Working Hard? Or Hardly Working? Or....

“Working hard for God” is that a good thing? I’m not so sure any more. I’ve been working hard for God since age ten, (when I got my call to children’s ministry.) And I’ve been putting the Energizer Bunny to shame ever since with my non-stop ministry activity. Sacrificing for God has been something I’ve been happy to do – but was God happy with the sacrifices I chose?

I equated activity and busyness with passion for God. I thought the best way to love God was to serve God with every fiber of my being. How wrong I was. Now, I am not saying that we shouldn’t be serving God, or that we shouldn’t give our best effort and energy in that service, but that I have learned tragically that service is NOT what God is looking for primarily. All of the service you give can be good and helpful and godly and benefit the Kingdom, but NOT be what God is asking you to do. Oswald Chambers (my new best friend) writes, “Always guard against self-chosen service for God; self-sacrifice may be a disease.” (!) How can serving God be a disease!? He warns elsewhere of “juggling with yourself” – something I can certainly relate to!

God is not asking for service. He is asking for me. Service should be merely a result or outcome of my walk with God. I tried to get close to God through serving Him – instead of getting close to Him and then allowing Him to use me. The output of my life may have looked very much the same (though I imagine there would have been much less I’d have been doing) – but the point is not the activity or the amount of it, or even the godly motives, it is the source of the activity. Was it God working in and through me, or me working for God in my efforts to know and please Him? Oswald writes that “We have to be so one with God that we do not continually need to ask for guidance.” Huh? Those words shocked me, I am always asking for guidance! But he continues, “If we are born again of the Spirit of God, it is the abortion of piety to ask God to guide us here and there.” (!) I was passionate in my service and in living out my convictions tirelessly* every day. But Oswald writes, “Beware of making a fetish of consistency to your convictions instead of being devoted to God. ‘I shall never do that’ – in all probability you will have to, if you are a saint.” Belief that “I would never” is a dangerous belief indeed! God may have to teach us a drastic lesson. Chambers states that “The one consistency of the saint is not to a principle, but to the Divine life.” Being devoted to the principle of service can mask the shallowness of the Divine life. One close to God will certainly find him or herself serving, BUT it does not work the other way around. The one serving God is in danger of losing that closeness to the very One he or she serves! Chambers warns, “It is easier to be a fanatic than a faithful soul, because there is something amazingly humbling, particularly to our religious conceit, in being loyal to God.”

If God is not looking for service? What then, is He seeking from us? We wants us to simply know Him, love Him, and follow Him. And He wants us to do so whether or not He will ever use us or whether anyone will ever notice us. We want to be noticed by God, and perhaps if others notice us, He will too! Being faithful to God in tough times and challenges certainly gains His favor and notice, doesn’t it? Forgive me for quoting Oswald Chambers again. “It is one thing to go through a crisis grandly, but another thing to go through every day glorifying God when there is no witness, no limelight no one paying the remotest attention to us.” Just me and God, and no one and nothing else. “If you are rightly devoted to the Lord Jesus,” he continues, “you have reached the sublime height where no one ever thinks of noticing you.”

I have lived to serve God and to equip and encourage others in their service to God. And that has its place, and I will continue to do so, but from a different vantage point going forward. Chambers concludes, as will I with these words. “The test of the life of a saint is not success, but faithfulness in human life as it actually is. We will set up success in Christian work as the aim; the aim is to manifest the glory of God in human life, to live the life hid with Christ in God in human conditions.”

Forgive me for sounding like Yoda again, but I think of his words to Luke, “Excitement! Bah. Adventure! Bah. The Jedi seeks not these things.” I find myself hearing instead wise old Oswald, the Christian Master saying, “Service! Bah. Success! Bah. Notice! Bah. The Christian seeks not these things. He seeks only to be in fellowship with His Creator. All else must flow out of that relationship. There is no try. There is only BE.”

I’m sure you’ve done much to serve God this week. But if you have not spent time with HIM first…. Bah! I beg you, get the order correct – fellowship first, service second.

*tirelessly - and odd word. I used to work tirelessly, meaning - "tired all the time." Now I want to work tirelessly, but meaning serving less tired, or even without being tired, because I am only doing what God is asking me to do, and nothing else. If I am tired I am probably doing too much, and more importantly, I am probably doing things God is not asking me to do.