God is My Inheritance

God is My Inheritance

It is easy to loose focus in this season that I’m going through – 2 months left till I graduate from business school with an MBA, school loans so insanely high that it would be a shame to even mention the debt, have not received a full-time job offer yet, no idea where my wife and I will relocate to, etc.  It would be nice to have an answer to these questions and it places a toll on me when I see those around me who do not acknowledge God receiving job offers and are in less debt than me.  It also becomes very easy to place all of my effort into a job search to catch that dream MBA job where my finances and geographic relocation hardly seem to matter.  The more time and effort I put into the job search, the less time and effort I place into my relationship with God.  What is my remedy?  Remembering that God is my inheritance, not a job.

What does it mean to say that God is my inheritance?  The things of this world will pass away, perish, or spoil and a job these days is kept on average for 2-5 years.  Remembering that God is my inheritance keeps my perspective not on the things which hardly matter, but The Thing that only matters.  Remembering that God is my inheritance keeps my perspective not on the dream job with the attractive compensation, but on my duty to serve Christ and to give to the needy (when I start making my income again!).  Remembering that God is my inheritance keeps my spirit strong throughout each of the job rejections that I receive and helps me to remember God’s plan for my life, not my desires for my life.

Now that my desires are in submission to God’s desires for my life, my fear of being unemployed after graduation for sometime subsides because by acknowledging and seeking God’s will for my life, my trust in God is being strengthened.  Therefore, my faith is being built because through my trust, I know that God will provide and that His plan is better than mine.

Recently, I realized that I was coming close to testing God.  Similar to how we do not use grace as a license to sin, we also cannot use God’s provision as a license to sit back and relax while God throws us blessings.  I have a solid opportunity on the horizon that I would love to have – it is pretty much my dream job.  I’m pretty close to receiving a full-time job offer.  I was placing all of my eggs in that basket – and this is how I realized that I was borderline testing God.  Since God provided in the past for me, He would provide again.  And if this is the door being opened, then what more did I have to do then to sit back and wait?  I quickly realized that God’s will is usually the opposite of what I expect – not because God is not faithful, but because my heart is yet to be aligned with God’s.  By my lack of action and my new mentality, I was acting as if I had the job already when in reality, I didn’t.  I see this as testing God.  So what did I do?

Please read this article How to Choose When You Don’t Know What to Choose.  I was convicted because I was not doing what the bible tells us to do.  Moreover, I was not doing what I preach.  If you have read the article, Ecclesiastes tells us to have more than one ambition, goal, task, etc. (whatever you want to call it) because we don’t know which God will choose to succeed.  This was my mistake: I stopped putting effort into the job search before I even received an offer, simply because I thought that this job was a sure bet!  So I found another opportunity that I am currently pursuing so that I can be sure to fulfill the teaching in Ecclesiastes.  Although I still have yet to receive an offer, I can now rest assured, knowing that since I am fulfilling my responsibilities, God will fulfill his promise of security.

Remembering that God is my inheritance brought me to this point of deep conviction and new direction, through reflecting on the Word of God.  If anyone out there is a reader and is interested, I’ll update the post when I hear any news on the job front!

-Mark