.
.
.
I was reading my daily passage in My Utmost For His Highest (MUFHH). This little devotional book never ceases to amaze me. Thank you, Oswald Chambers, for writing the words God told you to write. Take a look at what it said today.
.
.
.
Ministering as opportunity surrounds us does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God's in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indicators of what we will be like in other surroundings.
.
The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God's power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.
.
"I have given you an example that ye should do as I have done to you." Watch the kind of people God brings around you, and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him. Now, He says, exhibit to that one exactly what I have shown to you.
.
"Oh," you say, "I will do all that when I get out into the foreign field." To talk in this way is like trying to produce the munitions of war in the trenches--you will be killed while you are doing it.
.
We have to go the "second mile" with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we can not see the way, and we say--"I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis." If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.
.
.
.
First, ministering does not mean selecting our surroundings, if means being only God's in any haphazard surroundings He engineers for us. Sounds fun, right? (:
.
.
.
How we act and react in these surroundings is indicative of how we will respond to the situations we are put in later.
.
.
.
Then dishes. It takes all of God's power in me to do dishes the way that He would do them. Seriously? We are talking about dishes in a devotional? Yes. Dishes. That's all I do. Dishes, dishes, dishes. Maybe He wants to tell me something?
.
.
.
Now show that person exactly who I have been to you. Yes, and do it while you wash their dishes and sweep their floors.
.
.
.
And then he brings missions into it. How anyone could know that today I would need to be reading something about preparing for foreign missions while washing dishes the way Jesus would is beyond me, unless it was by God. Chambers didn't know me as he wrote this...but God did.
.
.
.
We can't wait until we are out in the foreign field to prepare ourselves for what will come there. It is as useless as building your weapons while you are in the trenches of war. It will not work. You need them before you get there.
.
.
.
Yesterday I read, "The workshop of missionary munitions is the hidden, personal, worshiping life of the saint." The place where God is preparing the weapons for the war I am called to fight is here and now. As I pray and seek Him, He is preparing me for the things He will call me to face.
.
.
.
In the moment, however, He has called me to be faithful in the "little things" such as washing dishes. So I will continue to do so joyfully as I pray that He continues to work in me.
.
.
.
If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones. But if you are dishonest in little things, you won’t be honest with greater responsibilities.
--Luke 16:10
. . . being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.
--Philippians 1:6
No comments:
Post a Comment