Review
“Seeking” is the effort we put forth to fulfill longing and desire for God. And for seeking to work, God, rather than something else, must be the object of the desire and seeking, and the seeking must be earnest. Such earnestness comes in large measure from emotion – both negative and positive. If one person has no feeling in his hand, but he has read an article about the damage done from burning his skin, and another person has full sensation in his hand; both will remove their hand from a hot stove but the second person will have a lot more earnestness about it than the first. If one man does some figuring and comes to the conclusion that he is be better off married so he might as well start pursuing a girl, and another man is head over heels in love; both will pursue the girl but the second one will have a lot more earnestness. Wholehearted seeking comes from emotion.
In the last lesson we focused on two ways to increase emotion:
1) Fan into flame the love you already have. Follow the psalmists’ example by making much of what is in your heart toward God.
2) Keep stoking the fire all day long. Shorten the intervals of time in-between conscious fellowship with God.
We understand that it is impossible to give God your conscious attention all day while you are concentrating on other things. There have been times when I have been delivering a pizza at Dominos, and I missed a turn because I was thinking about the passage of Scripture from that morning’s devotions. And so the people got their pizza later than they should have, and I wasn’t being a very good employee. God is not honored by that. He wants us to pay attention to the things we need to pay attention to.
However, in-between activities throughout the day – when you transition from one thing to another, you can take 20 seconds and remember your passage of Scripture you are meditating on that day, and pay attention to God for a moment, and remind yourself about whichever wonderful attribute of God you are focused on that day, and think for a moment about how your next activity can be an act of fellowship with Him; and if you do that in all your transitions, you will find that at the end of the day you will have far, far more joy and all those other results than you normally do.
How long has this interval been?
Lately whenever I turn my attention to God during the day, I think to myself, How long has it been since the last time I paid attention to God? He is paying attention to me all the time.
Ps.34:15 The eyes of the LORD are on the righteous
If it has been 4 hours since the last time I paid attention to Him, those are 4 hours of one-way attention. During those 4 hours, even if I have not had any thoughts of God at all, He has no doubt had thoughts about me more numerous than the grains of sand.
The purpose of mentioning that is not to make you feel guilty, as though God were lonely the whole time you weren’t paying attention to Him. God is never lonely – the Trinity is all the company He could possibly need.
The point of the exercise is to cause yourself to marvel at the amazing availability of the presence of God to me. Just think, How much more joy and peace and awe and comfort and love I would have right now if I had been able to intentionally commune with God 20 times over the past 4 hours instead of zero? That is not always possible – sometimes the opportunities just aren’t there. So the point is not guilt (unless you have miss-spent the last 4 hours, and you need to repent). The point is to motivate yourself as you prepare for the next 4 hours. Each time you turn your attention back to God think about how long it has been since the last time and how many thoughts God has had about you in that interval. And try to pinpoint some times in that interval that could have been used to focus on God, so that maybe this next interval can be shorter than that last one.
God did not design us for long intervals. When in my morning devotions I have had sweet communion and close fellowship with God to the point where I can actually sense the results of joy and peace, etc. in my heart, sometimes I can come to God one hour later, and the fire is out – I feel nothing from my time with Him before, and I have to start from scratch again. The problem is, now it’s the middle of the day and I only have about 45 seconds, which is not enough time to build another whole fire from scratch. It is enough time to throw another stick on an existing fire, but not enough to re-create what I did in the morning’s devotion time.
This is why the writer of Hebrews said,
Heb.3:1 fix your thoughts on Jesus
Heb.12:2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus
Last summer Tracy and I were on our walk and there was a biker coming the other direction with her dog next to her. It was a long, straight walking path, and so we could see them when they were still way off. And my very first thought when I saw them was that the dog looked like he was on a ridged leash – like he was attached to the end of a pole. It looked like that because he was always the exact same distance from her, running along beside her. There was another person in front of us walking the same direction we were walking, and he was right in the middle of the sidewalk. As he got close to the biker we were wondering what was going to happen because it looked like the dog was going to go on one side of him and the biker on the other side, so the guy would get wrapped up by the leash. As it turned out, there was no leash. They guy went in between them without any problem.
