what you would have asked for

Tim Keller once said regarding prayer that, “God will give you everything you would have asked for if you knew everything that He knows.” Might want to read that a few times… If that’s true, that has implications for your whole life and ministry. Read on…

In Today’s Email

1. God at Work in Your Gifts, Opportunities, & Failures

2. Hard Time Getting Out of Bed?

3. Comer on Busyness

God at Work in Your Gifts, Opportunities, and Failures

As you read this, pause and breathe in the air. At this moment, there is nothing about your life that surprises the Lord. In fact, He’s currently working all the good things in your life for His glory and all the less-than-good for His purposes. Basically, you aren’t floating on the wind here. God is always involved. That impacts the way we view our gifts, our opportunities, and even our failures.

Your Gifts

Think about your unique gifting. This is not a prideful act, by the way. So take a minute to think. What are you good at? Musically? Vocally? Pastorally? Maybe you have the gift of encouragement or wisdom or discernment.

While you may have worked at many of these things, ultimately, God chose to give them to you. Not your neighbor down the street. They have their own gifts.

God has given you these specific gifts. And He’s given you these gifts at this point in history. And He’s placed you in the community you’re in right now.

Your Opportunities

Not only does God give you gifts, He gives you specific opportunities to use them for service to His kingdom. The way we view our service to Him is crucial to a long and healthy ministry.

It’s easy to look at our gifts or our experience and have an idea about where we should be at by now. It’s easy to believe that there are things we should or shouldn’t be doing, or tables we should or shouldn’t be sitting at.

But there are two dangers to this:

1. We can believe that we are deserving of more responsibility and, in turn, miss the current opportunity God’s given us to serve.

2. We can be afraid of the task God has given, fearing we don’t have what it takes.

Here’s the deal: sometimes, the opportunities, or lack thereof, are exactly what you need. You aren’t a means to an end for God. You’re His child and that means that He deeply cares about and is working on your heart just as much as those you are serving.

The litmus test is this: at the end of the day, whether our tasks feel too big or too small, can we serve Him with joy?

Your Failures

There are two important things we must remember about our failures.

1. They don’t derail God’s work.

2. They don’t nullify our calling.

How’s that for some peace? God doesn’t need you to nail every set, every pastoral moment, or every interaction to move His plan forward. Some of us plant, some of us water, but GOD does the growing (1 Cor. 3:7).

One thing the enemy loves to do is to make us question our fitness for service in the kingdom. Here’s the kicker: none of us deserve this or have earned it. But God, in His love and grace, invites us into it.

Our job is this: wake up, give Him our best, grow from mistakes, repeat.

All while remembering this: God will help us do whatever He gives us to do.

While we will never pray for a lack opportunities or for failure to occur - sometimes those are the means by which God does His work of grace in us.

Hard time getting out of bed?

Do you feel like this pug most mornings? There might be a reason for that. Spoiler: it might not just be a “busy season”! Take the first step in finding out what might be underneath the surface with our free worship leader health check!

Comer on Busyness

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