[Shepherding the sheep with one heart] People whom God uses
Do you want to enjoy the crown of glory, the crown of life, the golden crown, and the crown of righteousness when you go to the Kingdom of the Lord? Then you have to get rid of the things that hinder you from living a life according to the word of God. If you decide to live according to the Bible, which is God’s covenant, you must risk your life in order to live according to the will of God. You must overcome lots of obstacles and refuse to give in, irrespective of the risks. If necessary, you need to give up your life. Then God will use you greatly.
God uses people who don’t give up; people who have a faith like Elisha. Elisha was ignored and ridiculed, but he followed Elijah, his teacher, to the end. Finally, he inherited a double portion of Elisha’s spirit.
God seeks people who lay down their thoughts, their faces and their lives when they do His work. He seeks people whom He can conveniently use. If you want to be used by God and if you want to receive power and gifts from God, you have to lay down your life in His presence, so that He can use you easily whenever He wants. You have to always obey Him in order that He can easily use you. You must be counted as a person who can be easily used by God.
If you want to be used by God, you must be unconditionally obedient to God, giving up your own opinions. Let’s imagine something happened to you and you needed to wake your child in the middle of the night and send him on an errand. In that situation, a parent would carefully select which of their children to wake up. A parent wouldn’t wake up a child who would refuse to go. No, a parent would wake up a submissive child and send that one on the errand. In the same way, God gives His tasks to the people who are the most obedient to His orders. You have to make yourself useful if you are to be the first person who pops into God’s mind when He is thinking whom to use. I bet that God uses the people who have already made themselves useful.
Pastor Seok-Jeon Yoon
Extracted from Yonsei Newspaper #589 (August 25, 2018)
