In this lesson we are going to talk about being shaped for serving God. Ephesians 2:10 says that we are God's workmanship we are created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared us to do in advance. We are God's workmanship which means God made you designed you, created you for a purpose. He fashioned you in such a certain way, in order to do His good works--He gave you the capacity to do that God prepared in advance. In other words, when God thought about it, He designed you in such a way that you can do what He has called you to do. We are His workmanship and God has designed us to be a contribution, not just to be a consumer.
It doesn't matter how long you live, but it matters how you live it. The duration of your life is not the key issue here-- it is the donation of your life. God has made us in order to do something. We are not just to sit back and be a receiver and a consumer, but we are to be a doer, and that is what we are going to be talking about.
Job 10:8 says, "Your hands shaped me and made me." Now we are not going to get into detail with your shape, but just let me give you five things to help you to know what God has called you to do. Those five things are found in the word "S-H-A-P-E."
"S" stands for spiritual gifts.
"H" is for your heart, e.g., the passions that God has put within you.
"A" is your abilities.
"P" is for your personality.
"E" is for your experiences.
All of these things make you who you are, and they help God use you for what He has called you to do. We all have a different shape, but some of us don't like all of our shape--and I am not talking in the physical either. God has made us different from each other because He has different purposes for us. God has made you unique to be able to do what He has called you to do.
1 Peter 4:10 says "Each one should use whatever gift he has received in order to make a lot of money..." okay--that is not what it says, is it? It says, "...each one should use whatever gift he has received in order to serve others."
God gave you what He has given it to you so that you can be a blessing. It is not just for you, it is to share. God has called us to serve. So another aspect of our destiny is to serve God by serving others. Yes, we serve God by serving others.
Jesus was telling a story relating to the judgment in Matthew 25. He said to His disciples, "When I was hungry, you fed Me. When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink." The disciples said, "Lord when did we do that?" He said, "whenever you have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto Me." Did you catch that? It is a really important concept--whenever you have done it to the least, you have done it for Him.
That means that any time we minister to others, we are actually ministering to the Lord; whenever we serve others, we are serving the Lord. God has called us all to be servants and to be ministers.
Ephesians Chapter 4:11-12 says, "He gave some as apostles, some as prophets some as evangelists some as pastors and teachers." Now a lot of times when we read those verses, we say, "yeah those are the people who do ministry." But we don't always read the next verse (verse 12) which says "God gave those for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ." God is giving gifts to the church in order to equip the saints--and if you have a relationship with Jesus, that's you. He gives these gifts to equip the saints to serve.
The King James Version says "for the work of ministry." You'll find the words "service" and "ministry" are used and tied together. It is the Greek word yakinas. We get our word "deacon" from it, and it basically means to serve. The word "ministry" gets misunderstood, because we sometimes categorize that word ministry just to talk about just the few people in church who have a job. In reality, anything that you do in the name of Jesus that blesses somebody, touches somebody or just expands the Kingdom of God in anyway, even in the least way--that's ministry. We have to broaden our perspective about what is ministry and God has called every one of us to be involved in ministry.
Ministry is not just for a few people who may be visible and who happen to have a title. Everyone in the body of Christ is a minister. You might say, "Well I don't feel like one." It doesn't matter if you feel like it or not, you are one because God made you one. I am not going to focus on how God shaped you for ministry right now, I will get to that later. But right now I want to talk about our attitude. We need to have the attitude that we really are God's ministers in order to really be used by God.
Jesus said, in Matthew 20:20, "Your attitude must be like My own, for I did not come to be served, but to serve." You know your shape kind of determines your ministry, but your attitude is a reflection of your maturity. I know somebody can really understand how God made them and how God designed them. I think that they can get a grasp of really their spiritual gifts and their abilities and their heart that God put I them. They can understand all of these things, and really understand a lot about how God shaped them for ministry, but not about their maturity. That is because the maturity is found in the heart. Maturity is found in the attitude. If you really want to serve, you need to be like Jesus and to serve like He did.
Serving like Jesus means several things. First of all it means available to God. It means that I am going to be available. Let's look at this first verse in Matthew Chapter 20: 30-32. It says, "two blind men shouted, 'Lord have mercy on us!' and Jesus stopped and called them, 'What do you want Me to do for you?' He asked."
