Do God’s Work, Not God’s Job
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EGO: Edging God Out
Last week, we started on a handful of topics we’re going to talk through together for the next couple of months. These topics are all based around the idea that when we start to rely on our own ego to solve problems, we start to Edge God Out.
We’re going to talk a lot about doubt, pride, fear and even failure the next several weeks. And we’re going to talk a lot about EGO: Edging God Out. As we discussed last week, there are different kinds of doubt. There is Doubt in Faith, and there is Doubting Faith.
Remember that we discussed a handful of scientists studying the cosmos. But they weren’t doing science in order to explain away the beauty of God’s creation. In fact, they did not see science as a way to Edge God Out at all. They saw it as a way to try and understand God.
Cynicism is a sort of doubt that from the perspective of faith is very unhealthy. In fact, cynicism is Doubting Faith, not Doubt in Faith. To be cynical is to live in profound self-will. It’s a perspective that is all about placing yourself outside the order of things.
A cynic stands on firm ground, from which they are able to criticize all else around them. The cynic never has to come up with any real answers to life’s great questions, because they exist simply to sow doubt about the answers others feel comfortable with.
A cynic doesn’t need faith, because they think they have all the answers. They are too proud to doubt their own assumptions. Cynics are lazy. They don’t do the work themselves of trying to make sense of our existence. They criticize the work others have done, the answers they find.
But there is another kind of doubt that can be much more healthy: curiosity. Curiosity is Doubt done in Faith. Curiosity is about following questions, and getting some answers. But those answers only lead to more questions. And on and on.
This is the essence of why curiosity as a form of doubt is healthy for our faith. You see, curiosity is all about humility. We don’t know, and that’s the starting point of curiosity. We’re coming from a place of being radically open.
When we’re curious, it’s because we don’t know something – but we also know that we don’t know, and we’re open to the answer. This is Doubt in Faith. Because as people of faith, we are convinced that there is an entire cosmos behind the one we see and feel and touch.
As people of faith, we are convinced that there is something more out there, something beyond ourselves. If that doesn’t make you curious, I don’t know what will! We are more than encouraged to be curious. We’re allowed to have Doubt, when done in Faith.
When we Edge God Out, we start to take our lives and God’s creation of abundance for granted. We start to have expectations about what we deserve in life. Expectations where we think something we put out into the world is then owed back to us.
For example, we’re taught in America about the American Dream. We’re taught that people who attain great riches here on Earth are somehow smarter, or work harder than the rest of us. Where is God in the American Dream? Sounds a lot like Edging God Out to me.
I’ve personally seen people attain material wealth, and I can tell you there’s a lot to be said for being in the right place, at the right time. You can be very smart and work very hard and not end up wealthy. Some people care about more. We Christians care about more.
Because Edging God Out misses the fundamental point of our faith: that God has already given us everything we need: a sun that shines, the atmosphere we breathe, the abundance of His creation, our very lives and lives of everyone else that has ever and will ever live.
As Christians, we simply try to get ourselves out of the way, so that we can pass along the bountiful grace of God. We try to be EGO-less whenever possible. Because when we get our EGOs out of the way, we can be a channel of God’s grace, and become useful to God.
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She Thinks I Still Care
Becoming EGO-less requires a deep sort of honesty. We need to be honest about where the blessings in our lives really come from. We know they come from God when we think about it, but that can be difficult to remember at times.
When our lives are going great, for example, we tend to think that we’re geniuses, or super-hard-workers. “I have this good life because of me!” we think. Remember my dreaded Dark Period of Self-Will? The DPSW? It was all about thinking I deserved everything I had.
But it’s even easier to find yourself in a DPSW when things are going badly. When something really difficult happens in our lives, we might find ourselves in a depression, where we think we did something to deserve the struggles we’re going through.
Now, of course sometimes we have done something to deserve our situation. I mean, it’s not like I hadn’t worked hard during my DPSW. And if I knock over a liquor store after church it would be hard to argue I hadn’t done something to find myself arrested.
But there are far more times than not we have trouble being honest with ourselves about the extent to which our lives are shaped by God’s Will, plain and simple. For example, what if I’m born with an innate musical ability? Or what if I found myself with a terrible disease?
