“And He said to them, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.” ~ Matthew 5:19-20
Decisions can be really tough. What to do for work? To move or not to move? Who to marry? Even things as simple as where to go for dinner can turn into agonizing questions!
We live in a time of extreme pragmatism. Most decisions made around us are done using pro’s and con’s lists, cost/benefit analysis, and personal desires. Sometimes when we are faced with questions or decisions as believers, we can slip into this similar pattern of looking at all decisions through a pragmatic lens.
Often, as Christians, we can refer to these pragmatic circumstances as an ‘open door’. I’ve done this myself. The theological implication is that God has sovereignly opened a door, and is calling us to walk through it. The point, of course, is that the decision is somehow made for us—we had no choice but to follow God’s leading by walking through the proverbial door.
While this seems tidy enough, it is simply NOT Biblical.
While God is certainly sovereign, Biblical decisions are often completely irrational from a worldly pragmatic perspective.
Think, for example, of Christ’s interactions with the disciples. When He first meets them, they are fishermen. They have been fishermen for generations, probably had thriving businesses, owned their own boats and nets, and were doing quite well financially.
Jesus comes to them and, without a single hint of pragmatism, tells them to follow Him. To do this, they would have to leave behind their families, their boats, their nets, their jobs, their livelihood…everything they had known. But Matthew tells us that they ‘immediately’ left their nets and followed Him.
Every pragmatic door was closed, so to speak. Every ‘pro' was on the side of staying put, and every ‘con’ was on the side of following Jesus. And yet, they left their nets and followed Him. Just because a circumstantial door appears to be open does NOT mean that God intends for us to walk through that door! Sometimes, the doors open in all the wrong places, and God’s will very different than pragmatism would have indicated.
Rather than looking for open doors, we need to pray and ask the Lord to guide us. This requires true submission to Christ and His will! We must be willing to have our hands open, rather than closed, and be ready to leave everything we love to follow Christ!