The key word here is "Jesus stopped"--this means that Jesus was available. Sometimes you need to go through all of the gospels and look at all of the times that Jesus stopped, and you will find that Jesus did a lot of stopping. In fact, many of the miracles took place when Jesus stopped. Jesus did not said, "I'm sorry I got an agenda; I've got to be over in the south part of Jerusalem before too long." Jesus stopped, and a lot of those miracles that we read about happened because Jesus made Himself available. He didn't mind being interrupted. A lot of those miracles were interruptions.
Proverbs 3:28 says, 'Never tell your neighbor to wait until tomorrow if you can help them now.' Question is what keeps us from being available, what keeps us from being ready? Well one thing is self-centeredness, Philippians 2:4 says, 'Forget yourself; forget yourselves long enough to give a hand.'
You see a lot of times we are too busy to notice what God actually wants us to do. Jesus gave us a story about the Good Samaritan; remember that one? Some of those guys were too busy to help the guy on the road. A lot of times we wear a 'do not disturb' sign around our neck. I've got my agenda to take care of, I've got my plan and don't you understand I don't have time, I am on my track, I am on my plan and I just don't have time for interruptions.
We need to have discernment, because sometimes the enemy will use interruptions as a device to derail our course. But other times, those same interruptions can be a divine appointment waiting to happen. We need to be discerning enough to hear the voice of the Lord, to be able to know whenever God has put an interruption in our time for a divine appointment. If you are serving yourself, you will miss it.
Perfectionism is another issue in serving God. If you wait for perfect conditions, then according to Ecclesiastes 11:4, you will never get anything done. I think excellence is a good thing, and I think we should always purse excellence. But sometimes we make a "god" out of excellence--"if I can't do it perfectly, if I can't do it without any flaws, then I am just not going do it."
If perfectionism is an issue for us, then we need to change our attitude a little bit. Maybe you need to have the "good enough" principle--if this is good enough, maybe God will bless it. If God waited around for people to get perfect, then nothing would get done. If God waited for everything in our lives to get fixed, He would get nothing done on this earth. God uses imperfect people who have all kinds of problems and issues; God doesn't expect perfection before He starts using you. I do know fixing a few of the problems does help; it facilitates you being used. However perfectionism is not a condition that God uses, and we need to understand that.
Materialism is another attitude we have to deal with. Luke 16:1e says, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money." Materialism is serving money and the bibles says you can't do that and serve God too. Sometimes we get so busy taking care of things that we don't have time to take care of people. We have to make sure that we are not so busy making a living that we forget to make a life.
We should always ask ourselves this question: "Am I going to be a kingdom builder, or am I going to be wealth builder?" Now there is nothing wrong with wealth. If God is bringing you into that place, there is nothing wrong with that. The issue with this is who is your master and who is your God and who are you serving? A lot of times we, are not available because we are busy out there building the wealth, so we don't have any time to build the kingdom. When that happens, the things we are so busy building are just distractions.
So the first thing to successfully serving Jesus is to be available to Him.
Things That Keep Us From Serving God
We have to have a right attitude in order to be able to fulfill our destiny. We need to serve the Lord with the right attitude, with an attitude of being grateful. It is an attitude of Thanksgiving.
Jesus had this attitude. Look at what He did when He was about to raise Lazarus from the dead, recorded in John chapter 11. "Jesus looked up and said, 'Father, I thank You that you have heard Me and I knew that You always hear Me.'" Then it says, "'I said this for the benefit of all the people standing there.'"
He could have been silent and not said anything. He could have walked up to the grave and mumbled His little prayer, and Lazarus would have still come back to life. But Jesus introduced this whole miracle with thanksgiving. There is something about thanksgiving that made Him able t o say this, and Jesus modeled this for us. You see, there are a lot of miracles in the life of Jesus because He had this attitude of thankfulness. I think we would see more of the same big miracles in our lives if that spirit and attitude of thankfulness was there.
Psalm 100:2 says , "serve the lord with gladness." Anyone knows that it is better to have gladness there whenever you are going to serve God. I believe it is thankfulness--we need to serve God not out of duty, but out of delight, because we want to. Service doesn't have to be drudgery, and some of us think, "Man when is this going to be through? Man, I got to change my gift for something else!" Well our whole perspective changes with gratefulness. When we have the perspective of being thankful for what God did for us, then it becomes more fun and exciting to serve Him.
2 Timothy 1:9 says, "It is He Who has saved us and changed us for His holy work." He saved you with all your stuff with all of your "ickyies," and all your junk. He saved you out of that, and that is something to be thankful for. You could have been totally useless, but now you are totally useful--and that is something to be really thankful for.
