God Will
But we must
Scripture Reading: Acts 27:24,26
God has granted you all those who sail with you…but we must run aground on some island…
I find the interplay between the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man fascinating. Paul intermingles them seamlessly in the narrative of Acts 27. On the one hand, he speaks with confident faith that God will save, not only him but everyone on the ship. No one is going to die at sea, at least not then, and he believed that because that’s what God said to him. God would, by His sovereign decree, save the lives of everyone onboard.
Then, before those encouraging words have a chance to settle in the hearts of those to whom Paul was speaking, he starts telling them what they had to do. Man’s responsibility. They had something to do. To put it in a folksy way: God may decree the hole, but that doesn’t mean we are supposed to stand around leaning on our shovels.
God is going to save, but He uses the proclamation of the gospel to do it. Christ will grow His church, but He uses the active work of the members of His body, using their spiritual gifts to build up His church. God will grow and sanctify us, but He uses our praying, our consistent intake of His word, and our daily walk with Christ to do it.
God is sovereign. Man is responsible. These two things are not at odds with each other, nor in conflict with each other even if we don’t fully understand how they work together.
