If God is sovereign, what's left for you to do?

Greetings,

Three letters in, this thread has been about who God is. Sovereign over all things. Present in the silence. Good even when the circumstances are not. In No. 33 I wrote that trusting God’s sovereignty does not mean passivity, and then I left it there. This week I want to pick it back up.

There is an old story about a careless man who slipped at the top of a staircase and tumbled all the way to the bottom. He picked himself up, dusted himself off, and said, well, God meant for me to fall. I’m glad that’s over with.

We laugh because we recognise him. He has taken a true doctrine and turned it into an excuse. If everything is ordained, then nothing is really mine to do.

Most of us would never say it that plainly. But there are two ditches on either side of this road, and many of us tend to drift, subtly, toward one of them.

The first man prays and does nothing. He is out of work and trusting God, but he has not sent a résumé in three weeks. His marriage has gone cold and he is praying about it, but he has not had the hard conversation. His finances are tight and he is trusting God for an increase, but he has never sat down with his budget to see whether excess, indulgence, or an idol is quietly eating what he already has. He calls it faith. It is closer to fatalism wearing church clothes.

The second man works and never prays. He has the spreadsheet, the backup plan, and the backup to the backup. He would say he believes God is sovereign, and he means it, but you would never know it from how he lives. He carries every outcome on his own shoulders. He works incessantly, and the first things to go are the ones that matter most: his time with God, his time with his family, and his time with the body of Christ. It is slowly crushing him. He calls it responsibility. It is closer to self-reliance.

If I am honest, I have been both men. My drift changes with the season. In some seasons I work myself to the bone, as if everything depends on me. In others, after pushing hard and watching nothing come of it, I take my foot off the gas and tell myself I am trusting God. Sometimes that is trust. Sometimes it is discouragement, and I call it trust because the word sounds better. In those seasons I miss opportunities I should have worked for. Not the frantic work of a man who thinks it all depends on him, but honest, diligent work from a man who is trusting God. I have to keep reminding myself of the tension: work hard, keep it in perspective, and trust God.

Both men pull apart what God holds together.

Nehemiah is rebuilding the wall of Jerusalem. Halfway through, his enemies plot to attack the city. Here is what he did.

He did not pick one. He did not treat the watchmen as a lack of faith, and he did not treat the prayer as a formality before the real work began.

Prayer without the guard is presumption. The guard without prayer is self-reliance.

Acts 27 captures this idea succinctly. Paul is on a ship that has been battered by a storm for days. An angel has told him that no one on board will die. God has promised it, and Paul has announced it to everyone on the ship. Then some of the sailors try to slip away in the lifeboat, and Paul tells the centurion, unless these men stay in the ship, you cannot be saved.

Ponder that for a moment. The outcome was certain. God had guaranteed it. And Paul still acted as though the means mattered, because they did. The God who ordained that everyone would survive also ordained how they would survive, and that included the sailors staying on board to work the ship. His sovereignty did not make their obedience unnecessary. It worked through it.

God ordinarily accomplishes his purposes through means. Our part is to use every legitimate means available to us while trusting God to make them effective. We do the work. We do not trust the work.

The soldier who refuses to saddle his horse because the outcome is God’s is not trusting God. He is disobeying him. The soldier who puts his confidence in the horse has missed something more important than the battle. The horse must be ready. The victory was never the horse’s.

This is where prayer comes in, because prayer is where the two meet. A man who prays is saying the outcome is not in his hands, otherwise why ask? And he is saying God can do something about it, otherwise why ask him? Prayer is the most direct expression of confidence that God governs the outcome. A man who does not believe God is sovereign has no real reason to pray. A man who believes it and still does not pray has confused sovereignty with fate.

So pray first, as Nehemiah did. Bring whatever you are carrying to the God who actually governs it. Then get up off your knees and set the guard. Do the part that is yours with everything you have, and leave the outcome where it belongs.

The man at the bottom of the stairs is not the model. Neither is the man who works so hard he never rests. The model is the man who prays, sets a guard, and then sleeps. As the psalmist puts it, it is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep.

Which ditch are you drifting toward in this season, praying and doing nothing or working and never praying, and what would it look like to hold both?

Grace and peace, Seun

If this one landed, No. 33 goes further — seunadeyemi.ca/reflections/33-you-say-you-believe-god-is-sovereign-but-do-you-really