God's Agenda for your Friends

Another gem from Oswald Chambers today. The phrase that caught my attention was that we are expected to “...deliberately identify ourselves with God's interests in other people. "That ye love one another; as I have loved you . . “

I recall as a very young Christian being greatly offended by the way that God had handled Gideon! After his victories it is recorded that Gideon had many wives and concubines and 70 sons. Judges 8: 30 After his victories too he created an image which became a snare to him and to others. Judges 8:27. At the heart of my sense of offence was that I was convinced that God should have sorted out these aspects of his life before his victories! It took a long time to understand that the statement “...My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways,” Is 55:8 NKJV could include the notion that His Agenda might not be the same as my Agenda.

God, I discovered, was not nearly so tidy as I was and certainly wasn’t nearly such a clear thinking evangelical as I was. I have a computerised ‘to do list’. As I tick off one item in a project the next item appears; it is all very tidy. God on the other hand seems to have different points of concentration in the lives of men and women and sometimes concentrates on aspects of a life that aren’t even on my ‘to do list’. It was a challenging revelation to discover that God’s creative works, and his new creation works, are not an exercise in painting by numbers.

When I am in the company of a friend is my conversation framed by my ‘to do list’ or God’s? Am I willing to go ‘off topic’ or do I insist on first, second, third...? Jesus said “Most assuredly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of Himself, but what He sees the Father do; for whatever He does, the Son also does in like manner. John 5:19 NKJV That surely is the question; ‘what is the Father doing in this life? ‘not ‘how to I get this soul to the next point in my agenda?’ Am I in such a fellowship with the Father that I can ‘see’ what he is doing or do I just revert to my script?