The start to being able to live more of our lives with the sort of profound awareness of God’s Will in our lives is being honest with ourselves. Honesty can be difficult in general. “Honey, why didn’t you mow the lawn?” Excuses are sometimes easier than the truth. “I didn’t want to.”
The most difficult type of honesty is being honest with ourselves. Now, in my life I’ve spent a decent amount of time studying some obscure types of Philosophy. And to talk more about this, I’m going to need to dive into some fairly esoteric stuff: country music.
The song “She Thinks I Still Care,” which found itself at the top of the country music charts in May of 1962, was written and recorded by George Jones. The lyrics are a masterclass in self-deception. They go like this:
Just because I asked a friend about her
Just because I spoke her name somewhere
Just because I rang her number by mistake today
She thinks I still care
Just because I haunt the same old places
Where the memory of her lingers everywhere
Just because I'm not the happy guy I used to be
She thinks I still care
But if she's happy thinking I still need her
Then let that silly notion bring her cheer
But how could she ever be so foolish
Oh were would she get such an idea
Just because I asked a friend about her
Just because I spoke her name somewhere
Just because I saw her then went all to pieces
She thinks I still care
I mean, why would she think he still cares? Just because he was asking people about her? Sure, he rang her number – but it was by mistake! Of course he hangs out all the places she used to, and he’s depressed, and he falls to pieces when he sees her.
Why does she think he still cares? Because he does! And of course, listening to this song, we know without a doubt that he does, indeed, still care. But we also understand what he’s doing, because most of us can relate. He’s lying to himself, because it’s easier than being honest.
You can imagine the conversations old George might be having with his friends. “George, maybe she just wasn’t the right one for you.” Loud sobbing. A friendly hand rubbing his back. And the worst part is, she doesn’t just think he cares – she knows it.
Now, I hope that George’s friend isn’t telling him “George, it’s just God’s plan that she left you.” Of course, no one wants to hear that when they’re suffering. They just want to be comforted. But eventually, I do hope George comes to realize that she has left, and he does care.
George is sad because he thinks maybe she was The One. That’s how he feels in the song. He’s sad because he doubts he will ever find another like her. I hope that on the other hand, George doesn’t just try on a different kind of deception. “I never cared about her anyway!”
Because this is pride, and it’s just as dangerous as being doubtful he’ll ever be happy again. Do you see how both George doubting he’ll ever find anyone else, and telling himself in pride that he never cared anyway are both forms of fear?
Remember how we talked about the way fear is a biological response? If we are going through this sermon together and suddenly: there is a bear! What would our bodies tell us to do? Our bodies tell us to control the object of fear, to kill the bear, or distract it, or hide from it.
You see, fear comes from a deeply biological level. If a bear were to suddenly appear, the amygdala deep in the middle of our brains would go to work. It alerts your nervous system, which sets your body’s fear response into motion. You can do nothing about this.
Stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline would be released. Your blood pressure and heart rate increase. You start breathing faster. Even your blood flow changes — blood actually flows away from your heart and into your limbs, making it easier for you to run for your life.
When we are afraid, our bodies prepare us for something called “Fight or Flight.” As you can see from the broken down description of what’s happening in our bodies when we are afraid, it’s both an intense reaction, and it’s totally involuntary.
George, because he’s afraid about her leaving him, is sitting in fear. And he’s trying to control that fear. In the song, he’s controlling it by fighting in. “She thinks I still care, but I really don’t. I’m over it.” He’s in Fight Mode, of the Fight or Flight reaction.
But he could also be reacting to his fear with more of a Flight reaction. “I never cared about her that much anyway.” Forget fighting his fear head-on, in this reaction George just runs away from his fear entirely. He “still cares?” Nah, he never even cared to start with.
You see, both these potential – highly likely – reactions to George’s break-up are ways to control fear. What is the opposite of control? Trust. What’s there to be afraid of if you’re trusting? You look at the “bear” and realize “that’s just Pete’s dog! He won’t hurt us!”
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From Job to Jesus
If there is one person in the Bible who finds even more hardship in his life than poor old George, it’s Job. Job is a wealthy man living in a land called Uz with his large family and extensive flocks.
Job is “blameless” and “upright,” always careful to avoid doing evil (Job 1:1). One day, Satan (“the Adversary”) appears before God in heaven. God boasts to Satan about Job’s goodness, but Satan argues that Job is only good because God has blessed him abundantly.
