What Makes You Think This is YOUR Job Anyway?

Far too often we look at our lives and the things in it and believe, truly believe, that we own it. We think that the car we drive is ours, and that the house we sleep in is ours, and the clothes on our back (and front) are ours, and even the scratched-up Geoff More and the Distance CD we found while cleaning our room at our parent’s house last year is ours. We have deluded ourselves in to thinking that possession is truly nine tenths of the law.

We get out of our bed in the morning and skip our breakfast so that we can walk out our door just in time to make our way to the office where we stealthily avoid our secretary as well as one of our deacons while they not-so-positively discus our numbers yesterday. We make it to our office door and fumble our keys to unlock our door, and sit at our desk to turn on our computer and drink, what is now, our cold coffee and sit for the next few minutes posting about our ‘already hectic day at our office’ on Twitter; all the while wondering why we aren’t rewarded for all the great stuff we have done over the past year in our ministry.

Wow. That may have seemed to be a redundant use of the word “our” but it was necessary to indicate the possessive nature that many of us have about the things in our lives. We believe that all this belongs to us, and subsequently is under our direction, demand, and authority.

Possession is a lie! The truth comes from the word of God wherein we find the love the things of the flesh to be representative of an absence of the Father’s love in them.

1 John 2:15-17 (ESV)
¹⁵ Do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. ¹⁶For all that is in the world— the desires of the flesh and the desires of the eyes and pride in possessions—is not from the Father but is from the world. ¹⁷And the world is passing away along with its desires, but whoever does the will of God abides forever.

We must begin to see ourselves as laborers in the field of the Master. We must see our work as being the result of His good will, and our payment far greater than the measure to which we have served. Workers in the field are not owners, nor do they have a claim to the land, but instead, they labor for the master to gather for Him what is owed to Him.