The Corner of the Robe

Did God send me here, or did I send myself?

If you serve people for a living, or at midnight on your own gas money, you have probably asked it once and then set it down fast. Staying busy is easier than finding out.

Sit with it a minute. Picture the phone lighting up at 1 a.m. with a young person in trouble, and the small warm thing that rises in you before the worry does. Somebody needs me. Be honest about how good that feels. Some of us chose this work because a room full of people who need us is quieter than the room inside us. Some of us are short with our own families because nobody at the kitchen table looks at us the way a kid in the intake room does. The mind is good at this. It takes an old wound, maybe a father who never said you mattered, and builds a whole career on top of it so you never have to go back and look. Whole programs drift the same way, quietly needing the people they serve to stay in crisis, because crisis keeps the doors open. The heart is deceitful above all things (Jeremiah 17:9). It will even use ministry to hide.

So the question stays open. I am not going to close it for you this morning.

Listen to David, hiding from Saul in a cave:

I will cry unto God most high; unto God that performeth all things for me. (Psalm 57:2)

He was already anointed. The throne was promised. And in a cave in that same wilderness, Saul walked in alone, and David’s men whispered that this was the day (1 Samuel 24). He could have finished his own calling with a knife. He cut off a corner of the robe instead, and even that wounded his conscience. The Hebrew word behind performeth carries the sense of bringing something to completion. David would not complete by his own hand what God had said he would complete.

A self-sent person cannot wait. That is one honest test.

Jesus was offered every kingdom on earth with no cross required (Matthew 4:8-10), and he refused. He said he did nothing of himself (John 8:28). When the crowds wanted him, he slipped away to pray. He never needed to be needed, and he gave himself anyway, all the way to It is finished. That exposes us. It is also the rescue, because the work that matters most is done, and if you are in him, you are a child before you are a worker.

If God took the role away tomorrow, would that feel like relief, or like dying?

Your answer tells you something. Not everything. We have four more mornings.