We must rethink “Let go and let God.”  The intended sentiment is not bad, of course. We absolutely must trust God.  But the concept as stated too often takes us to a place Bible does not.  The way we trust God is not by being passive and just waiting.  We have much to do!  This is true in personal holiness.  God changes us – what happens in us is the work of the Holy Spirit, yet we must work hard at holiness.  We must long for it, thirst for God and His ways.  “As the deer pants for the water, so my soul longs after you, Lord” (Psalm 42:1).  Likewise, this is true in vocation.  God is in charge, fully, of our opportunities, but we must work as diligently as possible to develop the opportunities we can.  “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.” (Colossians 3:23, NIV).  Instead of “Let go and let God,” we must embrace both doctrines, just as the Bible does.  It may not be as pithy, but give it everything you’ve got and then trust God for the results.

It is high time to put open and closed doors in their place.  “Well, that’s an open door, so I guess God wants me to walk through it.”  Or, “That’s a closed door, so it must not be God’s will.”  Such statements sound like trust in God, but in fact they indicate Christians taking the path of least resistance, not necessarily following God’s calling as we choose our vocations and make other important choices.

Sometimes God wants us to beat on a closed door until we break it open.  William Wilberforce famously heard God’s call, not to ministry but to the work of government, to service as a Minister of Parliament, his mission to oppose the transatlantic slave trade in the British Empire.  He famously stated, “It would merit no better name than desertion if I were thus to fly from the post to which Providence has placed me.”  Yet William Wilberforce persisted in his calling for twenty-six years will little to no success, his mission a fool’s errand.  Only in his twenty-seventh year of effort did God suddenly bless his work for justice.  Similarly, if Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders had treated civil rights for Black Americans as a closed door, what would our nation have lost?  Sometimes a closed door is actually God’s call, a call to push, push, push until it finally opens.

Scripturally, the prophet Isaiah received a famous call, one he recounts in the book of Isaiah chapter 6: “And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?’ Then I said, ‘Here I am! Send me.’”  What is less famous is God’s promise that immediately follows, that he will have no success, that no one will listen to him:

He said, “Go and tell this people: ‘Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving.’ Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed.” Then I said, “For how long, Lord?” And he answered: “Until the cities lie ruined and without inhabitant, until the houses are left deserted and the fields ruined and ravaged, until the Lordhas sent everyone far away and the land is utterly forsaken. And though a tenth remains in the land, it will again be laid waste. But as the terebinth and oak leave stumps when they are cut down, so the holy seed will be the stump in the land.” (Isaiah 6:9–13, NIV)
Isaiah was called by God, but he was called to beat on a closed door.  As were so many others: Elijah, Jeremiah, Micah, Shemaiah…  As the book of Hebrews says, “The world was not worthy of them.”  They followed God’s call, but it was hardly an open door.  Yes, sometimes God wants us to beat on a closed door until we break it open – or even end our days without ever having managed to break it down.

Other times, God wants us to look at an open door and walk right past.  In Acts 16, Paul and Barnabas are in prison for the usual reason, proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Arrested unjustly, at the instigation of a mob, after delivering a young woman from a demon, they are thrown into the inner prison, beaten, their feet fastened in stocks.  In the middle of the night, God sends an earthquake, one that literally opens the prison doors: “At once all the prison doors flew open, and everyone’s chains came loose” (verse 26).  Though this is an earthquake-prone region of the world, this is clearly a supernatural deliverance, as even an earthquake would not make a prisoner’s chains come loose from wrists and ankles.  If I were in prison unjustly, only for doing right, and if I knew that I might well be killed the next morning, and if then God sent an earthquake that freed me from my chains and opened the prison doors – well, I don’t know about you, but I’d be gone.  But when the jailer rushes in and, thinking the prisoners must have escaped, prepares to take his own life, Paul calls out, “We are all here.”  Faced with a supernaturally open door, Paul and Barnabas somehow knew that they ought not walk through it.

In other words, Christian decision making is more complex than closed or open doors.  In fact, closed and open doors may mean the reverse of what they seem.  We must do better.

To make better sense of this, we must understand the biblical doctrine of providence.  To define this doctrine theologically, we can go to many traditions in many places, but the Westminster Confession of Faith does it well:

God the great Creator of all things does uphold, direct, dispose, and govern all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least, by His most wise and holy providence, according to His infallible foreknowledge, and the free and immutable counsel of His own will, to the praise of the glory of His wisdom, power, justice, goodness, and mercy. Westminster Confession of Faith V.1

In other words, not only are we, as the image of God, not an accident, but what has occurred in our lives is also not an accident, nor are the opportunities which we have and do not have an accident. God is in control, and the situation in which we find ourselves, even if it limits our vocational options, is a part of God’s providence.

