The Power of Admitting, ‘I Don’t Know’
Our Mission
To present Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord to business and professional men and to develop Christian business and professional men to carry out the Great Commission.
Romans 12.2 commands, do not be conformed to this present world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind, so that you may test and approve what is the will of God – what is good and well-pleasing and perfect. Nearly everyone wants to know God’s will for their life. When thinking about this matter we usually place the onus of our ignorance upon God instead of ourselves. We think because we asked but didn’t hear it’s His fault for not communicating with us. What if He responded but we didn’t hear so He will tell us its our fault for not doing His will?
The verse in review today places the knowing of God’s will upon us and not God for doing what pleases Him. Knowing God’s will so that we can do God’s will is easy enough for us but we have to do something more than offer a quick prayer for direction the moment before we plan to take action.
Step one is to train our mind to think like God instead of thinking like everyone around us. The world has its way of doing things and God has His. God’s way of thinking is recorded in the Christian Bible. If we want to know God’s thoughts we have to read God’s Word. God’s Word reveals God’s will so that we are capable of obedience. It is the will of God and our compliance to it that will determine our eternal destiny. The opinion we have of our own goodness or worthiness to enter God’s eternal dwelling is irrelevant; only God’s opinion will matter when He decides who lives with Him and who lives apart from Him.
Step two is to engage God’s will as recorded in God’s Word to experience God’s presence and further leading. The Bible is crystal clear in the broad description of God’s will while leaving the specific obedience to that will subjective to each person and each circumstance. For example, God commands us to love our neighbor as we love our self. When Jesus was pressed for a practical definition of this command He told a story of a man needing help after being robbed and beaten. As we commit to obeying God, God by His Spirit, will place in our path opportunities to practically obey Him.
This leads to step three: stop looking to God to micromanage you and instead embrace the adventure of a living God working with you and through you to accomplish His purposes during the mundane course of your day. Most of us want to know specifics of God’s will for things like homes to buy, jobs to take or places to live. God wants us to love, serve, and give which can be done anywhere at any work in any place.
God isn’t a micromanager as much as He is the majority partner looking for a teammate to connect with for making Him known in the world. Knowing the will of God is easy, doing the will of God and trusting Him for clarity in the details is the hard part but the best part for experiencing God.
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MONDAY MANNA
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September 5, 2017
The Power of Admitting, ‘I Don’t Know’
by Jim Mathis
I was at a business seminar where the instructor advised attendees to never say, “I don’t know.” She said a better response is, “That is a good question,” or “Let me find out for you.” That sounds reasonable until we realize it denies the obvious – that we really don’t know everything, and sometimes it is not possible to find suitable answers to all our questions.
Since then I have noticed how many times I say, “I don’t know.” One morning at the tax office where I was working, the receptionist asked me why her computer said 10:30 when it was actually 9:30. I said, “I don’t know.” If I had been the IT person, I probably would have told her it was a good question and I would try to find the answer, especially since it might be indicating an even bigger problem. But not being a computer expert, a simple “I don’t know” seemed my best response. I once had a friend who cautioned about chasing “rabbit trails,” getting sidetracked by questions we did not need to answer.
Willingness to admit we don’t know everything might be an indicator of wisdom. We should have a desire to learn continually; that is how we grow in every area of our lives. However, assuming every problem has an easy answer, or we should somehow know the answer to every question, is naive.
When I was in the fifth grade, sometimes the teacher would ask the class a philosophical question, such as, “Why are we here?” I remember one of my classmates responding, “We can look it up in the encyclopedia.” I suppose the student had heard all the world’s knowledge was contained in those 20 volumes, and for us, it certainly looked like it. (These days we don’t need encyclopedias. We can just “Google” the answer.)
Today, I know a lot of things. Time, study and experience have taught me much. I am willing to pass along anything I know to anyone willing to listen, but since I don’t know everything, I am quick to admit, “I don’t know.” If nothing else, we can always suggest where or who someone might go to for the answer.
Sometimes admitting to ourselves, “I don’t know,” is a good thing in our relationship with God. We encounter a major obstacle at work, we pray about it, and then wonder how He can resolve it: “I don’t know.” Unexpected financial issues arise and we pray about that. How can God fix this? “I don’t know,” we say. And yet, He does.
The Bible is very clear on many matters, but there are things about God – and what He says in the Scriptures – that are not as easy to understand. This is why Dr. Paul Brand and Philip Yancey wrote in their book, In His Image, “Jesus Christ became the visible, finite expression of the invisible, infinite, inexpressible God.” We cannot understand everything about God. If we could, He wouldn’t be God.
We can be like the leaders of the Old Testament city of Berea, who “received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what (the apostle) Paul said was true” (Acts 17:11). Because as Paul wrote elsewhere, “the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the Lord’s people” (Colossians 1:26). Our desire should be to know God as intimately as possible.
However, we must also acknowledge God’s eternal truths are beyond full human understanding. This is why Hebrews 11:1 describes faith as “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” Trusting in God, in the workplace and our private lives, sometimes involves being willing to admit, “I don’t know.”
Jim Mathis is the owner of a photography studio in Overland Park, Kansas, specializing in executive, commercial and theatrical portraits, and operates a school of photography. He formerly was a coffee shop manager and executive director of CBMC in Kansas City, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri.
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