But what happened next made both Tracy and me laugh. When that guy passed in between the biker and the dog, the dog lost sight of his master for a split second. But instantly, in that split second, that dog stopped, turned, went off the path, and started sniffing around in the weeds with his back to his master.
She called it, but the dog wouldn’t come. She had to stop her bike, go back, and try to coax this dog out from sniffing around in the weeds to come back on the path. Once she did that, the dog stayed right with her, just like before.
When I saw that my first thought was, What a perfect picture of me. When I am by His side, and my eyes are fixed on Him, I can walk in step with Him. I can obey His commands and take delight in Him. But as soon as something distracts me from Him, just like that I’m wandering off in the weeds and He is the farthest thing from my mind. And He is calling me back to His side, but I’m so intrigued by the weeds that I can barely hear Him. Thankfully I can handle a little bit longer interval than that dog, but not as long as they often are.
Communion is 2-way interaction
When I refer to fellowship or communion with God, I am not referring to merely thinking about God or merely saying prayers. You can think about God without actually interacting with God. You can think about a person while completely ignoring that person. You can even say prayers to God without actually paying attention to Him. And you can read the Bible without paying attention to Him.
None of that is fellowship. Fellowship, or communion, is when there is a two-way interaction, not just one way. If you just pray, and you are not receiving anything from God, that is not communion. If you just read God’s Word, but you’re not actually attending to Him (paying attention to Him), that’s one way, not two-way. Communion is when there is two-way interaction - you pay attention to God and you receive something from God.
But what is it that you receive? That is a crucial question. It seems to me that most people who want to have a two-way interaction with God focus mostly on either revelation or the miraculous. Those who are more charismatic focus on unusual, miraculous responses, or to direct revelation. Non-charismatics try to pick up “promptings” or impressions that they can think of as being from God. The word “prompting” never even appears in the Bible, and it is questionable whether there is such a thing as a prompting from God (in the sense that it is normally understood).
The way to receive some relational interaction from God is not to empty your mind and wait for some impression to hit you and then assume it is a message from Him. The way we have two-way interaction with God is this: from your end you fix your attention and affections on God (on the expressions of His attributes), you contemplate what is wonderful about them, you take delight in Him as you do that – enjoying the experience of His attributes, and most importantly – the most profound act of communion you can have with God – is when you are trusting in something He has promised. That is what you do on your end.
Then, what you receive from God is not impressions, but grace – grace in the form of all the benefits that Scripture says come from being in the presence of God. Those benefits are things like: Gladness and joy, greater love and desire for God (and all those He loves), a feeling of safety and protection, peace and calmness, a willing heart, pleasure, encouragement and comfort, rest and refreshment like water to a tree, restoration, confidence, courage, and comfort, honor and vindication, fullness and satisfaction, a sense of being attended to and cared for, and guided, hope and rest, renewal and transformation, strength, motivation, enlightenment, a greater abiding presence of Christ in the heart, experiential knowledge of the love that surpasses knowledge, fear of God, awe and reverence, and desire to obey.
I don’t know about you, but I’d rather have all that than a “prompting” any day. When people are looking mostly for promptings, you have to wonder if they are more concerned with getting information from God about which way to go than they are with seeking God Himself.
When you are seeking hard after God, beholding His glory (focusing on and delighting in something that is true about Him) and trusting in one of His promises, and you sense that you have peace in your heart, or strength, or joy, or any of those other things, then you are having two-way interaction with God. That’s communion. That’s fellowship.
Last time we found that one of that ways we seek fellowship with God is through worship. And another way is through serving Him. Both of those are seen in Mal.1, where the priests were seeking God through worship and service, but they were doing it with a “what a burden” attitude – which is unacceptable to God.
Sacrifice?
