ProvenSample

God’s pattern throughout the Old and New Testament is to set His people free, but it was always for a single purpose. 

We are forgiven and set free so that we can worship and enjoy our God forever. This is what we were designed to do. We place expectations on ourselves of what we could, would, and should do for God if we really had our act together. But our expectations are not necessarily His. Jesus lived with one mission: to do the will of His Father. He called us to do the same. It begins with loving God, then loving others.

We sometimes complicate God and all He wants from us or for us. But He just wants us.

The word holy means to be set apart for God, to be, as it were, exclusively His. It’s easy to feel burdened by the importance and urgency of the mission of God. To some degree that is not all bad. However, the mission of God is so simple: to love God with all of our hearts, minds, souls, and strength, and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

You might ask, But what about the Great Commission? Isn’t our mission to be making disciples? I contend that if we truly love God and truly love our neighbor, then we will desperately want them to know Him. Therefore, we will make disciples.

We exist for one solitary purpose: to love God with all of us and in turn show His grand love to everyone He puts in our paths.

But too often we bow to the pressure of needing to show God’s love before we have even experienced it. We move out into the work before the relationship. We start with “doing” for Him instead of starting with “being” with Him. In John 21, when the disciples got to shore, Jesus didn’t immediately give them marching orders. He cooked them breakfast. They ate. Talked. Perhaps laughed and told stories. The plans He had for them would come later. After the meal, He would call Peter to feed His sheep. Days later He would commission all of them to make disciples (Matt. 28:19-20). But first they had breakfast.

Are you “doing” for God? Or are you doing life with God? He never meant for us to go it alone.