It’s vital that while we set our aims—whether to be a witness in the workplace, a pastor, raise a family to serve the Lord, or my own specific desires and calling that I’ve written about a bit—that they are godly (all those examples are), but that we think that success is being obedient to God. If it fails but we failed well, by which I mean obediently in holiness and repenting of our sin where it is to be found, then that is successful in the kingdom.

Well if God’s called you, it’ll work out.

I’ve been told this lots of times myself, I think I believe it half of the time. But it’s not true. Not in the way we mean it anyway.

What we’re saying is, you’re going to do this risky seeming thing on the basis of your faith that God wants you to do it, so the risky thing will work out, right? It follows, except it’s not my experience. I’ve followed God into several things in my life that’s it’s unclear why I was ‘called’ (assuming I’m right that I was, but let’s leave that question aside for now), and what I was attempting certainly wasn’t successful in any real sense that I could describe. Neither, in most instances, has it been the kind of abject failure that might make you decide you weren’t called after all, though I’ve certainly questioned these things many times.

The original statement is true in a sense, if God called you, the end for which he called you will definitely work out. The problem is that God does every action for a thousand ends, most of which are hidden from us, and it’s possible that none of them are the grand end that you’re thinking of.

To take an example that isn’t from my own life—imagine you moved to plant a church. Surely that means that the church will grow, even though it might be hard graft? I think most of us would realise that isn’t true objectively but would expect it to be true for us. Sometimes church plants fail. Does that mean that the planter wasn’t called by God? I don’t think that follows at all, the Lord is much more concerned with our character and with the individual person-to-person pastoring we do than in our institutions (though I believe he loves those too).

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