Every morning we wake up around 7:30 am
to get the day going with some morning worship or one of us gives a
Word from the bible for about 30 min. Now I enjoy worshiping our
savior and sharing what God has revealed to me through His Word, but
its difficult for me to do this in the morning… I’ m not a morning
person at all. After worship we head down the street to the soccer
field for morning exercise and soccer training (I need all the soccer
help I can get) for preparation of the up coming soccer tournament
with the local youth. After soccer practice we eat breakfast and then
head out to do what ever task is assigned for that particular day
(visit villages, prayer for families, local government meeting).
Evenings usually involve soccer games with local teens then dinner
back at our contacts home. After dinner is usually “family time”
which is where we discuss our day and encourage or rebuke one another
in a fashion that is pleasing to the Lord.
Ok so I ran through our daily itinerary
to prove a point… it’s easy make your day so busy that you forget
to sit and just be in the presence of the Lord (just you and Him) and
allow Him to speak to you. I mean, how can we expect to be effective
in the short time we have in each country when we leave God out of
our day. I think that it’s easy to make big goals for the day and
want to accomplish so much in the time allotted, but sometimes the
Lord has smaller plans for you that day… There are some days that
the Lords sole purpose for giving you breathe that day is to talk to
ONE person… but you could miss that if you never seek His
council… if you never focus on hearing what the Lord has to say.
Don’t get me wrong having ideas and vision is great! But I believe
you accomplish more for the Kingdom by seeking God’s vision and ideas
first, because remember its not about you or me, it’s about bringing
KINGDOM to the nations not William McRae or (insert your name). Apart
from the Lord I can do nothing, it’s only by His grace each day that
I breathe my next breathe, so I want each breathe to count and waste
nothing. Galatians 2: 20 says “I have been crucified with Christ,
and it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So the life I
live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of
God, who loved me and gave himself for me”. If Christ is in us then
His ideas need to be your ideas, His vision needs to be your vision,
ask for it daily, ask that your flesh would decrease and that the
Spirit of the Lord would increase.
What brought about these thoughts was
actually a movie I got off one of the other guys external hard drive.
If you haven’t seen The Last Samurai you need to go rent it, but
watch it in the Spirit of the Lord and see how much revelation can
be pulled out of it. In the movie the Japanese villagers in the
mountains are the only ones who maintain their ancient traditions
dating back more than 1000 years. The Samurai villagers wake-up early
every morning perform their daily chores and duties, but they strive
to do everything with such a sense of excellence that everything they
do brings honor and respect to their family and their village. They
devote themselves to excellence and became a powerful adversary in
battle… its something that many of us lack, when things get tough
we give up or just do enough to get by. I do enough praying and quiet
time to get by…but what if I went above and beyond, what if we
fully devoted ourselves to the Lord in everything that we do. Imagine
the what the Lord could do through someone who gave every part of
themselves to the Lord, imagine the healing that would take place,
the blessing, the spiritual gifts that would manifest, the amount of
people that would see Christ in YOU! We’ve got to stop giving into
our flesh and putting God on the side lines, we are in a spiritual
battle everyday and we need to come armed. Ephesians 6:12 “For our
struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers,
against the powers, against the world rulers of this darkness,
against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavens”. Satan doesn’t
want us to get closer to the Lord, so he uses the enticements of this
world to keep us occupied and not in constant communication with the
Lord. So my challenge to the Church is to take up the full armor of
God daily, Ephesians 6: 13-20, and strive for excellence in
everything that we do so the time we have in this world is effective
for the Kingdom.
