Five Disturbing Questions

Take a moment and pause to consider these five questions;

1)      What have you been doing or are you doing for God?
2)      What have you been or are you doing with God?
3)      Which of the two has power and is bearing fruit?
4)      In which do you sense GOD’s pleasure or YOUR pleasure?
5)      In which do you experience the greatest frustration?

As you ponder, do you ever wonder if God is not even noticing what you have been doing FOR Him? Yes – that GOD MAY NOT BE NOTICING?

How many times have you heard it preached that God is the God of ALL resources? He does not need your offering. He does not need anything. He is in the business of providing for need. Matthew 6:8, “Your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.”

What God wants is our hearts!

We can never forget what it is to have been lost and to have been found! God pursued US! Not the other way around. His Holy Spirit hounded us and God orchestrated the circumstances of our lives which brought us to the end of ourselves until we resorted to Him who was there all along loving us. All we ever had to bring to Him was our hearts.

Philippians 2:13 says, “For it is GOD which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.” (KJV)

All we can do is yield to Him, His will and His doing. This is a hard thing to hear. We want control, sense of accomplishment – a measure of credit. We have our pride.

Several recent conversations and moments of personal reflection on Christian leadership had me coining the following phrase; “Leaders often confuse the intersection of personal ambition and the coincidence of an opportunity with inspired vision or a prompt from God."

Truly divine inspired vision only comes from outside; not from one’s own self-interest or notions of progress or success.

The older I get the more I experience the same frustrating outcomes for many of my efforts. I also see this in others around me of less experience. Less experienced does not necessarily imply younger. There are many older than I who have not learned from their experiences and so they get to experience the same outcomes again and again. And even at my age I am destined to experience again and again what I refuse to learn. This is the beginning of wisdom.

There is a form of obstinance in proud people that reveals the true condition of their heart. I think it was Thomas Edison who said that insanity is doing things that same way and expecting a different outcome. Some of our brethren never gain from their experiences. Experience is only good if one learns from it. That requires humility and the selflessness of a truly receptive and submitted student. Live long, bend not enough to the will of God and you will certainly experience things over and over again. Ecclesiastes strikes again! “Ground Hog Day” – the movie ….

Coincidental to my musing on this topic, Peter Scazzero (see: Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and Emotionally Healthy Leadership) recently wrote the following in one of his email broadcasts promoting a podcast: “As people who lead in the name of Jesus, we are not to enter every open door or seize every new opportunity. Why? Doing so prematurely, i.e. outside of God’s timetable, damages both ourselves and his long-term kingdom mission in the world. We see this in biblical examples such as Jesus’ limits on the authority of the Twelve as he discipled them as well and the seven sons of Sceva’s premature attempt to drive out evil spirits for Jesus without a life with Jesus.”  Scazzero goes on to note that “exercising a role of leadership for Jesus is weighty”. It should be troubling to us.

And that brings me to the subject of this piece: What are you doing “for” God and what are you doing “with” God? How many times has the world mocked your efforts “for” God with words of rebuke similar to the words spoken by that evil spirit in Acts 19:15, “Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are YOU!” before beating you up and sending you fleeing away naked.

What we do FOR God may come from a place of pride within us that revels in self-accomplishment or a sense of competition with others whom we observe around us. Such is apart from God. We are to run our own race that God has set before us. Like every other counterfeit god or altar we set up for ourselves, no peace is ever derived from such a competitive spirit. We look around at others. We compare. We observe an individual in their calling and witness their joy and we compare. Then we strive. It has been said that comparison is the killer of peace. There is a fine line between “doing for” and “doing with”. It has to do with the condition of one’s heart.

As this year comes to a close and I consider the year ahead I am going to be more deliberate to incorporate a more submissive spirit to my goal setting and ambitions for what lies ahead. It is beginning to occur to me that I will sense God’s pleasure more in the things that I undertake that HE prompts, that HE guides and that HE provisions. This is going to be hard to do because I was raised and my life has always been predicated upon action, accomplishment and doing. Faith without works is surely dead as James so urgently professes in his epistle. But there is an order or sequence to works that involves God’s instigation and God’s power that my heart needs to more fully embrace with greater expectation of a joy and contentment in the "doing" part that I have only occasionally experienced.

And to Jesus Christ be all the credit and all the power and all the glory.

Blessings,

Bill