Last week’s lesson raised the question: Isn’t there a difference between saying, “What a burden,” and the legitimate desire to sacrifice something that is precious to you for God? If you are doing something out of love for God that is very difficult and painful and you are thinking, “This is hard, but I want to sacrifice for God;” is that the same thing as saying, “What a burden”? For example, suppose I really want to relax on a Sunday afternoon and take in a football game, but I get a call from a widow in the church whose sewer backed up and her basement flooded and she needs my help right away. And so I think, “I don’t feel like giving up my afternoon of rest and entertainment, but I’m going to do it in order to sacrifice something for God.” Does the fact that I don’t feel like going to help this widow, and that doing it is going to be a sacrifice – does that mean I am like the Mal.1 priests? In most cases the answer is probably yes.
It is OK not to like pain or discomfort; Jesus did not feel like being crucified. The question is, what is it that makes you willing to endure the discomfort? If it is resolve alone, that is not good enough. It should be joy.) Even Jesus’ sacrifice of His own life – the biggest, most painful, most costly, most horrible sacrifice that’s ever been made, was compelled by joy.
Heb.12:2 Let us fix our eyes on Jesus … who for the joy set before him endured the cross
It was Jesus’ desire for joy that drove Him to the cross. If I am not compelled by a strong desire for the joy that comes from loving a widow God loves, so that I would rather do that than watch the game, then on the way over to her house I need to be repenting and begging God to open my eyes to the joy of joining in His love.
God is the benefactor, not the beneficiary
When I do not desire to do some ministry that I should do, it means I probably have a perverted understanding of ministry. It usually means I have slipped into the error of making God a beneficiary instead of a benefactor. When a gift is given, the one who does the giving is the generous benefactor and the one who does the receiving is the needy beneficiary. And it is the benefactor who receives the glory (he is glorified as being rich and generous). The needy beneficiary is not glorified at all. He does not deserve any credit because all he is doing is receiving something. So when a gift is given, the giver is glorified; not the receiver.
So for us to glorify God, He must always be the Giver; never the receiver. John Piper said it this way:
Disinterested benevolence toward God is blasphemy. If you come to God dutifully offering him the reward of your fellowship instead of thirsting after the reward of his fellowship, then you exalt yourself above God as benefactor and belittle him as the needy beneficiary—and that is blasphemy. The only way to honor and glorify the all-sufficiency of God is to come to him for the pleasure of knowing and being loved by him.
In Acts 17:25 we learn that God is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. Yet 1 Pe.4:11 says that we do serve Him. How do we reconcile those two passages? A close look at both passages will show that it all depends on how you serve. In Acts 17 it says God is not served by human hands as if He needed anything. We must never attempt to serve God in a way that portrays us as the givers and God as the receiver. The proper way to serve God is to do so in a way that brings glory to God and not us. Peter explained how that is done?
1 Pe.4:11 If anyone serves, he should do it with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be glorified through Jesus Christ.
In order for God to be glorified in my serving Him my service has to be something I am getting from Him, not something He is getting from me. If I am the giver and He is the receiver, that glorifies me. I have to find a way to serve Him in which He is still the giver and I am the receiver. That means I have an attitude that points clearly to Him as the supplier of the strength. So in my heart I regard the ministry as a great privilege that is a gift I do not deserve and of which I am not worthy.
So what should I do when I forget this principle, and I find myself having a “what a burden” attitude? Suppose I am doing some ministry – talking to someone on the phone, or doing something for someone, and it’s taking longer than I had hoped, and I start to resent it. Is it better for me to just not serve, since my attitude is wrong? Of course not. If I stop serving because I have the wrong attitude I have not solved anything, because I still have the bad attitude. Never stop serving God – just make sure you are serving Him in the right way. Instead of serving Him in a way that belittles Him (by serving Him with an attitude that You are giving something to Him), serve Him in a way that glorifies Him. And you do that by making it clear in your attitude and in the way you serve that your serving is an act of you receiving strength from heaven – strength that enables you to dispense grace from heaven.