Satan challenges God that, if given permission to punish the man, Job will turn and curse God. God allows Satan to torment Job to test this bold claim, but he forbids Satan to take Job’s life in the process. So Satan goes to work. And it gets really bad for Job.
In the course of one day, Job receives four messages, each bearing separate news that his livestock, servants, and ten children have all died due to marauding invaders or natural catastrophes.
Job tears his clothes and shaves his head in mourning, but he still blesses God in his prayers. Satan appears in heaven again, and God grants him another chance to test Job. This time, Job is afflicted with horrible skin sores.
His wife encourages him to curse God and to give up and die, but Job refuses, struggling to accept his circumstances. This is when he utters one of my all-time favorite passages of the Bible, Job 1:21. If you remember one thing from this sermon, remember that verse. Job 1:21.
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I will depart. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; may the name of the Lord be praised.” God blessed me, and now those blessings are gone. He has given, and He has taken away. Pure poetry (literally, it’s a poem).
Let the profound nature of Job’s utterance sink in. “What did I do to deserve all the good in my life?” he’s asking us. “God gave it to me to start with. And now He has taken it away.” Then he says, “may the name of the Lord be praised.”
Now, while I always use the New International Version of the Bible when quoting scripture in sermons, in this case I want to point out that this last part of the verse isn’t as straightforward as it seems in this translation.
The New Revised Standard Version, for example, translates “may the name of the Lord be praised” as “blessed be the name of the Lord.” So does the King James Version. I like these translations a bit better, because “blessed” has this sense of awe in it.
“Awe” as in “awesome.” But also “awe” as in “awful.” Awe has a sense within it of wonder. “God gave me everything, and He took everything away. I am in awe of God and bless his name.” To me, this verse is saying something more like that.
Job isn’t falling into the same swampy ground of fear, doubt, and pride that George does in She Thinks I Still Care. Job isn’t going into Fight mode, and saying “I’m alright with this.” And he’s not running away from it, either. “I never cared about any of this anyway.”
Instead, Job’s reaction comes from a place of radical honesty. Honesty with himself and his situation. And because he’s starting from that place, he’s able to do something profound. He’s able to be honest about the role of God in his life as well.
Job doesn’t say “all the hard work I did to earn all the things in my life!” Instead, Job says “the Lord gave me everything.” And let’s look closely at what that initial honesty means for his situation.
In psychology, there is something called The Dunning-Kruger effect. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people incorrectly overestimate their abilities in a specific area, and underestimate the abilities of others.
You see The Dunning-Kruger effect all the time with sports fans. When the team a sports fan roots for is victorious, it’s always “we won!” But when that same team loses, more often you hear “they lost.” We won, but they lost. Do you see what’s going on there?
Job doesn’t end up saying “I’m so unlucky that all this bad stuff happened to me” because he doesn’t start from the premise “I am so smart, and I worked so hard for everything I have, I totally deserve everything in my life.”
Because Job is EGO-less from the start, and able to see everything around him in life as a blessing from God, Job is able to likewise praise God in the loss of those blessings. Job is operating from a place of radical honesty – honesty with himself, and honesty about God.
Job doesn’t find himself in fear when something bad happens, like poor George, precisely because Job had trusted God when good things were happening. And most importantly, Job was able to recognize those good things as coming from God, not himself.
Because Job’s ego was never at the center of his understanding of good times, it wasn’t there to be shattered when bad times came along. And because Job’s ego wasn’t being built up when times were good, he had less to be afraid of when times turned bad.
Likewise, Jesus, being fully man and fully God, shows one of his most human moments in the Garden of Gethsemane. Three times Jesus prays for a different outcome. A different way to achieve God’s plan for him in his time here on Earth.
This is one of the moments when Jesus is showing us precisely what it means to be human. Jesus is showing us here that it’s alright to doubt. It’s alright to want to be sure of God’s plan. It’s alright to ask God for the strength to follow-through.
Jesus is showing us what Doubt in Faith looks like. Not Doubting Faith, but Doubt done in Faith. Just like Job, Jesus is showing us how to execute God’s plan. Jesus is showing us that He was here on Earth to Do God’s Work, Not God’s Job.
