God Won’t Live Your Life for You

This is your life, are you who you want to be? A line from one of my favorite bands, Switchfoot. It’s a sobering question and it’s had me thinking about my own life. Considering it has brought up some assumptions I have about life that I don’t think are true. One of which is this – I am a product of God’s decisions.

I believe in the sovereignty of God. Which is a fancy way of saying He’s in control. And God also made it very clear that He has given us choice in our lives. In some deeper way, past our understandings, these two things work together and not against one another.

I do want to put forth a word of caution when talking about God’s sovereignty, because a misunderstanding of that word can cause us to conclude things about life that just aren’t true. If I choose to eat a large bag of sour gummy worms and then 45 minutes later find myself writhing in stomach pain, my stomach isn’t hurting because God decided it to be. No, my stomach is hurting because I overate junk food.

A trivial example but can be revealing in how we see and interpret the broader world. Look around, this world is a broken place that much we can all agree on. It begs the question did God cause it or did He allow it? How we answer that literally changes our worldview.

God allowed my stomach to hurt after basically poisoning myself with sour gummy worms, He did not cause it, but He was intimately aware of it. “You will not reject a broken and repentant heart, O God” (Psalm 51:17). Did God break your heart? I don’t believe He did, but there’s something about His character and nature that He can’t refuse coming near to us when we are broken-hearted.

I realized that I had been attributing my disappointments and heartaches to God. That He decided these things were going to happen, and He’ll decide when I can start moving again. In the meantime, I just wait. I don’t choose because I’m operating under the assumption that He’s going to do it for me.

Friend, I may be talking more to me than to you – but that’s just not how God made us. “Cast all your worries and cares to God, for He cares about you” (1 Peter 5:7). We were made to dream and to pursue and God knows that this opens the door to disappointment and loss along with joy and success.

Paul tells us in Philippians to make our requests known to God (Philippians 4). God created us to be learners and growers – that we would walk in deeper maturity. Why would He do this if He’s only going to end up living our lives for us? No, He’s called you to live your life. And to do it in partnership with Him. Abiding in His character and truth (John 15).

The point is this, we throw around these theological words like sovereignty, and I’ve noticed how a misunderstanding or misuse of that word can vastly misinform my view of the world. God, in His wisdom, allows. And that’s a hard pill to swallow when things are tough.

It would be remiss of me to not acknowledge that God is able, does, and is fully within His rights to step into our stories and cause things to happen. This is something for you and I to go to the Lord on our own to prayerfully consider where God is in our specific situations.

My word of challenge here is this, don’t hide behind a word like sovereignty as an excuse to not live your life. I’ve tried – it doesn’t work. And God is patient enough to wait, as long as it takes, for us to get up and start living our lives again.