That said, providence often looks quite ordinary.  The Westminster Confession continues:

Although, in relation to the foreknowledge and decree of God, the first Cause, all things come to pass immutably, and infallibly; yet, by the same providence, He orders them to fall out, according to the nature of second causes, either necessarily, freely, or contingently. – Westminster Confession of Faith V.2

“Second causes” is a technical term in the Confession, often unclear to the modern reader unless we know the discussion from which the term arises.  Those who wrote the confession, the Westminster Divines, were stepping into a Medieval debate about the nature of created things, whether created things have essentially the same nature or multiple natures, and they took the – hopefully relatively obvious – conclusion that created things have manifold natures.  When a rock moves from the top of a hill to the bottom, it has no agency; it is merely acted upon.  When you or I move from the top of a hill to the bottom we have agency (unless we are pushed!).  We make a choice; we are volitional creatures.

The doctrine of providence asserts that God’s control is remarkably comprehensive, including all things, yet our actions matter.  For example, we pray before a meal to thank God for His provision of the food.  Yet that food came from a farmer’s work, harvested by human effort, packaged up and sold, then purchased with our money earned from our work, cooked in our kitchen by our own effort.  Nonetheless, we do not offer Bart Simpson’s blessing: “Dear God, we paid for all of this ourselves, so thanks for nothing.”  Yes, we did pay for the food; we did cook it; and we can even explain water cycles and sun and soil nutrients and all the rest.  Yet we rightly thank God for the food because we recognize his providential control and care in this long chain of both human and natural actions.  As secondary causes, they are how he usually provides for us.

Further, the Confession’s enunciation of the doctrine of providence makes it clear that God works through means:

God, in His ordinary providence, makes use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure. – Westminster Confession of Faith V.3

In other words, God has set up this world and controls this world such that things usually occur as results.  As God, He is always free to do more, to do anything He wants, no matter how miraculous, to work “without, above, and against” means.  Normally, however, God works through means, and those means include second causes, even – and maybe even especially – our volitional choices.

So it is with our vocational choices.  God is always free to simply and miraculously drop a great career in front of us, without any effort on our own part.  Usually, however, He works through means, and our own actions are one of those means.  If that is the case, then do not be surprised that working hard and studying gives better grades than not.  Do not be surprised that going to law school makes it more likely to get a job as a lawyer.  Do not be surprised that doing well in medical school makes it more likely to match in our preferred area of specialization.  Second causes are normal in the world we live in, and the opportunities we make through our own efforts are exactly that.  They are under God’s full providential control, but our work is certainly the way He brings them to us.  In other words, hard work – including that on vocational choice – pays off…usually.  One can always find counterexamples, both where hard work fails to pay off and where the slacker gets through, but that is not the norm.

Every Christian theological tradition assents to two biblical doctrines, God’s sovereignty and our responsibility.  Each is evident in the Bible, so all Christian traditions except the most imbalanced will acknowledge them both.  These two doctrines, however, seem to cut against each other.   If God is in control of everything, then how possibly can I be responsible for what I do – because God controlled me doing it?  How am I not just a robot?  Or if I have volitional choice, then how can God really be in control?  Because of that tension, most every Christian tradition says it assents to both doctrines, but in practice, if we examine how we teach, how we counsel, how we pray, how we evangelize, how we grieve, we have one of these as a really solid, fleshed out, lived out doctrine and the other present, but only as a paper-thin version.

One group of Christian traditions deeply incarnates and lives out its doctrine of human responsibility.  We experience that in the evangelism guilt trip, for instance: “If you don’t share the gospel with her, it’s your fault that she went to hell.”  We hear the emphasis, “Nobody else is going to go out there and do it.”  These Christian theological traditions have a robust doctrine of human responsibility.  They still acknowledge God’s sovereignty, but a paper-thin version of the doctrine.  Theologically these traditions are called Arminian Theology and Open Theology.

On the other hand, another group of Christian traditions deeply embodies and lives out God’s sovereignty, but sadly at the expense of human responsibility.  We experience this group with the evangelism rationalization: “Well, if he’s truly elect, God will bring someone else to share the gospel with him.”  When asked why we pray, these traditions quickly answer, “We don’t pray to change God’s heart. We pray to change our own.”  And yes, prayer does change us, but the Bible also says, “The prayer of a righteous man availeth much” (James 5:16, loosely KJV). This group of Christian traditions plays up God’s sovereignty, but at the expense of creating a paper-thin doctrine of human responsibility. These traditions are typically called “Calvinist,” though in point of fact they are more properly called “hyper-Calvinism.”

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