2 Tim.4:17 the Lord stood at my side and gave me strength, so that through me the message might be fully proclaimed
Heb.13:21 may he work in us what is pleasing to him, through Jesus Christ
So when that happens, make that feeling of not wanting to do something good as a memory cue. Anytime I feel that, instead of saying, “Come on Darrell. Just do it,” I let that lack of desire for ministry at that moment serve as an alarm bell. It is like a flashing red light on the dash. It alerts me that something is wrong inside the engine, and it motivates me to lift up the hood of my heart and ask, “What on earth has gone so haywire in here?” And that will force me to think through these principles.
Another thing we should do is follow Paul’s example and always speak about our work in a way that points to the source of the gift.
Ro.15:18 I will not venture to speak of anything except what Christ has accomplished through me
1 Cor.15:10 I worked harder than all of them-- yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
When you speak about ministry, remind yourself of the fact that obeying God’s commands to serve Him and others makes you a net receiver not a net giver. When you obey His command to serve, you are mostly getting something, not mostly giving something.
In fact, all God’s commands are like that. Don’t think of the commandments and laws and rules in Scripture as descriptions of how you are to benefit God. His commandments are God’s way of defining how He intends to benefit us. The commandments in Scripture are like the commandments on a label of a medication you get from the doctor. You follow the rule and take two tablets by mouth twice a day not to do the doctor a favor. You do that to receive a favor from the doctor.
And so any sacrifice I make is like a kid sacrificing some of his time on his birthday to open presents, or a lottery winner sacrificing an afternoon to go collect his winnings.
The only proper way to serve God, then, is to be on the receiving end of what is being given. That is the kind of serving Jesus talked about in Mt.6:24 where He said you ca not serve both God and money. Think about that – how would a person serve money? Do you assist your money? Are you the benefactor of your money? Do you supply something for your money? No. So how does a person serve money? We serve it by looking to it for our joy and satisfaction. We serve it by letting it be our benefactor and our supplier, so that it becomes our master. That is the way we serve God - by looking to Him as our provider and benefactor so that we pursue Him in life and He becomes our Master and our highest treasure.
So it is OK to think of your service a sacrifice as long as you experience that sacrifice as a joy and not as a burden. But usually when people are compelled by joy the word “sacrifice” tends to drop out of their vocabulary.
Our gifts to God are like a 2-year-old saying, “Mom, I want to get you a birthday present.” And so the mother takes the child to Wal Mart, helps her pick out a gift, buys it, brings her back home, helps her wrap it up, and then the child can have the joy of giving the gift. Is the child giving a gift? Yes, but mostly the child is on the receiving end. And if the child considers it a big hardship, then what’s the point? The only benefit the mom was getting out of the deal was the joy of seeing the delight of her little child. If the child doesn’t have any delight, it is a pointless exercise and waste of time?
1 Chrn.29 is the story of the fundraising for the massive building project of the first Temple. In v.6 it says they all gave willingly. And that statement is followed by the list of all the amounts of gold and silver that were given - amounts measured in talents, which are like tons. Imagine if you looked in the bulletin each week to see last week’s giving and it was listed by how many tons of gold and silver were given.
These were not rich people. Their giving really cost them. There were plenty of other things they could have used all that money for. But nowhere in the passage do you see the terminology of sacrifice – just the opposite.
1 Chrn.29:9-14 The people rejoiced at the willing response of their leaders, for they had given freely and wholeheartedly to the LORD. David the king also rejoiced greatly. 10 David praised the LORD in the presence of the whole assembly, saying, "Praise be to you, O LORD, God of our father Israel, from everlasting to everlasting. 11 Yours, O LORD, is the greatness and the power and the glory and the majesty and the splendor, for everything in heaven and earth is yours. Yours, O LORD, is the kingdom; you are exalted as head over all. 12 Wealth and honor come from you; you are the ruler of all things. In your hands are strength and power to exalt and give strength to all. 13 Now, our God, we give you thanks, and praise your glorious name. 14 "But who am I, and who are my people, that we should be able to give as generously as this? Everything comes from you, and we have given you only what comes from your hand.