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Do God’s Work, Not God’s Job
While Job utters that beautiful statement near the beginning of his story, that’s not the end. Job finally does let his EGO get in the way. He never thinks perhaps he might have done something to deserve all the bad that has happened to him. His EGO pops up in another way.
Remember that for Job to think he deserves the bad, Job must first think that he’s done something to deserve the good. This is, in fact, the very idea that Satan wants to test by asking God for permission to torture poor Job.
It’s called Disinterested Righteousness. Satan is testing whether Job is faithful simply because his life is so abundant. Does Job have faith only because he expects something good from God as a result? This is what Satan wants to find out. In Job 1:10-11:
“You have blessed the work of his hands, so that his flocks and herds are spread throughout the land. But now stretch out your hand and strike everything he has, and he will surely curse you to your face.”
At first, Job has the viewpoint of “God gave to me, and now He takes away. God is great and I don’t understand.” But there’s a twist to the story: Job’s friends show up. And for weeks, his friends give him trouble about his situation.
Job’s friends say he must have done something to deserve all the bad that has happened to him. But Job maintains that he did nothing to deserve the bad, just as he had done nothing to deserve the good.
But after weeks of this, Job starts to believe his friends a little. Job never questions whether he deserves either the good or the bad that’s happened to him. And he never questions his faith in God. But Job does start to think perhaps God has failed to understand Job’s faith.
And God answers him in Job 38:4-7: “Where were you when I laid the earth’s foundation? Tell me, if you understand. Who marked off its dimensions? Surely you know! Who stretched a measuring line across it? On what were its footings set, or who laid its cornerstone?”
Note the details of God’s response here. God doesn’t say “Job, I am all-powerful, and I will do to you whatever I want!” Of course, that would be true. God can do whatever God wants. IT is never a good route to be taking when we find ourselves doubting that.
But what God tells Job is specifically “Job, I made this.” The most important part of that statement is the “I” part. God made creation. And God delights in blessing the righteous. There is no question about that. It’s all through the Bible.
But God is also wise. Quite a bit more wise than we are. God made us, and God made us in His image. What did we do to deserve to be born? Much less to be born in God’s image? Is there something we did to deserve the sunshine, or the abundance of God’s Creation?
We did nothing to deserve these things. And these fundamentals are given to everyone we know. Life. Our planet. The ability to do good, to be a channel for God’s grace. If God wanted to torture us, why would he make us with the capacity for such things as love? Forgiveness?
You see, what God has in mind for us has nothing to do with what we “deserve.” And thank goodness for that. All we can do is ask to channel God’s grace in the highest form of honor we can pay God: to be useful for His purposes.
That is righteousness for the sake of righteousness. Because we believe that God is wise, and God loves us, and wants the best for us, we can trust Him. We try not to Edge God Out with our EGOs, and instead place our lives in His care and control.
When we have doubts, we Doubt in Faith. We don’t get into the pattern of Doubting Faith. We don’t Fear, because we Trust. And because we Trust, we don’t feel the need to control everything. We know that God will use us for His purpose. And we take comfort in that.
When we suffer, we should focus on the future, on what purpose God has for us, rather than the past, on what might be the cause of our suffering. We want to make ourselves useful to do God’s Work, and the first step in that is recognizing that we can’t do God’s Job.
This week, I noticed a woodpecker that appeared most mornings, and this woodpecker was making some very loud, very strange sounds. When I went investigating, I found out that this woodpecker was pecking at something metal, instead of wood.
It reminded me that thinking we can do God’s Job instead of God’s Work is absolutely futile. Why even try? Stop pecking at the metal parts of life. Find yourself a tree, and trust you’ll be able to peck your way to what you need.
God offers the fulness of abundance to provide our needs. We were created to enjoy that abundance. But we have to get our EGOs out of the way. We have to start seeing our lives for the radical blessings that they are.
To do God’s Work and not God’s Job, we have to see that both the “good” and the “bad” things that happen to us are a part of God’s plan. We can’t hope to understand it. But if we go with the program and make ourselves useful to God’s purpose, we can find utter contentment.
We can find comfort, and peace in our lives by making ourselves useful to God. We can experience the joys of love, and kindness, and forgiveness. God has already given us all those. By getting our EGOs out of the way, we can pass them along to others. We can find purpose.
