Reflect on your life’s purpose.
Meditate on Scripture.
Think critically about this issue.
These prompts confuse me every time I see them. How do I “reflect?” “Meditate?” “Think critically?” My usual solution consists of closing my eyes extra hard, waiting for my thoughts to stop racing, and falling into a quick nap. I’m too ignorant to do any of these higher-level investigations. I need some help here because many matters in life deserve this sort of thinking.
During seminary, four questions – “Do? Be? Go? See?” – gave me enough direction to unpack important issues without sending me into an endless spiral of analysis paralysis. I may not work through all four questions for every project, nor do I use the framework for every issue. This framework works as a tool employed for appropriate purposes (analysis) and doesn’t work for inappropriate purposes (just go and do the thing). Over the next four weeks, I’ll show you how this framework works so that you might be able to think more deeply about the issues that the Lord has put on your heart.
What Should I Do?
The first question – “What should I do?” – comes up when we are confused. From the Christian background, it is properly “What things has God commanded me to do?” These commands can appear as literal commands, laws, implications of stories, and apparent suggestions, but all appear in Scripture and work by God’s Spirit.
While the authority of Scripture is a worthy topic, I’d rather reframe the issue of morality as it appears in Christianity. “Sin” is a common biblical Word that refers to “missing the target” of God’s law. But there’s another word in Scripture around the idea of morality: foolishness. Scripture calls it silly to act outside of God’s law. Why?
Disobedience as Foolishness
Bear with a silly illustration. Scripture teaches that God made people, so there exists a Creator-creature relationship between God and us. Humans know something about this because we make products all the time. People make phones, cars, and tools. We make things with purposes and design things for those purposes.
A phone, for example, has the purpose to communicate with others. A “10 Commandments” for a phone might look like the following. “Thou shalt not connect to two WiFi routers simultaneously. Thou shalt not heat thyself in a microwave. Thou shalt not attempt to chill one’s drink with thyself. Thou shalt not put thyself on a heating element so as to cook eggs on thyself. Thou shalt not throw thyself onto the ground. Thou shalt not use thyself to cut open a fruit. Thou shalt not use thyself as soap to clean thy neighbor. Thou shalt not use thyself to infect other phones with viruses. Thou shalt not continuously rotate thine screen interface, that it might go well with thee and extend thine use in thine master’s possession. Thou shalt not use thyself as a vehicle to transport thine master across the road.”
A phone has no will. Imagine a phone trying any of these things! These are all silly uses for a phone because none of them are designed to work in these ways. Some commands here are obvious, others less so. But all of them are foolish to disobey because they are outside of the intended purpose with which phones are designed.
Don’t be a Fool!
As you consider the question of “what should I do?”, think of God’s law of not only a list of do’s and don’t’s. Consider how commands in Scripture outline what is according to God’s design for us as humans and what is foolish for us, as people, to do!