I love my
life! It’s joyous and satisfying, and I sometimes
have to pinch myself that I get to live it!
Each week I get
to lead middle schoolers through a passage of the Bible and then step back and observe
while they learn to think biblically and apply God’s Word to their everyday
lives. Now and then they also share how
what we learned impacted them in a given week.
It’s awesome to watch the Lord at work in them!
For 12 weeks
this fall and winter I studied faith lessons from the life of Abraham in the
book of Genesis and listened as women volunteered answers and shared what
they were learning as we looked into a passage together. Sometimes they told me later what impact a
lesson had on their marriage, or in their walk with the Lord. How exciting!
I get
to catch a glimpse of what the Lord is doing in the lives of numbers of women
of all ages as the Lord grows them into the godly wives, and mothers, and young
adults He sees them to be, and I think: life just doesn't get any better than this!
I’ve noticed
something recently however. I’ve noticed
that sometimes ministry gets in the way of my own relationship with the
Lord. I find that I get too busy to
pursue Him, too busy to spend much time in prayer, too busy studying in
preparation to teach others, so that in the end, I have no time to spend listening
to what the Lord wants to say to ME.
It makes me wonder,
have I been settling for the good (and it has been better than just good, it
has been GREAT), and missing the Lord’s best?
I don’t
think for a moment that all of these wonderful opportunities to teach and to
serve are things from which the Lord would have me turn away. No, I think He is the One doing the leading, the
One guiding me into these opportunities.
But I think He just might be reminding me that I need to be very careful
not to let the gifts become more valuable and precious than the giver.
In “My
Utmost for His Highest”, for February 6th, Oswald Chambers referred
to Abraham’s near sacrifice of his long awaited son, Isaac. Abraham had been given wonderful promises by
God which were for him and his descendants. The
only problem was that at 75 years of age, Abraham didn’t have any
descendants. The Lord promised him that he would indeed have a son and the promised son finally came, miraculously, 25 years later when Abraham was described as: “as good as dead”.
Since the Lord
had promised Abraham that it was through Isaac that all the promises to him
would be fulfilled, it undoubtedly came as a complete surprise when God asked
Abraham to sacrifice that very son as an offering.
We’re told
in the New Testament book of Hebrews, in chapter 11, that Abraham went ahead with the plan to sacrifice his son, reasoning that
if the Lord had given him this son, and all of the promises made to him were to
come through Isaac, and now the Lord was asking him to sacrifice that son –
then the Lord intended to raise Isaac from the dead. At the very last moment, God stayed his hand and provided a substitute for Abraham's beloved son (foreshadowing God's own sacrifice of His Beloved Son, Jesus, who would die and be resurrected).
Chambers applies
this to his readers in the here and now when he says:
“Are you ready to be poured out as an
offering (the way
Isaac was)? It is an act of your will, not your emotions.
. . . . You must be willing to be placed on the altar and go through the fire;
willing to experience what the altar represents – burning, purification, and
separation for only one purpose – the elimination of every desire and affection
not grounded in or directed toward God. . . . Tell God you are ready to be
poured out as an offering, and God will prove Himself to be all you ever
dreamed He would be.”
For some
reason, reading that made me wonder whether my joyous and satisfying life is
centered more in “affection not grounded
in or directed toward God”.
Has doing ministry
been displacing God from His rightful place in my heart?
That question
comes again to the forefront of my mind:
If everything were stripped away, and I had only the Lord, would HE be
enough? if tomorrow my health should fail, or my life circumstances change - and all I know and love were stripped away -
would my life be as satisfying
and joyful as it is now? Would knowing the Lord and fellowshipping with Him - with nothing else to occupy me - be enough?
Where does my joy and satisfaction rest - in ministry or in the Lord Himself?
I can tell
you I’ll be thinking and praying about this for a while, giving over my other affections, so that nothing gets in the way of God proving "Himself to be all I've ever dreamed He would be."
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