What keeps us from having this attitude of gratefulness? There are a couple of things that immediately jump to mind. The first of these is the area of comparing and the criticizing. God doesn't like it when we do that. The bible says, "who are you to criticize someone else's servant, the Lord will determine if someone else has been successful." It is not your job to judge, it is not your job to compare or to criticize. When you do that, then competition raises up. Personally I think that competition, more than anything, else kills the American church. It kills the spirit and it is the spirit of comparison.
It is too easy to fall into the trap of comparing ourselves with another church, or another person in ministry. If they are doing well, we don't like it. We get bitter, because we judge ourselves against them. Whenever they do something well then we feel bad about ourselves for not doing it as well. And when they fall down and stumble, then we are not feeling so bad because our comparison is with them. That is sick and it is a very bad thing.
The second thing that can make us have wrong attitudes is when we try to impress others. Matthew 6:1 says "When you do good, don't try and show off. If you do, you won't get a reward from your Father in Heaven." Serving God and self-promotion don't go together, and you can't be exalting yourself. If you sometimes you find yourself sneaking into the conversation things like, "Well, you know God used me"--that can be an indication of an attitude problem. You may be phrasing it subtly, but if your motivation is such that you want people to know what a great minister you are, you have an attitude issue that you need to deal with. Don't act as if God couldn't get along without you, because it just doesn't work. You may, at times, impress other people, but you are not impressing God. And most of the time, others will see through it, and you won't impress them either.
Another great indicator of whether or not you have the heart of Jesus in ministry is determined by the heart of gratitude that is in you. If you are struggling with that heart of gratitude, why don't you sit back and reflect on what has God done for you.
In fact, your prayer life and your time with God are a time to give thanks to God. I think the attitude of Jesus would be hard to build that into your life. I am going to give you a homework assignment, a very practical thing. Please write some things that you are grateful to God for. Tomorrow when you get up and spend time with Jesus, take a few minutes and give thanks to Him for everything that Jesus has done. We have to have that attitude of gratitude within us and that'll create the heart of Jesus.
Serving Jesus means being faithful. We already talked about being available and being grateful, but those two things are not enough. We must also be faithful.
Now faithful means this: I don't give up, I don't quit, and I just don't stop just because things aren't going well.
Anytime you serve the Lord, you are going to have times where everything goes wonderful. You are also going to have times when everything doesn't go well. It is in those difficult times you are going to be tested, and it is in those times that you will grow.
In John chapter 15, Jesus says, "I am the vine and you are the branches. He that abides in Me bears much fruit, for apart from Me, you can do nothing." Then it says Anything that bears fruit, He prunes. If you are bearing fruit, He prunes, and we don't always like that pruning stuff. Pruning is not the most "fruitful" time in our lives, but it is the time that you grow most.
The question is: do you have the stuff to hang in there? John 17:4 says "I brought you glory on earth by completing the work you gave Me to do" and at the end of His life when Jesus hung on the cross, He said "I finished everything; I completed it I did everything I was sent here to do." Just like Jesus, we need to finish the work that we have been called to do.
You may retire from your job, but the truth is that you never retire from ministry. God always has something for you to do until you go to be with Him. 1 Corinthians 4:2 says, "the one thing required of his servants is that they be faithful."
One day you are going to stand before God and there is going to be a reward system. You see my gratitude is not only to be thankful for what God has done in my life in the past, but gratitude also extends to what God will do in the future. Heaven is my future, and I don't know what kind of reward system God has, but you know the bible talks about that but you know that we can be thankful of all we have in the future here. A lot of times, thinking about what is ahead is what keeps my mind staying on course to be faithful.
1 Corinthians 15: 58 says, "Throw yourself in the work of the master, confident that nothing that you do for Him is a waste of time or effort."
Nothing that you do is a waste of time. Sometimes we do some things, and we feel like, "What's the use no one sees this and it doesn't matter?" You may not want to continue with the task because it seems insignificant. It feels like what you are doing has no importance, and it bothers you to work on it because it doesn't feel important. But there is a difference between being significant and being in a prominent place. We may not be recognized as we do what we do, but if God has given it to us to do, then it is significant to Him.
Prominence is not significant. Rick Warren pointed this out well in his book, "Forty Day s Of Purpose." He said that on our faces there is a place of prominence, and when you look on somebody's face, everyone has a nose. It is prominent, it is seen by everyone, but how significant is it to live? If you lost your nose, you could still live. You might not smell things and you might have to breathe through your mouth, but it isn't going to kill you to loose your nose. Yet it has a very prominent place, and it is seen.
