From
John 15:1-5
H,
The more I look at it and live it out the more I am convinced
that it has little to do with what we do but everything to do with  how we do it. We do not get points for
striving to do all the overt things of a so called ‘ministry’. It is not like
we need to be heavily involved in the minutiae of God’s unfolding will. We are
not as important to this as we think we are. He would be God if no one
believed. He would lose nothing if the whole earth scorned Him. He who is
everything is sufficient in Himself to sustain the majesty of the universe
without our arrogant need to think we must do the works or the whole thing will
fall apart. Faith without works is dead but works outside faith are pointless.
There is something else going on here. A famous line
comes to mind; the bit about stones praising God if people do not as mentioned
by Christ and we are told again and again how nature itself reveals His glory. I
think that all of this regeneration going on has nothing to do with doing
something for God but rather becoming someone in God or ‘like’ God. I think it
is about eternal character not vigorous actions or moral compunctions. The other
bits play their part but this is all aimed at giving us the sort of character
and making us into the sort of beings that last forever.
A life built on this character will outlast the world and
the coming “fire next time” and all the storms and tempests that every individual
life will have until we land safely on the endless shore of God as a true son
or daughter of that wholesome will. We are being made into patient, kind,
loving, humble, joyful, peaceful, faithful, self controlled and fruitful beings
that are the true light of the world and salt of the earth. It seems to me that
God has no interest in business empires or political agendas or vain glory
campaigns that suggest we are in the public relations department of heaven. He is
not out to prove a point on any matter or to show that every idea has some ‘Christian’
substitute. He is into the individual hearts that return to Eden and gain that
non separation of the original plan of man with God and God with man. He is making
us in His image all over again. These other things will occur as a consequence
of this return to first love but let us not think that this is what matters. It
is life-eternal and all that character. That is the true and eternal solution
to all the problems of us, in and out, today and toward forever and in our
hearts and in the world.