This last month I served with a team in Sungai Petani, Malaysia. We were living in and partnering with a local Church in an Indian community.
Being December, we put together a children’s Christmas skit, we caroled into the early morning, we performed a dance at a Christmas Eve service. We also were able to make several home visits for prayer, and performed at an Indian wedding! It was an incredible experience of a shift in culture.. I’ve never experienced anything like it.
Outside of scheduled ministry, I saw the Lord move a lot too. Both, in the team that I was serving with and also in me.
God revealed to me that a few weeks before getting to Malaysia I started relying on my own logistical skills rather than asking him. I got comfortable in the hustle and bustle and resorted to doing what I knew to do, leading how I knew to lead, communicating how I knew to communicate, and serving how I knew to serve. All in attempt for excellence.
Now, wanting to execute plans with excellence isn’t a problem, but what I didn’t realize was that somewhere along the road, it was my heart that changed. I shifted from perusing excellence for the glory of God or the expansion of his Kingdom or even the good of the Squad.. and I started operating out of a fear of failure and the desire to be seen as successful.
I made my own plans rather than leaning on him for guidance and strength.
This month, the team that I was with and I had been reading through the book of Hosea. It’s an interesting book about the Lord leading a man back to his wife who left him to be a prostitute. God uses this as a parallel to the nation of Israel, who turned away from him and worshipped idols. He calls them adulterous in the way they cheated on God with the pleasures of this world and bowed down to golden images, worshiping other gods.
At first, I related on so many levels. I recalled the years I spent having turned away from Jesus to chase after what the world had to offer. Each morning that we read I remembered that season of my life and thanked God for embracing me and taking me back, after I left him.
Later, I was praying and apologizing for making my own plans instead of trusting him, and he showed me that I wasn’t just making my own plans, I was worshiping my plans. That my plans may as well have been a golden calf I was bowing down to.
.
It was a sobering moment. A final tap that drove down the realization of where my pride had taken me.
Depending on our own skills and our own strength robs us of the freedom that comes from trusting in the Lord and leaning on the Holy Spirit as the Helper he is. It also robs us and everyone around us of the fruit of the Holy Spirit that grows as we abide in him. It can actually take us to a place of idolatry.. of loving and worshiping things that don’t deserve our praises and placing our hope and our trust in things of this world rather than finding our security in our Father.
Pride is sneaky..
But, praise God for these seasons of revelation that call me further out of my natural patterns and further into abundant life in him.
“You shall have no other gods before me.”
Exodus 20:3
