Tag Archives: Christian Service

January 24, 2023 · 7:56 pm

ANANIAS & Co.

I was on the cast of a stage play in my secondary school days. I did not have to memorize any scripts. I was a soldier in the play and all I had to do was to appear on stage at the right time with the other soldiers and fight. We disappeared backstage as the curtains were drawn on our scene. There was also another one in which I was just one of the stagehands and only got on to the stage when the curtains were drawn and away from the sight of the cheering audience.

On these two occasions, I definitely did not get any accolades from the audience because I did not do anything remarkable in their sight. However, without the fight scene in the play, it would not have been complete and of course, no stage play is smooth without the work of the invisible team that rearranges the stage between the scenes.

Celebration of those that are in our faces is a natural reaction for us and should not come as a surprise to anyone. However, some people do a lot of heavy lifting behind the scenes and never make it to the stage in their entire careers. Yet without these people, the A-list actors that we celebrate will not be where they are today.

There are quite a few people in the Bible that did some heavy lifting in the background, they are not mentioned many times in the scriptures. Yet without their exploits, the story would be far from complete. I have chosen to call Ananias the Chief of this group of people. After he prayed for Paul and baptized him, his name was mentioned only once again in the Bible and that was by Paul himself during a speech. Under the prevailing circumstances in his days, getting up to seek out and pray for Paul was a great act of faith and obedience and definitely went a long way to shape the story of the New Testament scriptures as we have it today.

Another person that did not get much screen time but played a significant role was Hur, who helped to hold up the hands of Moses with Aaron in the battle against the Amalekites. This act secured victory for the Israelites at that time.

Others are Elisheba, the wife of Aaron and matriarch of a great lineage of priests that include Nadab, Abihu, Eleazar, and Ithamar; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, one of the women that supplied the physical needs of Jesus while He walked the earth; Gilalai, one of the priests that participated as a musician in the procession led by Ezra; Hassenaah, a man whose sons built the Fish Gate during the reconstruction of the walls of Jerusalem under the repair programme led by Nehemiah; Jehiah, one of the gatekeepers for the Ark of the Covenant in the time of king David. There are so many more. These people may not have had a great mention, but their exploits are by no means meager and the scriptures will not be complete without them. What is important is that they played their part in God’s “play”.

Now we are on that stage, and we have to play our parts. That natural desire to be seen and applauded will always be there. So, if the acts and scenes we regularly appear in do not attract many accolades, the tendency to want to trade places will often tug at us. However, we must consciously remind ourselves that the applause of men is not our purpose and God’s scale of success and prominence is different from the scale that we use and it is His own that really matters.

Whatever you do [whatever your task may be], work from the soul [that is, put in your very best effort], as [something done] for the Lord and not for men. Colossians 3:23 [AMP]

Whatever it is that you are doing, God sees, God knows and God gives the best accolades. Let us not grow weary or become discouraged in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap if we do not give in. Galatians 6:9 [AMP]

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January 18, 2020 · 4:45 pm

NOT JUST FOR PRUNING SAKE

I have always wondered why some babies make their first appearance on earth with strange haircuts. Some sections are fully cultivated and resplendent, while others are completely bare or designed with sparse vegetation. In most cases, there is usually no clear pattern to the hairstyle. However, after a few years, you’ll struggle to recognize what was once an unattractive ‘real estate’. The transformation starts immediately after the first haircut and continues to be perfected with more haircuts. I can only imagine what those heads would look like if they were allowed to just develop like that.

My childhood days were before the days of electric clippers, when all sorts of contraptions ranging from scissors, manual clippers and blade-and-comb were used to plough the hair. If you didn’t experience these things, you don’t know what you missed.

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These haircuts can be likened to the pruning of trees to make them more fruitful and desirable. The hair strands that are removed from the heads by haircuts are not exactly useless or dead strands, but their removal is essential for the required transformation. That’s the same thing with pruning. When you prune, you are not necessarily removing dead branches, but living branches that need to make way for the perfection of the tree. If these trees are not pruned, they will never reach their full potential. If the trees had sensory nervous systems, I guess pruning would be like surgery without anaesthesia…not a very pleasant experience.

