I read something the other morning that challenged me and got me to thinking about how I am approaching the calling God has given me. As I thought about it I realized that in the past I’ve spent a lot of time worshiping my “work.” While it was focused on God, it often became my sole focus and caused me to lose my concentration on the One who called me to His work.
What happens when we lose our focus? We wind up living on the margin of body, soul, and spirit and we get overwhelmed, spent. There is no freedom in the work and we begin to feel all of the resulting burdens and pressure associated with losing our freedom in Jesus. I never really thought about it but just the opposite is true as well. When our concentration is on God and not our work, those burdens are lifted and we are not out there on the margin all alone. Our center is rightly re-established and our freedom in Him is restored. We have no responsibility for the work as our only responsibility is to stay in constant touch with the One who has set the work before us and not allow anything to hinder our cooperating with Him. Oswald Chambers put it this way: The freedom after sanctification is the freedom of a child, the things that used to keep the life pinned down are gone.
Along with stepping back from living on the margin comes the realization that our preconceived notions of what God is doing, what He is preparing us for in His work is not ours to judge. He puts us where we need to be and expects us to put our total focus on working with Him, not jumping out ahead of Him in the natural, living on the margin all on our own. He is engineering everything in our life in accordance with the plan He has established for us, the plan for each member of His bride that He revealed in His Word.
Rom 8:28-29 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. 29 For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren.
When we step back from working for God on our own we are freed from living and working on the margin and realize that that freedom is for one thing only; to be totally devoted to the One that has called us to co-labor with Him:
1 Cor 3:9 For we are laborers together with God: ye are God’s husbandry, ye are God’s building.