Today's "My Utmost For His Highest" by Oswald Chambers has a message that is not always easy to hear, but that is very important in gauging our attitudes.
Ministering as opportunity surrounds us.
This does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God’s in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.
The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.
“I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” Watch the kind of people God brings around you, and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him. Now, He says, exhibit to that one exactly what I have shown to you.
Over the 35 years that I have been a born again, Spirit filled believer, I have encountered people with the above attitudes. They want so desperately, they say, to get to the mission field where they can actually DO something for God! What they don't realize, or have forgotten, is that the local church is our training ground for ministry (Ephesians 4)! We should be taking advantage of the wonderful ministry gifts that HE has made available to us through our local church. We should be attending every available service with the idea that I must learn so that I will be able to share these Truths with others as the Spirit of God puts me in position to minister! I should be buying up every opportunity to observe those in leadership positions as they put God's Word into practice. I should hear them pray, watch them minister, meditate on the Truths they share and become a more consistent and bold DOER of the Word I am hearing! When we can prove ourselves faithful in an audience as small as our own homes, our places of business, our schools and our local church, THEN we can be trusted by God to take the Gospel to others in far away places. Every area on the face of the earth is a mission field! There are people everywhere who need to hear of the Savior! Bloom where you are currently planted and HE will, in HIS perfect timing, take you to those places that HE has laid on your heart! In God's eyes, timing is everything! HIS timing is perfect! AMEN! Here is Hillsong Chapel with "Lost Are Found":Shalom in Him!