There is more to Christianity than going to church and being very active in the church. There is definitely more to our relationship with God than just being good people and living chaste lives. And there is more to our walk with God than being consistent with our daily Bible study and prayers. Whatever level we get to, however deep our relationship with our Heavenly Father gets, there will always be more. We are called to live supernatural lives, doing the very same things that Jesus did while He was on the earth as summarized in Acts 10:38:

And you know that God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power. Then Jesus went around doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.    Acts 10:38 (NLT)

That ‘more’ does not come with business as usual. It comes with continuous pruning. That’s why Jesus said:

“I am the true Vine, and My Father is the vinedresser. Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that continues to bear fruit, He [repeatedly] prunes, so that it will bear more fruit [even richer and finer fruit].”  John 15:1-2 (AMP)

The branches that need to be pruned are not necessarily bad or offensive things, they include nice things that just need to be dropped if we have to get to the level that God wants us to get to at every point in time. They are mostly things that compete with the sacrifices of time and other resources that should be devoted to God or other forms of personal and spiritual development. If we do not drop these things, we will always be at the milk level and not able to graduate to solid spiritual food and bones, like Paul said to the Corinthians:

“I had to feed you with milk, not with solid food because you weren’t ready for anything stronger. And you still aren’t ready…” 1Corinthians 3:2 (NLT)

The things to be pruned are different for everyone so; there’s no one size that fits all. Part of the work we need to do is to be on that continuous journey of self-examination to know what we need to drop at every point in time. When we discover these things, we then need to take the responsibility for pruning them off and by the way, this pruning is not for pastors or church workers only, it is for every Christian, because…

These signs will accompany those who have BELIEVED: in My name, they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues;  they will pick up serpents, and if they drink anything deadly, it will not hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will get well.” Mark 16: 17 – 18 (AMP)

If we are believers then we really do not have any excuse but to keep pruning and flourishing. That’s what we have been called to and it is a lifelong call. We must never become satisfied and complacent. We must keep pushing till the very end

12 I admit that I haven’t yet acquired the absolute fullness that I’m pursuing, but I run with passion into His abundance so that I may reach the purpose that Jesus Christ has called me to fulfill and wants me to discover. 13 I don’t depend on my own strength to accomplish this; however I do have one compelling focus: I forget all of the past as I fasten my heart to the future instead. 14 I run straight for the divine invitation of reaching the heavenly goal and gaining the victory-prize through the anointing of Jesus. 15 So let all who are fully mature have this same passion, and if anyone is not yet gripped by these desires, God will reveal it to them. Philippians 3:12 – 15 (TPT)

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June 30, 2015 · 11:49 am

WORKING FOR GOD

Somehow, we have always had it ingrained in the recesses of our minds that we had to do things for God and get really involved in church activities in order to get God to like us and do things for us. This meant that the answers to our prayers had a direct relationship with how much we had ‘invested’ in actually pleasing God. When praising God, we had to dance really hard like David danced for God to notice us and our shout of “Amen” had to be the loudest. And then to cap it up, we had to be actively involved in one or more church service units and be in church every other day. These are things and reading the verse below convinced me the more that serving God is not really about things:

 “Listen to my Message, you Sodom-schooled leaders. Receive God’s revelation, you Gomorrah-schooled people.  “Why this frenzy of sacrifices?”  God’s asking. “Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of burnt sacrifices, rams and plump grain-fed calves? Don’t you think I’ve had my fill of blood from bulls, lambs, and goats? When you come before me, whoever gave you the idea of acting like this, Running here and there, doing this and that— all this sheer commotion in the place provided for worship? “Quit your worship charades. I can’t stand your trivial religious games: Monthly conferences, weekly Sabbaths, special meetings—   meetings, meetings, meetings—I can’t stand one more! Meetings for this, meetings for that. I hate them! You’ve worn me out! I’m sick of your religion, religion, religion, while you go right on sinning”. Isaiah 1: 10 -11(MSG)

When we become children of God, serving God in any area that we have grace to serve should be as natural as breathing is to any living thing. We don’t serve or do things because we need things, rather it is because He is our father and we are His children and the Kingdom is our Father’s Kingdom.  Most times, we clearly miss the point that what God really wants is just for us to love Him. Every other sacrifice or service should just flow out of our lives as a result of our love for our Father and the relationship we have with Him.  If God was interested in things, Uzzah would not have died when he tried to stop the ark from falling (2Samuel 6:7), after all he was doing a good thing.

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Every segment of our lives as God’s children should form part of our worship to God and there should be no compartmentalization into spiritual life and secular lives. God created us that we might be worshippers, but we have become everything else but worshippers. We have put working for God ahead of worshipping God.

I will end with this quote from a previous blog post.

“God created us for His pleasure. Our Christian service is also a part of us that should give Him pleasure. If I experience God’s blessings or not in the course of the service, I will still serve Him. God’s blessings are completely free and there is no way I can pay for all that He has done and all that He will do for me. Relating this to the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican, the Pharisee came on the platform of all that he had done for God, while the Publican came ‘Just as I am without one plea’. We know the rest of the story. In Matthew 7: 7 – 8, God did not say you should go and ‘labour in the vineyard’ before coming to Ask, Seek and Knock. If I need anything, I can simply go to God as my Father and just Ask”

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