This must be true confessions time.
Recently I told you abut the week I was unfaithful to my wife. Today I have to confess about the time I decided not to share the love of God with everyone. I did it in church, and I helped lead other people in the same direction.
So let’s start with a question:
With whom are we supposed to share the love of God?
Do I hear you yelling, “EVERYBODY!”?
That’s the answer, but it’s amazing how easy it is to rule out some people without even realizing it.
Here’s how it happened to me. As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I drove to church early on a recent Sunday to volunteer. It was going to be a busy Sunday. The service included communion, an extra collection and a time when the pastor would be calling people up on stage. The volunteers would be helping with all those events. We spent a lot of time planning exactly how e would get it all done.
In fact that’s all we talked about. There was no time for prayer. There was no time to talk about why were serving. We had to get everything done and get it done correctly.
Near the end of the service I passed another volunteer and said “Hi”.
His eyes were so focused on his destination and his mind was so focused on his task that he didn’t even see me. We were keeping our heads down and getting our jobs done (Not always the best solution).
We completed our tasks with God honoring excellence. But anybody watching us would have seen us hurrying around with worried looks on our faces.
Can you imagine anybody seeing that and saying, “Wow, I want what they have”?
We were so focused on sharing God’s love with our guests that we forgot to share it with each other first. How authentic does that look?
These days we leave time for a devotional and prayer for individual team members before we serve. You might expect that team morale would grow. But you might be surprised to hear that our level of excellence has increased, too.
I guess we made the same mistake trying to serve God that day in church that I make almost every day of my life. We just didn’t listen closely enough to hear what God was saying:
John 13:34-35
“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
