Faithful to God's Will (Urbana 84)
page 1 of 4by Ada Lum
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About Ada Lum (as of 1984).
The more we obey the Lord, the easier it is to obey him the next time. The goal becomes more distinct. If we learn to obey what is clear, it becomes easier to discern his will in an unclear situation. The more we love the Lord, the easier it is to obey him. And the more we obey the Lord, the easier it is to love him.
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The idea of becoming a missionary began as the wild dream of a teenager not long after I became a Christian from a rather decent pagan family. After my conversion I began to experience a new stability in my life - because Jesus was Lord of my life. And I also began to see other family members and friends turn to Jesus Christ and become likable people. So with adolescent insight, I saw clearly the logic of Jesus' Great Commission. Everyone should know Jesus and enjoy his blessings. I was idealistic enough to want to go and make disciples of all nations - or at least of one nation in particular: China. That was the nation my parents came from, and it had the most non-Christians. So I committed my life to the task of evangelizing China.
For the following twenty years I prepared, trained and tried to gain all kinds of experience for this life mission. When I finally went overseas, however, China's bamboo curtain had descended resoundingly with lead weights. I have served God in many countries, but not China. Over the years it gradually dawned on me that it had not necessarily been God's specific will for me to go to China.
Another conviction about God's will that I've lived and worked by, until recently, was that missionaries serve in their adopted country until they die, expecting to be buried there. I had been impressed by missionaries like Adoniram Judson. In 1812 he went overseas as one of America's first missionaries. For thirty-seven years and at great personal cost, Judson pioneered gospel work in Burma [today's Myanmar - ed.], laying down an unusually solid foundation. He went back to New England only once in those years. In 1850 he died and was buried in Rangoon beside two of his wives and infants. He had been faithful to God's will for his generation, and God took it on from there. (Though Burma closed its doors to outsiders in 1966, that work today is stronger and more widespread than ever.) So you can imagine what I used to think about missionaries who returned home for good, while still young and able. Surely, I thought, they had serious spiritual problems.
Yet this past year, with only twenty-two years of overseas experience and still young and able (I believe), I have been peacefully settling into a new ministry back home in Hawaii. My desire to see the gospel spread and churches planted securely around the world is livelier than ever. I still have the immense privilege of ministering to students and churches overseas. But when the proper time comes I expect to have my ashes scattered over the Hawaiian waters of the Pacific.
These are only two examples of how my understanding of God's will has been changed through the years. Has God misled me? Certainly not. Has his will been so difficult to discern? Not really. Or have I badly misconstrued his will for half of my Christian life? I don't think so. These areas I mention are minor details compared to God's overarching will that I serve him in some way anywhere. That has never changed. We learn the necessary details only as we are moving along this known road.
Now this was the experience of Abraham, the father of the Jews. In Hebrews 11:8, the writer comments, "by faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not, know where he was going." Knowing God's will takes time, not because he wants to make us sing for our supper. God never teases us. He has done everything celestially possible for us to know him and his purposes. But it takes time to know a person, his desires, his tastes. I understood my parents better as a teen-ager than as child. As an adult I came to know them and to enjoy them well enough to anticipate their wishes and to delight in carrying them out. Even when they were in their eighties I was still learning new things about them.
It took at least two years for Jesus' closest disciples to begin to comprehend his purposes and who he was. And they had the closest possible contact with Jesus. Even after his resurrection and well into their apostolic work, they revealed faulty understanding of his ultimate purposes for the world. But they kept moving. They followed hard what they did know.
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