to its first love and do the first works over again. We fall into the trap of letting that “newborn energy” fuel us only towards self-fueled works — noble as they may be — then when our energy tuckers out and we look to scapegoat God, we find our minds entertaining the thoughts of “Que sera, sera…whatever will be, will be”…”it must have just been God’s will for it to work out this way.”

Once again, I find the timing perfect. Here in America, as millions of believers are waking up to find themselves with a bit of an “election hangover”, I hear a lot of the same words: “God must have willed this to happen.” That invokes causality, the idea that God caused it, which is quite a bit different from foreknowledge (knowing ahead of time), and personally, I reject causality in this case. (We could get into a lengthy and unproductive debate at this point regarding the nuances of how God will “work it all together for good”, but that is, in fact, different from causing it to turn out that way in the first place. Making a life-raft out of plane wreckage is quite a bit different from crashing the plane to make a life-raft. God cast no votes yesterday; the American people — some living, some dead — did.)

The election turned out the way it did because people — about 190 million of them — chose to not vote while only about 120 million of them did vote. And with a margin of victory of about 3 million votes (as of the time of this writing), it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out just how much of an impact the 190 million could have had over the 3 million. “Do your duty!”, Chambers says, “and stop blaming God or expecting a miracle from Him when it is YOU who isn’t doing what you’re supposed to be doing!”

Humbling? It should be. It was for me, too.