Many lot of times we want to be doing the things that are seen. Here is another example: your hand which is seen, yet if you lost your hand, you can still live.
There are a lot of things that are very significant but are not prominent, but if you don't have them you won't live. Take your heart s an example. You don't see your heart, you don't see your liver, you don't see your kidneys-- but those are extremely important parts of your body. They are significant. They are just not prominent, they are not seen. A lot of times we look at the things that are seen, and we say "Well I want that job that is seen because I like that bit of prominence."
We don't always realize that some of the most significant gifts are not the ones that are most prominent. In fact, the significant things in the body of Christ are not the things that are prominent, the things that are seen, but the things that are not seen. But because they are not seen, sometimes we don't think that they are important. That's because we are looking at these gifts through the eyes of man and not necessarily through the eyes of God.
There are a lot of important things that going on in this church that are ever seen: somebody sets up chairs, somebody sets up tables, somebody cleans, somebody works in the parking lot, somebody blows the leaves, somebody is setting something up, somebody fixes the coffee, somebody is over there watching children and teaching the Sunday school--and they are not seen. There are a lot of things that go on in any church that are not seen, and sometimes we don't think they are important because they are not visible. But I'll tell you this, that God sees every one of them and your pastor appreciates every one of them.
Know this: God sees it regardless whether or not man sees it, and that is what is important. He will not forget how hard you have worked for Him, and how you have shown your love for Him by caring for other Christians. God sees what you have done; your love for Him is shown by caring for other Christians.
I'd like to share one last verse this. It is the verse we want God to say to us when we go to meet Him face-to-face : "Well done good and faithful servant. You have been faithful in a few things, so I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share in your master's happiness."
God shaped you for something. Begin to ask God what He has called you to do. If you don't have an active role in ministry, it is missed. You have an important place in the Body of Christ and you may not think it is significant, but God has a job for you. He has a way for you to help the body to function. I want you to think about how God has made you, and shaped you and what are you willing to do for Him.
Made for a Mission
God created all of us for certain things, and in order to fulfill our destiny, we have to do all of these things. Let me review them quickly for you. First, we were created for God's pleasure, so that He could love us and so that we could respond to His love by loving Him back and by worshipping Him. The second one was about fellowship and learning to love one another. The third was that we are to become like Jesus. In God's original creation plan, we were created in God's image, but that was marred by sin. So now, a piece of our destiny is to be transformed to be more like Him. We call that growth/transformation process "discipleship." Forth, we were created for ministry or serving God by serving others. God shaped us in a certain way in that we are to be able to do ministry. We have already talked about all of those things.
There is another purpose that we were created for: to share the Good News. There is a word for that: that is called "evangelism." Sometimes that word may be a little bit misunderstood, but the word itself basically means this: to herald the Good News. It is the picture of the person who would come into the town announcing "The King is Coming!" He is crying out--the crier who would come and to cry that the king is coming, the king is here. That is what the word "Evangelism" is. We have Good News, and we are to be heralding out the Good News of what Jesus Christ has done. It is all about Him! Evangelism.
Where are we to be sharing our Good News? Well, the Bible says in Acts 1:8 "You shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to all the ends of the earth."
First, we are to be His witnesses in Jerusalem. That doesn't mean that we must buy a plane ticket and go to Jerusalem so we can all evangelize this city first. (Personally, I'd like to go, as I've never been to the Holy Land. I don't want to ride a bus when I get over there you know, but I've always wanted to go over there. I haven't been yet, but I will one day.) But that is not what this verse is talking about. Jerusalem is basically the place they were in, since they were in Jerusalem when He gave them this word. In other words, the Lord is saying, "I want you to start at home first."
Rick Warren put it this way in his book, Forty Days Of Purpose: God made you for a mission. That mission is to share the good news of what Jesus has done for you. Now, we are going to focus on that. It is kind of the culmination of what we've been talking about so far.
All the things that you have learned about God and destiny, God wants you to share them with somebody else. All that you have received, God doesn't want you to hang onto it and hoard it--He wants you to share with other people. In the last prayer that Jesus prayed before the crucifixion and ascension, He was getting together with His Father and crying out to Him. This is what He said, "In the same way you gave Me a mission in the world, I give them a mission in the world."
When we talked about ministry, we talked about having a ministry to the Church. But God wants you also to have a mission out in the world. In the same way that you may have a ministry to believers, you must also have a Mission to unbelievers. God wants you to get outside of the Church! He's called you to get outside of the four walls of the church and to get outside of yourself.