David understood that he was the 2-year-old giving to God. “We are nobodies. It doesn’t make sense, God, that You would grant nobodies like us the incredible privilege of giving generously and wholeheartedly to You. This is a gift we don’t deserve.” They saw all their giving to God as a gift from God. Whenever you give anything to God – you draw money out of your bank account, or time, or energy or skill, in each case you are reaching into the hand of God for what you are giving.
Most Christians probably understand that all our money belongs to God and not to us. But I think we tend to forget sometimes that the same is true of our time, energy, intellect, bodies, and everything else we use to serve God. When we give to God the gift is His already, the wrapping paper is borrowed from Him, His Spirit has to enable us to put it in the box and tape on the bow, and then we present it to an infinitely rich God who already owns everything. And so the only thing we are really giving Him is our love (just like the 2-year-old). If we see it as burdensome, then what are we giving Him? Nothing at all.
There is only one thing you can give God that doesn’t belittle and insult His name, and that is your love. (And love is the soul’s delight in God that rises out of desire)
Remember in Jer.2 when God rebukes His people for looking to leaky cisterns for satisfaction? He contrasts Himself with those leaky cisterns. But what does He say He is like – a non-leaky cistern?
Jer.2:13 My people have committed two sins: They have forsaken me, the spring of living water, and have dug their own cisterns, broken cisterns that cannot hold water.
A cistern is a holding tank that needs to be filled from another source. John Piper makes an excellent observation about the difference between the way you demonstrate the worth of a water trough compared to the way you demonstrate the worth of a spring. You demonstrate the worth of a cistern, you get some buckets of water and come fill it up.
If you want to glorify the worth of a spring you do it by getting down on your hands and knees and drinking to your heart’s satisfaction, until you have the refreshment and strength to go back down in the valley and tell people what you’ve found. You do not glorify a mountain spring by dutifully hauling water up the path from the river below and dumping it in the spring. … God is the kind of God who will be pleased with the one thing I have to offer – my thirst.
How to pay God back
In Ps.116 the psalmist deals with the question probably every one of us have had at some point –
Ps.116:12 How can I repay the LORD for all his goodness to me?
That’s a fair question. How would you answer it? How can a human being repay God for His goodness? By serving Him? That would require borrowing even more grace and getting farther into debt with God. Serving God to repay Him would insult God, because that would be to assume we have something to offer God. Look at the psalmist’s answer:
13 I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD.
How can you repay God? By holding up your empty cup and saying, “May I have some more?” That honors Him as the generous benefactor. God will never be reduced to the status of beneficiary – even in heaven. Did you know that someone is going to be waiting tables at the great wedding feast of the Lamb at the end of the age?
Lk.12:37 It will be good for those servants whose master finds them watching when he comes. I tell you the truth, he will dress himself to serve, will have them recline at the table and will come and wait on them.
Is this using God?
Suppose someone read Lk.12 and said, “OK, God is glorified by serving me, so from now on I’m going to think of Him as my servant.” So all his prayers are like placing his order at a restaurant. “God, I know you delight in supplying and serving and giving, so here’s what I would like. Please give me some money and a new house and a great job and ….”
Unless you are influenced by the health wealth heresy you probably instinctively know that an approach like that would not honor God. But why? The reason is because God is not the object of the person’s desire. That person is looking to money and a house and job to bring him joy, not God. That is idolatry. James 4:1-4 calls that kind of praying adultery – it is like a wife asking her husband for hotel money so she can go meet her boyfriend. God does not answer prayers like that. God is always the generous benefactor, but He only gives one thing – Himself. The prayer should be, “God, I know you delight in supplying and serving and giving, so here is what I would like. Please give me a greater vision of Your glory, and a greater experience of Your presence, and deeper fellowship with You….”
