Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches. – 1 Corinthians 7:17
This is not a message about being “okay” with going nowhere with your life. This is definitely not a message condoning you to not change or an excuse giving you a way of not seeking personal growth. This is a message, however, about not becoming who you are not.
You should not pretend, nor should you strive to be somebody you’re not for the sake of pleasing other people or for the purposes of impressing God in some type of religiousness. That doesn’t mean you should feel comfortable not rooting out sin in your life, so let’s stay away from an attitude of anemic, apathy toward our sinful appetites.
In our daily lives, we get so caught up in becoming something, that we become unrecognizable, even to ourselves. We try to become something, for some reason, but only know that we should become something, and haven’t figured out the “what” of who we should become.
A friend told me, “Jonathan, you can change everything about you, from what you do, and who you mingle with, and where you go, but that won’t stop God from calling you to who you should be.” My friend was absolutely right. I can change all those things, but the most important thing is to be myself in God. God made us the way we are, He absolutely did, but He makes us and crafts our existence to be more and more like Him– perfectly creative and unique. Get this straight, God doesn’t create opportunities to sin, but He does create opportunities for us to define ourselves in moments where we can make decisions and either walk into His calling or to walk away from it.
We need to start walking into His calling, and I know a lot of us have no idea what that even means or how that looks. We only know how to be people we know we’re not. We’re only these people because everybody else prescribes us to be them and we fool ourselves into believing that it is really who we should become; but let’s get it straight, the opinion of everybody is not the opinion of God.
The opinion of God is culmination of experiences and opportunities He gives you. The opinion of God is made manifest in what you are doing now– the way you’re serving, the way you are living, the lives you are pouring into. You become who you are called to be when you allow people to move you into your life and when you start changing their lives with the love of God, the love which compelled Jesus to die for us, the love that broke the tyranny of sin. You can only be you.
You can be you now, as God calls you, that is, as imperfect as you are, but willing to add love into the life of others here and now; or you can pretend you are somebody else and ruminate through life and figure out later you were just acting for everybody who doesn’t really matter. We all have lives assigned. We all have people who need our love and need our talents and need us to be who we are and travel with them and journey with them. You have been called and that is who you are, embrace it and live into it, and enjoy the exciting ride.