So the other day (Monday) before lunch, as we do every week, at my bible college we spent 15 mins praying for graduates of the college.
Each one of us sitting around our various tables may pray for one or two people and read from information collected on sheets that are given around from folders. It is rather straightforward and very nice, although it can seem a bit of a chore at times, especially when you are pretty hungry. It is a good discipline really though and probably doesn’t need defending so I don’t know why I bothered to start defending it.
Anyway!! This particular day I was praying for a guy called Paul and his wife (they seemed nice). And I just so happened to take notice that in his box labelled “Dates attended Moorlands” he’d marked the years as the early 80’s.
Now this would have appeared relatively uninteresting to me on most days, but today however I was struck to the core by the realisation that this guy was here studying God’s word, preparing for ministry and getting ready to carry out God’s work … all before I was even born.
This fact stole my mind for the rest of the prayer session, God reminded me that before I was even born, before I was even an idea conceived in my parents mind, God had been carrying out his will here on the earth. (A very obvious fact and one I should be acutely aware of having studied church history, the New Testament and all the accounts of the early church proclamation of the Gospel of Christ at bible college.)
Yet at that particular moment this fact had a particular relevance and God spoke; He reminded me of just how insignificant I am in His grand plan. Now I doubt God was being nasty or arrogant, I just think at times we need to be humbled and reminded of a simple fact. Which is that in all of our stressing and straining about how to be a good witness and how to make sure our friends meet Christ and experience the Good News of his atoninig sacrifice that God is master and commander, he is in control, all His experience will never be totally reliant on our measly efforts.
Before I was even born God was working on the salvation of the world. Why am I so worried about how I can contribute when I’ll probably just mess up his finely tuned method? But for some reason He entrusts us with the messenger role.
So this week I have had a little nudge of encouragement from our Father to let me know that it’s under control and not to let my Christian, “weight of the world on my shoulders” ego get the better of me.
5limboi
