I'd like to ask God what I can do for Him, but I'm scared when I think about what His answers might be and how ill-prepared I feel.
Have you ever used the YouVersion Bible app? It is an amazing resource, and I especially enjoy the Bible Plans it has – a series of daily devotionals on just about any topic you can imagine, presented by hundreds of different individuals and groups. I was reading one of those series recently and came across this remarkable paragraph:
We serve a King who isn’t safe, but He’s good. When we pray, our prayers shouldn’t be safe; they should be good, big, and dangerous like God. We tend to come to God with our dirty laundry, or our laundry list of what He can do for us. What if we came asking what we could do for Him? That’d be dangerous. –Life.Church
Wow! So many of us (me included) come to God with our laundry lists of what He can do for us. What if we were to reverse our prayers and ask God, “Who’s laundry can we help You wash? Whose prayers can we help you answer?”
DESPERATE PRAYERS
There are people in our world sending desperate prayers to God. Have you ever been one yourself? God uses those experiences to develop compassion in us and love toward others going through their own desperate times. Personal experiences change how we think about and respond to the world around us.
“Don’t copy the behavior and customs of this world, but let God transform you into a new person by changing the way you think. Then you will learn to know God’s will for you, which is good and pleasing and perfect.” (Romans 12:2 NLT)
God’s will for each of us will be different but some things are true for all of us. One of those things is our responsibility to help others as we are able.
Do not withhold good from those who deserve it when it’s in your power to help them. If you can help your neighbor now, don’t say, “Come back tomorrow, and then I’ll help you.” (Proverbs 3:27-28 NLT)
I believe God has always wanted me to attempt greater things and to be even more active in His world than I have been. (For example, I bought the rights to this web domain name 15 years ago (!), but it has just been parked unused until now.) Why haven’t I attempted greater things? I’ve been fearful, I’ve felt inadequate, I’ve worried about failure, and I’ve felt like I lacked the needed financial resources. I hope my stories will encourage you to step into your destiny sooner than I did.
OVERCOMING FEARS
For today, let’s talk about fear. I was one of those kids who couldn’t sleep in a completely dark room. There always had to be a nightlight in my room. That fear lessened as I grew up, but I had plenty of other fears as an adult. Thankfully, Robert Morris, in his book Beyond Blessed (link at end of blog), helped liberate me from many of my adult-onset fears.
Here’s a paragraph from the book to help you see what I mean:
In dramatic contrast, putting God first and recognizing that it all belongs to Him liberates us from fear of loss and insufficiency. Think about it. When you own a home, the repairs and upkeep are solely your responsibility. But when you are a tenant, the ultimate responsibility for the property lies with the landlord. Homeowners may lie awake at night worrying about whether the roof needs to be replaced, but tenants never do. If there is a potential problem, they simply pick up the phone and say, “Hey I think you may have a problem with your roof. You might want to check it out.”
[Here's me with my mind blown. What a life-changing concept this is!]
I sleep better knowing I'm not the Owner.
THE SECRET IS NOT OUT THERE...
Pastor Jeremy of Time of Grace Ministry wrote the following:
Go and serve your friends and families. Slave away for the benefit of your spouse and your children. Fill the lives of others with good things, by giving, and giving, and giving, and giving, and recognizing that really the secret to fixing our broken communities, the secret to healing broken families, the secret to binding broken hearts — it’s not out there somewhere — the secret is you.
Words like these really helped me when God recently prompted me to start a website and a blog. “Hey,” I said to God, “I’m almost 70 years old! This is a young person’s gig. What I know about how to build a website or write a blog is exactly zero!”
“Go ahead anyway,” God seemed to say back to me. I will see that you get the help and resources you need as you need them. Tell your stories. Reflect My glory. Every day, millions of people whisper desperate prayers. I desire the hearts and hands of willing workers to help answer them. You can be one. In Me, you are sufficient. Remember, I can do abundantly more than you could ever ask or imagine.”
So, here I am, just blogging away. Amazing. If I can start a project like this within months of being a septuagenarian and make myself available to God for laundry duty, so can you. Stop with the “I’m not good enough” excuse I used for many years. Whatever task God has put in front of you, get on with it! You ARE good enough. God has made you so via the cross.
There’s a lot of “laundry” out there, friends. I pray with all my heart that you will join me in asking God which desperate prayers you can answer. Once He shows you, don’t let your fears stop you from your tasks like I did. Reach up and grab God’s hand. It might have a bit of soap on it, but He already has it stretched out to you… just waiting for your help with His laundry.
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