David Livingstone’s Example
David Livingstone wanted to be a missionary to China but was prevented from going, so he went to Africa instead. He wanted to be a good missionary, so before going he got both a theological and a medical education. Finally, in 1840, he sailed for Africa at age 27. In Africa he faced all kinds of dangers – broken bones, diseases, injuries, sickness. He had repeated run-ins with lions. One lion almost killed him, tearing his flesh and crushing the bone in his shoulder. A native diverted the attention of the lion when his paw was on Livingstone's head. When asked once what he thought when the lion was over him, Livingstone answered: "I was thinking what part of me he would eat first."
He said one of the hardest things was traveling over 400 miles on ox-back.
He felt God was calling him to do something about the slave trade and to venture even farther into the dark interior of Africa, and so he had to make the painful decision to part with his beloved wife and children and send them home. So after having been away from civilization 11 years, they emerged at Cape Town, said their goodbyes, and Livingstone disappeared back into the darkness. In one single trip he suffered 31 attacks of fever. He had to make his own roads, had bloody hands and knees, was almost constantly wet and was continually attacked by natives. At age 41 he came out to Loanda ragged and exhausted, to find no letters from home waiting for him. But instead of deciding he had sacrificed enough and heading home, he plunged back into the heart of Africa. This time he became nearly deaf from fever and nearly blind from being struck in the eye by a branch of a tree in the forest.
Eventually his wife rejoined him in Africa, where she died and he had to bury his wife. But he continued to press on. Finally, 11 years later, at age 60, all his brutal suffering caught up to him, he was so weak he could not walk across the room. They laid him on a rough bed in a little hut. Robert Speer describes what happened:
At four in the morning the boy who lay at his door called for the others, fearing that Livingstone was dead. By the candle still burning they saw him, not in bed, but kneeling at the bedside with his head buried in his hands upon the pillow. The sad yet not unexpected truth soon became evident: he had passed away on the farthest of all his journeys, and without a single attendant. But he had died in the act of prayer -- prayer offered in that reverential attitude about which he was always so particular; commending his own spirit, with all his dear ones, as was his wont, into the hands of his Savior; and commending Africa -- his own dear Africa -- with all her woes and sins and wrongs, to the Avenger of the oppressed and the Redeemer of the lost."
When Livingstone was 44 years old he made a trip to England and spoke at Cambridge University.
For my own part, I have never ceased to rejoice that God has appointed me to such an office. People talk of the sacrifice I have made in spending so much of my life in Africa. Can that be called a sacrifice which is simply paid back as a small part of a great debt owing to our God, which we can never repay? Is that a sacrifice which brings its own blest reward in healthful activity, the consciousness of doing good, peace of mind, and a bright hope of a glorious destiny hereafter? Away with the word in such a view, and with such a thought! It is emphatically no sacrifice. Say rather it is a privilege. Anxiety, sickness, suffering, or danger now and then, with a foregoing of the common conveniences and charities of this life, may make us pause, and cause the spirit to waver, and the soul to sink, but let this only be for a moment. All these are nothing when compared with the glory which shall be revealed in and for us. I never made a sacrifice.
When I experience serving God as burdensome, I need a whole lot more than just a minor little attitude adjustment. The problem goes much deeper than that. If my heart is saying, “What a burden,” it means my understanding and perspective are twisted 180 degrees out of reality. You don’t say that when you are receiving a wonderful gift – you only say that when you are giving out of your resources.
That is why God loves a cheerful giver. He loves that because cheerful givers are cheerful because they understand that when they put money in the plate, they are beneficiaries, not benefactors.
So can you see why, when we seek God by serving and worshipping Him, our serving and worship must be earnest and wholehearted? When our worship or service starts to become halfhearted and lackadaisical, generally that is a sign that we have slipped into a backward way of thinking of our service. We think we are mostly giving something instead of mostly getting something. When you do something to serve God, or when you enter into worship, you are asking God for something – a priceless treasure. And His response is, “OK, I’ll give it to you, but only if you’re happy to get it,” because if you are not happy to get it, that means you are mixed up about whose giving and whose receiving.
