Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.
—1 Corinthians 7:20
Where do you begin digging out after a major winter storm with days of blowing and drifting snow? I always begin right outside my garage door. As the door opens, I begin shoveling the knee-high drift that appears between my outside car and the garage door. I cannot get my show blower out of the garage until I move my car. I cannot move my car until I clear it off. So, the first thing I do is shovel a path through the drift and around the car. I believe the same principle applies to the Christian life.
Shortly after I accepted Christ at age eighteen, 1 Corinthians 7:20 stood out to me in my first read through the New Testament. “Each person should remain in the situation they were in when God called them.” I was a student at Penn State University but didn’t exactly understand what that meant for me. I guess I disobeyed its instruction as I dropped out of school after the next trimester. “Remain in the situation” may mean begin to live your Christian life right where you are. Jesus told the disciples in Acts 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” The disciples began being witnesses of God’s grace right where they were, in Jerusalem, before moving on to Judea and Samaria.
Most of us have heard the expression, “Bloom where you are planted.” We may rephrase that for winters in the Laurel Highlands as, “Begin shoveling the sidewalk at your own front door.” God may call many of you to different vocations and locations in the New Year, but until then, God calls us to serve Him now right where we are. The most important place to live out our Christian life is at home followed by our neighborhood, our job, our church, and then our world. We often become disgruntled with those people and situations closest to us and long for the day when our circumstances will change. As long as God needs us there, our circumstances will not change.
God may be calling us to begin right where we are. Oswald Chambers writes, “God engineers everything; wherever He puts us our one great aim is to pour out a wholehearted devotion to Him in that particular work” (December 16). Nehemiah 3:22-24 reports that in rebuilding Jerusalem’s walls, “Benjamin and Hasshub made repairs in front of their house, next to them, Azariah made repairs beside his house.” Individuals took responsibilities for their own neighborhoods.
A City on Our Knees, a song by tobyMac, asks two questions, “If you gotta start somewhere why not here? If you gotta start sometime, why not now?” Many of us have much that needs to be done in the upcoming year. Why not start shoveling the snow at our front door? Why not start shoveling today? Don’t wait for some huge opportunity in some distant land to begin serving the Lord. Why not start right here, right now? I am praying for new and great opportunities for all of us in 2011. But until the new and great comes, let us hone our skills and serve the Lord right here and now. Happy New Year.
