One of the learning curves I am on at the moment is not doing things to please man, which is very different to doing things to 'edify' man or glorify the Lord. This is not so easy to discern all the time and comes down to being aware of the motives of my heart.

Often we use words like laying down your life, sacrifice, pouring yourself out and having a servant heart, but these things can become just as legalistic if we do them for the wrong reasons as any religious dogma we may find elsewhere.

Jesus certainly WANTS those thing from us, but as an act of love and perfect sacrifice to HIM and under HIS anointing and HIS equipping and HIS empowering... it is all about HIM!

So firstly we need to make sure we HEAR from HIM and arent just doing things which are 'good ideas'.

While in one sense we do forget ourselves, because it is all about Him, we actually do need some awareness of self because without it we can not really be honest about WHERE we need his help. It is really great when we can use our gifts and talents to serve the Lord, but if we are doing it without the Lord we may as well be doing it out in the work place and getting payed for it because the spiritual significance may be totally lost without intimacy and relationship with Jesus.

Romans 12 says;

1Therefore, I urge you, brothers, in view of God's mercy, to offer your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and pleasing to God—this is your spiritual[a] act of worship.

It then goes on to tell us about using our spiritual gifts to edify the 'body'. But our first port of call is to offer ourselves to GOD! So often we get this the wrong way around. We use our spiritual gifts/talents to 'serve' the body (or is self really disguised as such?), and hope that God is ok with that.

It's a bit like that verse in James that talks about the man who looks at himself in the mirror and then goes away forgetting what he looks like. We NEED to know where we are at spiritually, we need to look in the mirror of the word of God and ourselves in Jesus reflection, so we can get a true sense of where we need repentance, forgiveness, reconcillation, redemption and rebuilding.

If we don't take the time to examine the motives our hearts and why we do what we do, then we could spend weeks, months and years doing 'good' things that He never really called us to do, nor equipped us for, or worse still had no anointing for but was a work of our very talented flesh!

~selah~