Acts 20:24 says: "The most important thing is that I complete is my mission, the work that the Lord Jesus gave me: to tell people the Good News about God's Grace." We have a mission to share. Acts 1:8 tells us where to start that mission. Start in your community with the people that are closest to you--that's the place where you begin. That's where Jesus wants you to start, right at home.
Let's look at Acts 1:8 again, "You shall be My witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to all the ends of the earth."
The Lord also wants you to go to those who are really close to you but not like you; to those who are a little bit different than you. That's the Judea and Samaria. You see, they lived in the Province of Judea, and the area just right north of them happened to be Samaria. Judea was Jewish and the Samaritans were half-Jews. What He's saying is this--"Go to the folks that are a little bit outside of you--maybe not right into your community, but those that is a little bit different than you." Then the third category there is: "to the ends of the earth." That means 'everyone else,'--those that don't fit into those first two categories. In other words: everybody. That is the commission, and you are called to be a witness.
What is a witness? It is somebody that simply testifies to what they have seen or experienced. They share what they have seen, what they have experienced and what they have felt. That is a witness.
You are an expert on your life, and you have something to tell. You have a story to tell, a story about of what Jesus Christ did for you. You can share how He forgave you of your sins and how He gave you a new life. Yes, you have a story to tell, and you need to tell your story. The Lord wants you to be witnesses of your encounter with Him. That's what He wants you to do, because God is building His family. We've already talked about the family of God and about how He wants us to fellowship and love one another. God is expecting us to help expand His family, and He's using us to expand His family. This is God's plan.
Ephesians 3:11 says "This was God's plan for all of history, which He carried out through Christ Jesus, our Lord." You get to be a part of God making History, by bringing people into His kingdom. But God had a plan; He had a mission and the way He's going to accomplish this mission is through what Jesus Christ did. We are to be the ones that speak out of what Christ has done because Jesus Christ is the only way to come into a relationship with the Heavenly Father. He is the only way.
I read story years ago about when Jesus when up into Heaven. Obviously, this is not a real story because the person telling it wasn't there, but he was just telling this story just to make a point, and it is a good point. Here is the story:
Jesus ascends up into heaven, back to His father and to angels there. One of the angels greets Him and says, "Oh, Lord, we've heard all about what You've been doing on the earth, how you lived that perfect life, and that must have been really difficult to do." Jesus said, "Well, yeah, it was, but I did it." Then he said "I heard about the sacrifice that You made for all of mankind, and You took upon You the sin of the world, and that must have been really, really difficult." And Jesus said, "Yes it was".Then the angel said, "Well, I guess everybody knows; I guess now the whole world knows what You've done!" And Jesus said, "Well, no, only a few, at first just twelve. No, make that eleven. Then one hundred and twenty, but the numbers are growing. But I've told them this: I told them to tell somebody who will tell somebody who will tell somebody who will tell somebody."
The angel said, "Well, do You have any other plan? I mean, what if they don't do it? What if they forget to tell it? What if they get tired telling? What if they give up, what if they quit? What happens if they don't come through? What is Plan B? Do You have another plan?"
Jesus said, "No, I don't have any other plan."
In other words, we are it! That is kind of a scary thing, isn't it? God is entrusting us with the Gospel. God is counting on us to be the vessels that He uses to tell the world of what He's done. But we are the ones--we're it. God has called us all to be History-Makers.
Back to Acts 1:8. The first point of that verse is that we must share with those in our world--this is the Jerusalem part. These are the people that you know. These are the people that you are connected with, those in your world.
Jesus affirmed this in His life and ministry. Look at the story in Luke 8. One day Jesus had healed a person, and this person was following along with Jesus and basically said, "Jesus, I'm going to go with You." Jesus told this person (in Luke 8:39), 'Go back home and tell people how much God has done for you.' So this man went all over town telling people how much Jesus had done for him. He said, "Jesus, I want to go with you." Jesus said, "I don't need you with Me; where I need you is back there. The people know you. They have heard things about Me, but they are going to hear it first-hand because you have experienced Me. "Go back home".
You see, God wants us to start with the relationships that we have. He starts in our home and in our neighborhood, and in the pace where we work. He wants us to share with the people that we are in contact with on a regular basis: our friends, our families, our co-workers. The list goes on: the people at the gas station, at the bank...the people that you just see on a regular basis. That is your community of people in your sphere of influence. That is the place where we begin.
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