“For by grace you have been saved through faith; and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God; not as a result of works, so that no one may boast.” Ephesians 2:8-9
Why do you serve?
This is a question that I have been using to examine my own heart lately. Christ’s resurrection power and His brutal death on the cross are more than enough – Ephesians 2 emphasizes this truth! If grace has completely covered my life, why do I work so hard? Lately, as waves of absolute exhaustion overwhelm me, I have been evaluating my servant hood motivations. Because of God’s emphasis on rest and Sabbath I don’t believe that God has intended our lives to be a time of constant hard work and service in His name (as much as my “go-get-er-done” attitude tells me otherwise). There is an appropriate time for work, just as there is an appropriate time for rest. Now the hard part . . . patiently waiting for God to transfer this knowledge to my heart.
I KNOW that I am not working for my salvation, but I realized that I am instead working my hardest because I believe that God deserves my best. Now, that is a true statement, but I believe that I have been misled in what “my best” for God is. This misinterpretation has robbed me of simply being with God because I instead try to receive His love, even though it is a characteristic that is so perfectly manifested in His nature. Sometimes I feel like I am trying to convince God that He did not die in vain, but rather that He died for someone who loves Him. Therefore, I am going to spend my life repaying Him for His grace. No wonder I have been so exhausted! How foolish of me! Without even realizing it, my frame of mind was deceived into attempting the absolute impossible. So let me ask you again, as I have so often asked myself: Why do you serve?
“If you devoted every single moment of your life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already . . . It is like a small child going to its father and saying ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’ It is all very nice and proper, but only an idiot would think that the father is sixpence to the good on the transaction.” C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
In James 2, we read that faith is dead without works, but I believe that works without faith are also dead: “Apart from Him we can DO nothing” (John 15:5). Let me explain further: Our faith is like the trunk of an apple tree. It is firmly rooted in Christ and it is nurtured and freshly watered by God. Our works are like the branches. You cannot have true works of God without faith, just as the branches need the supply of nutrients given by the trunk in order to survive. If the branches (our works) are cut from the tree, then they are dead. If the branches are attached to the trunk and thriving, then they will be fruitful. They will not just BE, they will be and they will thrive with delicious, juicy apples.
When we flip through the pages of scripture we find many people who have served God in such amazing ways: Noah, Abraham, Moses, David, the disciples and Paul to name a few! God pursued these people relentlessly and He worked His glory through each of them – changing and reviving the world. But, when you closely examine their lives and motivations, they weren’t trying to impress God or really ‘working’ hard. At a first glance, it may seem as if they were laboriously exhausting themselves because of the fruit that God produced through their lives, but the fruit was only produced because of their relationship with God. They knew God and that relationship gave them faith in His perfect ways. They were with God. They invited God into their lives and into each precious moment – acknowledging Him in all things. They did life with God. In fact, Noah was known as a man who “walked with God” (Genesis 6:9). How beautiful is that? There is no ‘trying’ insinuated there at all; Noah just ‘was’. Noah walked through his life enjoying and basking in the company of God, and it is because of this that God did things through him; it all started with their very REAL relationship.
If we turn back to Genesis 2, we see that right from the very beginning of ‘time’ God walked with man-kind. When Adam and Eve sinned, God’s voice did not meet them by booming down from heaven in anger, but rather, they hid from the sound of the Lord’s footsteps in the garden: “They heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden” (Genesis 3:8). God wants us to walk with Him – everything else that we DO will then flow from that beautiful and intimate relationship. A relationship involves two people and it does not thrive when one person is constantly trying really hard to impress the other. After all, isn’t that why God sent Jesus? God came down to us so that we did not have to work and spend our time focusing on obeying the many laws that would hopefully mend our broken relationship; rather, God came to us so that He could physically walk with His people. Jesus journeyed through life with His disciples and with the people He met along the way. He taught them, He ate with them, He laughed with them, He challenged them, and He did life with them. That is the most beautiful picture of what God desires our walk with Him to be like NOW.
God did not design us to do things FOR Him but to do things WITH and THROUGH Him; as C.S. Lewis states, there is nothing we can do for God, for everything is His already. Here is my advice to you and to myself: Stop trying so hard and just be. Learn, as I am now, to walk with God. Invite Him into each day, each moment, and each breath. Your soul longs to be with Him! So do it! Ask Him to show you how and know that He will. You will then experience your calling: a full life walked and lived intimately with your creator.
Written by: Justine Boles
Refined Joy 