God Is Looking for Someone Just Like You
by Bill Hybels
Have you ever wondered why, when you turn over your life to God, you don’t just get express-freighted right to heaven? Or, to put it a little more crassly, if you’re so heaven-bound, then why are you still sucking air down here?

Although countless trees have been killed in the name of explaining this issue of “why we are here,” I think there’s a single verse of Scripture that sheds as much light on the situation as anything else. Ephesians 2:10 says that “we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”

We were all created to do good works. I was created to do good works. Just as confidently, I’m here to tell you that you were created to do good works, which explains how I know that you have a holy discontent banging around in your brain somewhere—if you’re alive and kicking today, then there is a specific work that you are expected to do. There is a set of tasks with your name on it that God has given you to accomplish, and long before you actually arrived on the scene, God planted certain seeds in your soul that he remains whole-heartedly committed to watering, growing, and making into something meaningful, if you will let him.

The danger in opting out of the holy discontent pursuit is that in doing so, you also opt out of tackling the good works God has wired you up to accomplish. The goal, friends, is to cultivate your soul’s soil so that this doing-of-good-works process can unfold in your life—or, as you might say, to opt in. There is no greater satisfaction this side of heaven!

Let me offer a brief word about this “specific work” idea. While I believe that it is extremely important to pay attention to holy discontent whenever it occurs in your spirit, I don’t believe that every time something affects you deeply, it automatically becomes your God-given calling or your divinely inspired, personal life assignment. You may find yourself affected deeply by all sorts of troubling situations in our world, but this does not necessarily mean you’ve landed on that one thing to which you should devote your entire life.

Here’s how I keep it straight in my own mind. There is a verse in the Bible that says that once we turn our lives over to God, we begin the process of becoming “transformed into his image.” It’s a long-term project to be sure, but over time, Christ-followers should in fact begin to look less like themselves and more like Christ. Therefore, on an ever-increasing basis, Christ-followers should be abandoning their self-seeking viewpoints and taking on heaven’s perspective. They should be loosening the grip on self-centeredness and instead looking for ways to serve others. They should be resisting the temptation to judge and seizing more and more opportunities to give grace instead.

As God works in our lives, turning us into fully devoted followers of Christ and therefore into progressively more compassionate people, many of society’s ills should break our hearts and prompt us to action of some sort. For instance, when we see a massive tsunami hit nearly a dozen countries and kill almost 300,000 people, we’d all better pray the prayers, write the checks, route the aid, and garner the necessary resources to ensure victims’ needs are met.

However, in addition to being moved toward short-term, “cause-inspired” action, I think you constantly should be on the lookout for that one cause or purpose or problem that grabs you by the throat and just won’t let go. Your “one thing” is the stirring situation that causes so much damage to your soul that it brings you to your own Popeye moment—a place where you feel you simply must do something. Your “one thing” births a burning-bush experience in your soul where you sense God himself inviting you into an intentional and personalized partnership with him to renovate reality.

For Moses, it was protecting his people from abuse. For Bob Pierce, it was getting food at the front of the food lines. For Martin Luther King Jr., it was realizing racial reconciliation. For other people, it’s other things.

The reason why it is so critical for you to dig in and figure out what it is that wrecks you is because you may be the one person God is looking for in order to reverse some ugly and destructive trends in your generation. In fact, when you find yourself standing on the sacred ground of your burning-bush experience, don’t be surprised if you hear God say, “This is why I made you and why I wired you up like I did! This is why I allowed the mountain-top, reason-for-rejoicing times in your life, as well as why I let the pits of despair sneak in. None of your tears of anguish will be wasted; I plan to use every ounce of what you’ve been through for good in this specific area. I know you are devastated by the same problem that grieves me, and I just happen to have in mind someone exactly like you to help me solve this!”

Let me say that last part again. God is looking for someone just like you—someone who gets wrecked on planet Earth by the things that wreck him up in heaven—so that he can sign you up for service. I assure you there is a holy discontent with your name on it. There is something out there that God is waiting for you to grab on to so that he can use you to help solve it. It wrecks you, it wrecks him, and he is ready for you both to do something about it.

From Holy Discontent: Feeding the Fire That Ignites Personal Vision by Bill Hybels