Monthly Thought

May 2007

"Everything you do or say should be done to obey Jesus your Lord. And in all you do, give thanks to God the Father through Jesus." Colossians 3:17.

I expect you've heard this quoted before. I definitely have. But can you say you really live up to it?

No! There is only one person in the whole of History who always obeyed God - and that was Jesus. The only thing is, even though we can never reach this goal, we need to always be trying to get closer to it. OK, so while you're in churce maybe you're fairly close. Or even when you're talking to your Christian friends. But how about when you're at school? Or with your other friends?

Well, this is something I've been thinking about myself. You see, I'm training to be a teacher and recently I've had an absolutely crazy amount of work on - so much that I actually let myself off far too often with not spending any time with my Bible or with God. And then things started to spiral. At times I could almost physically feel my relationship with God changing - my mind was elsewhere while we prayed, I didn't want to join in with any Christian conversations and, eventually, I even became angry at some of the rules God gave us. As if this wasn't bad enough, despite the amount of time I spent on my work, my teaching was gradually getting worse instead of better.

So, I suppose you've already spotted it, but the massive mistake I made was in forgetting that even my training, which takes up a lot of my life at the moment and will have a huge effect on my future, is just a part of my worship of God. And this is the same for everybody, for everything you do - it is all just a part of your service to God. It should never be allowed to get in the way of your relationship with Him.

When you realise something like that, it has a huge effect on your perspective. However, this doesn't mean we don't need to do any work. After all,

"In all the work you are doing, work the best you can. Work as if you were doing it for the Lord, not for people." Colossians 3:23

And I couldn't expect to just do no work and have God fill my head with the right answers at the right time - He doesn't reward laziness!

To round up neatly, everything we do should be a part of worshipping God - meaning we should work hard at it while obeying Jesus in it. BUT if it is part of our worship of God then it definitely shouldn't get in the way of our relationship with Him!

If you have any questions, then do email me on good_luke@hotmail.co.uk

Luke Stratton