Going to church to receive
This is a good transition to get us into v.2, where David talks about his experience worshipping God in the sanctuary. Let’s apply this principle to corporate worship at church. When you go to church, should you go primarily to give or to receive? I suppose most pastors would say, “We have too many people coming to get and not to give. They just sit in the pew, soak everything up, but they never pitch in and help with the work.” That is a problem, but is the best solution to get everything thinking in terms of giving instead of receiving? I don’t think so.Look at v.2 of Ps.63.
Therefore I have seen you in the sanctuary and beheld your power and your glory. 3 Because your love is better than life, my lips will glorify you. 4 Therefore I will praise you as long as I live, and in your name I will lift up my hands. 5 My soul will be satisfied as with the richest of foods;
He does not say, “Therefore I went into Your sanctuary and worked my tail off and did my share.” He went there and received and received and received; and now he wants to go back so he can receive some more. Last time he got to see God’s power and glory, and he got to experience God’s love which is better than life at its best, and he got all the longings and cravings of his inner man completely satisfied. And so now he wants to go back and get all that again.
What is the solution to the pew-sitters who do no work? Do we need to convince those people that God needs their help? It is astonishing to me that the words, “God needs” could ever come out of the mouth of anyone who has ever read the Bible. The only valid way to use that phrase is this way: “God needs nothing.”
Acts 17:25 he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything
God does not need anything; and if He did need something, He would not need it from us.
Psalm 50:12 If I were hungry I would not tell you, for the world is mine, and all that is in it.
The solution to the lazy, do-nothing pew-sitters is not to convince them that God needs them to work. The best solution is to teach them to come to church to receive God’s grace, because if you truly receive God’s grace, you will work hard and love people deeply.
1 Peter 4:10 Each one should use whatever gift he has received to serve others, as good stewards of God's grace in its various forms.
When you receive grace from God, you become a steward of that grace. If it is truly grace from God that you are receiving, you will feel compelled to dispense it to others through your spiritual gifts. Paul worked so hard and gave so much to the Corinthians because he was compelled to do so. Why was he compelled?
2 Cor.5:14 Christ's love compels us
When you experience that love that is better than life you will feel compelled to dispense it to others. God’s grace has an effect.
1 Cor.15:10 his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them-- yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.
If we have a church full of lazy, do-nothing, pew-sitting sluggards, maybe the problem is our ministry at the church is not providing a feast of God’s grace for them. Either that, or we are providing the feast, but they are not gorging themselves on it because we have trained them to have an attitude of coming to give instead of coming to receive.
What attitude should you have when you come to church (or Bible study)? How about this – think of yourself as what God says You are – the Temple of God. God’s Temple is His dwelling place. As a church, we are the dwelling place of God – the headquarters of God’s fullness. We are the place people come to be near God and to receive grace and love from Him. So when you come here, you should be thinking a couple things:
1) I am going to the same place David talks about in v.2 – the dwelling place of God. My great hope is to have the experience David had – to see God’s power and glory and to be satisfied in my soul by Him.
2) I am not only going to the dwelling place of God; I am the dwelling place of God.
So in the church, while you are seeking God, you should also have the perspective of serving as the headquarters of God’s favorable presence, so that His grace is dispensed to people through you. You are more like a straw than a cup. You will be satisfied by God’s grace when it passes through you to others.
I think if we really learned this principle it would solve the problem of burnout. How do you get burned out of receiving grace from God? Your kid never gets burned out on opening birthday presents. He doesn’t get to his 8th birthday and say, “I have been faithfully opening these presents every single day on Christmas and my birthday, no one seems to appreciate my work, I don’t get any recognition from it, I’m sacrificing my time that I could be using for something else – I’m just getting burned out on this whole gift-opening thing.” When you are mostly receiving, you don’t think of it as a big sacrifice. It is a sacrifice only in the sense that it is a sacrifice to give up a dollar to buy what you already know is the winning lottery ticket. When you win the 10 million dollars, the press does not come and ask you, “How are you coping with the sacrifice of losing that dollar you spent on the lottery ticket?”
