I don’t know who first used it this way, but I would like to muzzle whoever initially employed “whatever” as a slang term. According to that font of all popular knowledge, Wikipedia, "The term is used to dismiss a previous statement and express indifference and is usually considered offensive and impolite. In the late 20th century and early 21st century, the word became a sentence in its own right; in effect an interjection, it is used as a passive-aggressive conversational blocking tool, leaving the responder without a convincing retort." Anything a person says or does can be negated by the retort of “whatever.” It may be a hopeless cause, but I would like to return "whatever" to its proper meaning which according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “used to emphasize a lack of restriction in referring to anything or amount, no matter what.” Let's go back to the time when I said “whatever”(in this positive way) to God and encourage you to make a similar "whatever" declaration.
I grew up as a child of the sixties1 Most people think the defining moment for our generation was Woodstock, the festival billed as “three days of peace and music” that featured sex, drugs and roll and rock. My defining moment, however, happened three years later at what Time magazine called the “Jesus Woodstock,” a little gathering of between 80,000-250,000 (depending on the day) believers in Dallas, Texas known as Explo '72.
It was just a little over two months since my walk of faith had begun. Suzie Miller, the girl who led the Bible study where I first encountered people who talked about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, had invited me to go to with her to this "Jesus Rally" in Texas. She was the only person I knew at the conference, and soon as we got to Dallas we parted ways----Suzie was chaperoning a high school group, I was attending college-level meetings.
In the evenings all 80,000 plus of us attended worship gatherings in the Cotton Bowl. One evening, it had been pouring down rain as Christian apologist, Josh McDowell got up to speak. I don't remember what he had to say, except that at the end of his talk he challenged us to say a four-fold “whatever” to Jesus: “I will be whatever you want me to be. I will do whatever you want me to do. I will say whatever you want me to say. I will go everywhere you want me to go.” If we were willing to make this commitment, Josh asked us to stand. As I and about 70,000 others rose to our feet, the rain stopped, and a magnificent rainbow appeared in the sky. I remembered from my Sunday School lessons that the rainbow was a sign of the covenant between God and Noah after the flood. I took this Cotton Bowl rainbow as a sign that God was pleased with the commitment that I had just made and that He would hold me to it.
If you are hesitant to make such a commitment to God, go back and relearn Lesson 1. How could I say no to anything that God, who loves me unconditionally and always treats me with undeserved kindness, asks of me? Why would I be afraid to say yes to someone who is faithful to me, is crazy about me and will never stop loving me?
Sometimes we are timid about being who God wants us to be because people will think we are foolish. We forget that “…Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God. This foolish plan of God is wiser than the wisest of human plans, and God's weakness is stronger than the greatest of human strength.” (1 Corinthians 1:24b-25, NLT) We think doing whatever God asks us to do might be risky but fail to consider that the rewards far outweigh the risks. When we obey, we experience the same intimacy with Jesus that He experienced with His Father: “I have loved you even as the Father has loved Me. Remain in My love. When you obey My commandments, you remain in My love, just as I obey My Father's commandments and remain in His love.” (John 15:9-10) We don't want to promise to say anything God tells to because we fear He might want to make us His national spokesperson. (Don't feel too bad about this, even Moses talked God into letting his brother be the Exodus pitchman.) As followers of Christ, we are promised that the Holy Spirit will speak through us in times of crisis (Mark 13:11). Finally, people don't want to commit to going wherever God sends them for fear that God will dispatch them as a missionary to Africa. Personally, I am not sure why people always pick on Africa. There are worse places He could send you such as Philadelphia (any Pennsylvanians reading this please forgive me). In my case, God did send me as a missionary to Guam, Micronesia and the Philippines (all tropical paradises) for two years and it was one of the best experiences of my life.
The fear of saying yes to whatever God's calling is is based on the false belief that God wants us to be miserable. If we say yes to Him, He will require us to do something we are no good at which will drain the joy from our lives. In his book, Wishful Thinking, theologian Frederick Buechner states, “The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”2 Paul says, “God has made us what we are. He has created us in Christ Jesus to live lives filled with good works that He has prepared for us to do.” (Ephesians 2:10, GWT). Would a God that loves us so much that He sent His Son to die for us, create us just to torture us? No way! He knows how you are wired and the good works He has in mind for you to do require your unique abilities. When you do them, you will find satisfaction and people around you will be blessed.
Learning the Lesson
Meditate on the following passage:
God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and God lives in them. And as we live in God, our love grows more perfect. So we will not be afraid on the day of judgment, but we can face Him with confidence because we live like Jesus here in this world. Such love has no fear because perfect love expels all fear. If we are afraid, it is for fear of punishment, and this shows that we have not fully experienced His perfect love. We love each other because He loved us first. (1 John 4:16-19, NLT)
- What fears do you have about committing yourself totally to God?
- What do these fears show about your concept of God?
- Take a baby step…commit to do one thing God asks you to do this week.
[1]
For
those of you in younger generations, you may not realize that the
"sixties" did not start on January 1, 1960. The Sixties was a decade that can be measured
in several different ways. Musically, it
ran from February 9, 1964, when the Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan
television show to the summer of 1975 when the hit single The Hustle
issued in Disco Fever.
Politically, it began with the death of President Kennedy on November
22, 1963, and ended with the resignation of President Nixon on August 9, 1974. In many ways the sixties paralleled the
defining event of the era, the Vietnam War. Although it had been going on for a
while almost unnoticed by the American people, the conflict heated up rapidly
in 1964. In that year Congress approved
the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that gave the president the right to wage war
without declaring it. The war petered
out between 1973 when the Paris Peace Treaty was signed supposedly ending the
war and 1975 when Saigon was captured by the Communists—the actual end to the
war.
[2]
Buechner, Frederick. Wishful
Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC. New York:
Harper Collins, 1993, p. 119
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