Life Hermeneutic

her⋅me⋅neu⋅tic-interpretative; explanatory

I have been a follower of Jesus by faith in His gospel for almost 6 years and during this time of interacting with churchy people or other followers of Jesus you pick up/advocate interesting, sometimes heretical views of God. This is very easy to do when you want something to be a certain way. So if I want Jesus to not put people off I can read the bible selectively and rationalize away the parts I do not like while I distort/lose God. Or if I do not want to give up certain aspects of my life and personality I can emphasize all the good that is in my personality/life while I work against God by attempting to make people into my image and not His. Or if I want to feel good about myself through comparison to others I can exalt the sins that I do not commit as the most heinous and feel pity for those who struggle with such things while I communicate the lie that the gospel is for everyone else. The easy part is then finding people who want what I want. We surround ourselves with others who inherently desire the same thing until we blindly accept our latent goal as truth.

Well, I want to address one in particular that I and so many other followers of Jesus or churchy people have perpetuated for far too long.  It is the “God called me…” card. Now, let me clarify from the get go that prayer is vital and that the Holy Spirit can/will lead us but the call must fall in line with the already explicit, clear call of God in the scriptures.

There is a biblical hermeneutic that instructs us to interpret unclear texts with the blatantly clear ones. So when I read James 2:24 “You see that a man is justified by works and not by faith alone” I may think that my works are necessary for my salvation. But what I should do is make sense of this verse in light of its context in James but also the entire Bible. I must put this one verse up against Romans 3:28-30, 4:5, 5:1, 9:30, 10:4, 11:6, Galatians 2:16, 2:21, 3:5-6, 3:24 and all the myriad of other verses that make it clear that through faith alone are we saved. So I then interpret the one confounding, cloudy verse in light of the many. The same is true for God’s call on our lives.

When I approach a foggy, unclear decision and situation I should definitely ask God for guidance. But I should not neglect the guidance and truth already given to me. We should rummage and scour the word of God to see clearly who God is, His gospel, what He has called his people to do and then think and pray through how my life story fits into His. But we normally skip this aspect and go straight for seeking this mystical feeling that will somehow lead me to the answer. This is the same process that I explained in the first paragraph, where my desire is to follow God as long as I can consume what hits the spot for the time being. Like  my mentor Todd Engstrom said, “Ask somebody to go on a mission trip overseas and they will need to take ample time to pray about it and wait for some fuzzy feeling, but ask them to go on vacation overseas and there will be no prayer needed to make that decision.” When comes to us actually serving and not consuming then we go to a feeling we have instead of the command from Jesus to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you…” and making our decisions in light of the already explicit call.

I am just as guilty of this as anyone else, and just like them I wonder where the power of God is in my life as we deny God’s explicit, revealed calling and embrace our reason, wisdom and feelings in the hope that it would produce what only God can. Radical, enduring joy!

Other great blog posts on calling

http://jdgreear.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/09/sendrdu.html

http://toddengstrom.com/2009/09/18/called-jd-greear/