A Life well Lived

The Corporate /working world is overrated. Think about it, if you get to work for 20 years and get to build a mansion and have all the wealth you wanted who does your life benefit but yourself, your family and friends, and sometimes maybe the odd stranger? So, if you are working for a company this is all you could ever be, ever achieve.

When you work for God however the value of your life exceeds merely providing for your needs, the needs of your family and friends, and bits of charity here and there. When you work for God you reach out to strangers, some people you don’t know and some you will never meet. So you achieve much much more than you would if you worked a 7am to 5pm job for the same number of years, say 20.

What then is working for God, how is it done and what does it entail? Working for God is using the gifts you have been given (singing, handcrafting, counseling) and the job you have been given(being a lawyer, accountant or Journalist) to honour and bring glory to God. So it works on two levels, your natural in-born talents on one level and your acquired talents on level two.

Before you commit to working for God though you must consider carefully your decision. Working for God will require total obedience to God and total sacrifice from you. So for example if the Spirit of God tells you to leave your high-paying job as an Internal Auditor, you will have to obey and will have to sacrifice it. This is not where you make a decision half-heartedly. For God will require total obedience and sacrifice from his servant because this is the only way Jehovah can use men in his work. So when you commit to working for God or the glory of his Kingdom be prepared to walk out on your family, your future, your hopes, your dreams as well as put your whole salary at His disposal to use as Jehovah sees fit not as you see fit. In fact have no attachments to anything and that way you will be freely available for service.

Other people are called into working for God through divine inspiration like visions and visits by the Holy Spirit and Jesus Himself. The rest of us choose to use the skills we have to glorify God. So we pray and ask God to show us how we can best serve him and when he does we ask him to everyday to bless the work we do for him so that it bears as much fruit as possible and that our lives reach the fullest potential they can reach in our lifetime. You look at what you do best as a starting point, the thing you feel you were born to do. If you are a cheerful and carefree giver who actually enjoys sharing everything with anyone no matter who then that is the natural skill you were born with. You just take that and ask God to use it to point people to Him and his righteousness.

And for the work we do for God there is apparently an account in heaven where every act you do to glorify God or point people to Him is credited to your specific account in heaven no matter how small the act. So if you share your food with a starving someone in God’s name or out of recognition that that is Gods will for you or because it is the gift of sharing you have been given, it is noted in heaven. Whether it is a biscuit, a large piece of delicious cake or a 3-course meal, it is recorded.

Payments for the work we do for God are, however, done in multiplication. This is because of something called ‘The Ripple Effect’ thus the ripple you will get in the water when you throw something in it. The greater the thing you throw in, the bigger the ripple you cause in the water, the smaller the thing the smaller the effect you will have on the water.

This then is how the Ripple Effect works: If you share a meal with a homeless person today that person will because of the strength he has gotten from that sausage live one more day. In that one more day he might receive Jesus Christ and be saved from the fire of hell.  If he does get saved he might go on to be a great preacher who saves thousands of souls and sends men to preach the gospel. Your reward then will not be for the sausage you shared with the homeless man alone but also for those he goes on to touch and also those these go on to touch. Your reward multiplies by itself and is deposited in your heavenly account. All lives touched are credited to you.

You should know that the rewards in your heavenly account from all the work you do for God out of a pure and righteous heart, with no deceit intended or selfish reasons behind it, will come in useful on Judgment Day. Yes when your millions upon millions of sins are brought out in front of the whole assembly and you hang your head in shame wishing you had led a better life, had had more mercy on your fellow men, and had sinned less your heavenly account will be opened. The work you did will then be weighed against the sins and mistakes you made. It will be to your favour if your works for God outweigh your sin, for the better the contents of your account the better the type of life you can lead in heaven.

It is said salvation of the soul is only by believing in Jesus Christ and cannot be worked for, very true. But it is written “Greatest in the kingdom of heaven is the servant”, the one who humbles himself to serve others. So you might get into heaven yes even if you don’t work for God. But what working for God will do is determine whether you live in the desert, in Somalia, South Africa, Great Britain, America or Iceland. Yes you will be asked what you have done with your life and the talents God gave you to serve him and his people. If you lived for yourself while having been “in Jesus Christ” you will get into heaven but will get to see the King from outside the stadium while the one who poured out his life in service to God and men will be allocated a place 5 seats below him as appropriate. Pity he who has nothing to show for his life. Let he who has an ear hear.

“Day by day the Lord observes the good deeds done by godly men, and gives them eternal rewards”-(Psalms 37:18 TLB)