Why I’ve Stopped Doing God’s Thinking For Him

This morning, for some reason, I was thinking back to some of my earlier days in the church. Thinking about what a strong sense of vision I had, not just about my own ministry, but for the Church in general. Thinking about things I believed God was doing with His people, and things I actually prophesied were going to happen. And thinking about how much of it I got wrong.

Hang in there: this isn’t a post about being disillusioned. Just gaining perspective. Here’s an example.

I used to preach from the pulpit that the church needed to be a birthing ground for the arts–that we were created in the image of a Creator, and therefore we should create! I still believe this. But along with that, I envisioned an arts-friendly institution where people of all talents could come and worship God with their talents to the altar in a sanctuary-type setting. It was our vision for 24-7 worship.

Today, I don’t even believe that’s the right thing to do. I have a completely different picture of what we’re supposed to do with our talents. I no longer see worship as contained within that tabernacle-like picture, and I no longer believe our talents are supposed to be contained within a Christian-ese box. From what I’ve seen, that just creates a ghetto where at its best, only the people inside it are blessed, and at its worst, it just gets ugly from people’s crap. I still believe our gifts should be yielded to God, but then I have a picture of getting up from the altar and taking those gifts to the world, to those people who may never come into the tabernacle.

I thought God was going to do one thing. Instead, He seems to have other plans. I thought I was on the cusp of a major move of God, and I thought I knew exactly how it was going to go down. Instead, I find myself completely alienated from the platform from which that move was supposed to take place.

From another perspective–I believed that worship (at least the way we practiced it) was destined to become a major tool of evangelism. I preached that we were part of the restoration of David’s tabernacle, and that our worship would draw the nations to God’s throne. I promoted “public worship”–unabashed expressions of praise in public places–and it was indeed a witness to people. God used it in ways that I may not even realize until it’s all over.

But at the same time, my picture of it was all so–churchy. And I don’t mean that in the timeless Body-of-Christ way; I mean it in the sense of institutional Christianity. I was still trying to get people into our institution. And now, even while I’m still a believer, I have no affinity with that institution anymore. I find myself disenfranchised from the very place where I believed all the nations should come.

Not quite what I thought. Not quite what I expected. And certainly not quite what I predicted.

So what does this mean? Was it all a bunch of hooey?

No, I don’t think so. I just think I was busy doing God’s thinking for Him.

You see, to the best of my ability and understanding, everything I thought was going to happen, I derived it from the Scriptures. I looked at the prophecies of Scripture, and I tried to discern the heart of God within the Scriptures, and like most of us, my mind connected the dots. I got a picture in my head, an interpretation, of what God was going to do and how He was going to do it. And while everything I was trying to do in ministry was based on Scripture in some way, it was also sort of based on that mental picture.

The thing is, when God fulfills His own word, it seldom looks the way we think it should, and He usually connects the dots in a much different way than we assume He will. This is precisely why so many of God’s own chosen people did not recognize the Messiah when He came and lived in their midst.

And so, to quit rambling, my point is that God’s word is true–we just have this terrible way of misinterpreting it. I don’t believe it’s all hooey–I’ve just come to understand that God will fulfill His own purposes for me, for His Church, and for the world, in His own way and time, and I don’t really have a clue anymore as to what that will look like. And that’s okay.

I’ve resigned from trying to do God’s thinking for Him. What I see in front of me may be a hot mess right now, but God is big enough to figure it out and fulfill His plans within it. My job is not to figure that out for Him; my job now is to seek Him to know my own place within His purposes, and trust Him with the rest.

That, in a nutshell, is the journey I’m on now.