I admit that when I started writing this morning, I began by rhetorically asking the wrong question.
The question I had planned on considering in this post was: "what would you do if you could do just one thing?" This was the question I was asked over and over and over again in an attempt to help me understand what I ought to do with my life. I suppose I was asked a similar question to this one in High School on one of those tests that was supposed to help me figure out my future. As I got older, the question was framed differently: "what would you do if you never got paid?" Or, on the flip side, "what would you do if you had a million dollars?" (Most of my life, it seemed to me that the only person to ever have answered that question truthfully was Peter Gibbons: "Nothing. I'd do absolutely nothing.") Unfortunately, it's the wrong question, and a misleading one at that.
First, it's the wrong question because God has already given us a "one thing to do". If the "doing just one thing" question has any value, it is supposed to guide every other choice that you make. If you can figure out the one big thing, the "vision for your life", then you can figure out everything else that you need to do to get there.
I remember reflecting on this several years ago when I was thinking about my career choice. I had been in ministry for several years and I was frustrated at where I was. For some reason it occurred to me that if I wanted to switch careers, I would need to figure out what I wanted to do and then if I could figure that out, it would guide my choices for today. When my time finally came to enter this new career, maybe several years from now, I would be ready because I would have been targeting it the whole time. I decided the same thing had to happen for me in ministry. At the time, I may not have had a particular assignment, but if I really felt the call to be in ministry, it was imperative that I continue to prepare myself. That way, when my number got called, I was ready to go.
The Bible gives every Christian a "one thing to do" that ought to give us guidance and vision for everything else that we do. To be a Christian means that we have put our total confidence in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to reconcile us to God. This reconciliation was necessary because we were on a path of destruction; we were living our own way, chasing our own dreams, ignoring God's will and reign. We were in bondage; now we have been set free.
What follows from that freedom is a new mission: to bring glory to God because of the work of Jesus Christ. Everything you do now will be to that end. It is the primary calling on your life; the thing that guides every choice you make. The Christian declares, "My goal is to advance the Kingdom of God and to ensure that His will is done in this domain, the earth, as it is in the domain of Heaven."
This is the lead calling in the life of the Christian, that, when you have understood it, will profoundly influence how you answer the question above about the "one thing you would do". It answers the question and unseats whatever answer was there before. All of us, no matter our daily occupations, are kingdom builders. That is "the one thing that we must do."
In my experience most people are unable to articulate this as their chief end or their purpose. They believe that Christianity is about being good, or doing the right things, or about being moral or ethical or Republican or Democrat or accepting or loving or tolerant. Jesus has moved from being "savior who calls us into a new kingdom" to "good example who teaches us how to live". They were never told in advance that following Christ means a radical alteration of how we view the world and our purpose within it. The broad implications of this are that the church isn't making much headway advancing the actual kingdom of God. A kingdom that reflects us? Sure. But not a kingdom that reflects God's will and his ideals.
It is imperative that we understand this primary goal and chief calling. Without it, our life will reflect only our desires and our passions and our will and will never be guided by the desires, passions, and will of God. And they might be vastly different things.
Second, because God's "one thing" adds purpose and redeems our real life. Is it just me, or does the "one thing" question lead you to a point where you start to feel like unless you do something massive and extraordinary, you are sort of a waste of space?
I was reading the story of William Wilberforce this morning, the man who is credited with leading England to abolish the slave trade in the 18th century. We read a story like his and then we ask, "so what is God calling ou to do?" And the result is that we feel obligated to come up with something huge and world-changing: I'm going to abolish sex-trafficking or hunger or malaria or become the pastor of a mega-church or write a best-seller on the Gospel or whatever. Or, on the other side, we just get depressed. Depressed because we realize that most of those things seem hopelessly unrealistic.
Here's the thing about Wilberforce: when he became a Christian, he was already a member of Parliament. He was already influential. He was young. His buddy was the Prime Minister. He was wealthy. He had a bunch of tools in place and didn't really know what to do with them; up until he became a Christian, he had basically squandered all of it and used it to his own gain. Then Jesus showed up. Far from sitting him down in a room and saying, "now William, what is the one thing you would do?", Jesus instead gave William's work real and lasting value. Now, William knew, my goal is to glorify God. How has God set me up to do that?
Interestingly, William almost derailed what was eventually God's plan for his life by trying to answer the "one thing" question on his own terms. If you asked him after he became a Christian, "what is the one thing you would do if you could only do one thing" William would have said, "be a member of the clergy." Thank goodness he never did that. The right answer was, "glorify God". He didn't need to be a member of the clergy to do that.
God's purpose for your life gives your life direction and purpose that is already higher and more important than whatever you could come up with yourself. The Christian person raising kids in suburban New Jersey and the Christian person trying to solve world hunger have both been given the same purpose, the same "one thing": to glory God and bring his kingdom and will in the world. Some of us do that by raising Christian children who will run Christian businesses and operate with proper ethics and do their job well and earn money so they can give it away. Others of us will do that by moving to a remote village somewhere in the world and explaining the Gospel to it's inhabitants. What gives any of our work meaning is this: it is for the glory of God.
A much better question for the Christian, then, ought to be this. How am I advancing the kingdom of God and his will in the life that I already live? And then, how can I invite others along with me on the journey?
You are a kingdom builder already; what you are doing is already extraordinary. It is supernatural. You are bringing God's kingdom here as it is there. That's your task, no matter what you are doing today.
And that's the reality that ought to shape our choices today, and our vision for our future.