For What Reason?

5.20.09

Colosians 3:23-24 "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men, since you know that you will receive an inheritance from the Lordas a reward. It is the Lord Christ you are serving."

Being the baby brother to an older brother can have it's advantages. I can not tell you the amount of times that I got away with anything I wanted to just by screaming at the top of my lungs while unleashing a barage of tears that makes Niagra Falls look like a drippy faucet. I remember more times that my brother got grounded just for giving me an ugly look. It truly was one of the easiest things in the world to accomplish when I was a little boy. Anyone with an older sibling knows exactly what I'm talking about.

As I grew older the desire to get my brother into trouble got channeled in a completely different direction. I lost the baby brother mentality and became true competition for my older brother. By the time I got into high school I no longer wished to use my parents to out do my brother. It became my only mission in life to beat my brother at every thing that we did. He played football so I played football. If he was good wide receiver I was going to be the best quarterback. I was going to make sure that I was taking it a step further. When he took up high school wrestling you'd be right to guess that I took it up too. In fact I would set goals for myself to be better than him by and earlier age. I set my goals by what he did to be able to out do him. When I was a freshman in high school I set a goal to have a varsity letter by my sophomore year.

The problem with my way of thinking was that my goals had nothing to do with what I wanted or what was truly healthy. It came only from a desire to beat my brother. Eventually my father helped me realize that I didn't have to make everything with my brother a competition but I should continue to strive for exellence with a different goal in mind, to make myself a better person.

I think often about the competition that I had to beat my brother because it makes me think about how I serve today and what my actions truly mean today. It can become so easy in our competitive world to lose sight of why we do what we do. Sometimes it is because we want to out do a co-worker, or because we want our boss, colleagues, friends and family to see how great we are. Have you ever found yourself doing something nice for someone just to get the congratulations, or working extra hours at work just so that your boss will tell you how great you are, so that you can have your ego stroked. We all do it. Who doesn't like being told they're great? If you say "Not me" I challenge you to re-examine yourself.

What happens when we begin to work for the accolades is that we actually take the focus off the one we serve and focus it on us as the servant. We begin to become competition for attention, and the competition is against our Lord the one we serve. You see God wants us to continue to strive for exellence at work, and do nice things for others but not so that we'll get the praise but rather so that folks will see Him alive in us. Christ has a desire to be seen in all that we do. One of the greatest thoughts I ever heard growing up was Share the Gospel with someone today, use words if you have to. Meaning we have to let go of the me and let others see Him in all that we do. Next time you are faced with an opportunity to serve, do it and don't tell anyone. Your inheritance and blessings come from the Lord. If someone doesn't know that you did it for them does it count just the same? Sometimes that is where people see the Lord work. In a anonymous blessing.

Thought question: Would you still act and do what you do if no one ever saw, heard or knew about what you were doing? In other words are you living the Gospel despite who sees it?