Day 2 - Monday - | Daily Devotions | My Utmost for His Highest |

 August 5th

The baffling call of God

And all things the prophets write concerning the Son of man shall be accomplished.… And they understood none of these things. Luke 18:31, 34.

God called Jesus Christ to what seemed an unmitigated disaster. Jesus Christ called His disciples to see Him put to death; He led every one of them to the place where their hearts were broken. Jesus Christ’s life was an absolute failure from every standpoint but God’s. But what seemed like a failure from man’s perspective was a tremendous triumph from God’s because God’s purpose is never man’s purpose.

There comes the baffling call of God in our lives, also. The call of God can never be stated explicitly; it is implicit. The call of God is like the call of the sea; no one hears it but the one who has the nature of the sea in him. It cannot be stated what the call of God is because His call is to be in comradeship with Himself for His own purpose, and the test is to believe that God knows what He is after. The things that happen do not happen by chance; they happen entirely according to the decree of God. God is working out His purposes.

If we are in communion with God and recognize that He is taking us into His purposes, we shall no longer try to find His purposes. As we go on in the Christian life, it gets simpler because we are less inclined to say—‘Now, why did God allow this and that?’ Behind the whole thing lies the compelling of God. “There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.” A Christian trusts the wits and the wisdom of God and not his own wits. If we have a purpose of our own, it destroys the simplicity and the leisureliness which ought to characterize the children of God.

 Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest: Selections for the Year (Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering, 1986).