Lately, I’ve found myself not only coming and going but, also, bumping into myself in the middle of coming and going. I doubt I’m alone on this collision course. Children of God, everywhere, are on this same burdensome treadmill. Wait a minute!! Instinctively, I penned burdensome. Does not Scripture guide me otherwise?
“Come to Me, all you who labor and are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Matthew 11:28-30 (NIV).
My soul having been refreshed by these verses, my mind entered conversation with God. This daughter of His, needing revelation and re-routing, God minced no words in delivering His aha moment. Both a light bulb and enlightenment went on when God filled my being with His fundamental inquiries.
Am I running ragged doing God’s work for me or my work for God? Do I even know and understand the difference? Let me declare, since I needed to even be asked these questions, I obviously was not scoring a 100% on my answer sheet.
What God was wisely helping me comprehend is His work for me will never exhaust my heart and soul. However, my self-proclaimed work for God, most often, will exhaust my body. What’s more, my self-decided work for God is not even what God is calling me to, needs me for, or even wishes me to do. Plain and simple, this child of God (and probably all children of God) needs to let God create and assign His list (not my list) designating the work I’m called to do for Him (not the work I’ve personally chosen to do for Him).
Choosing to do God’s work for me over my work for God does not translate into never being pushed beyond my physical strength or an eight-hour workday. What it does promise is that God’s strength will carry me, sustain me and refresh me when I endeavor to answer the call of His work for me. My work for God carries no such guarantee. If God calls me to it, He will carry me through it. If I call myself to it, my own efforts often fail to get me through it.
Not possessing divine knowledge, how best can we decipher God’s work for us from our work for God? Prayer and accepting and adhering to its answering guidance best solve this question.
Our human plate gets overloaded when the “work meal” handed us by God is supplemented by servings of our own added “work desserts” that we surmise God surely wants and needs but just forgot to put on our plate. We all need to ask ourselves if we are starving to stuff ourselves with our work for God, or are we well nourished by the food of God’s work for us? The former will wear us down into a grave. The later will lift us up to the heavens. The “starving to stuff” or “well nourished” choice is each of ours to make.
Uplifted in a Broken Down World 