Do you ever feel like the world is collapsing around you? I do. And then I wonder what I’m supposed to do about it. And is it worth it? We all know the story of the little boy saving the one starfish out of thousands: it was worth it to the one starfish who was thrown back into the sea. Yes, we think, save the one. Pick up the one starfish you can help. This is what God wants us to do, surely. But…all those others! The poor, the homeless, the abused children and the divorced and lonely women: how are we to help all these?
Or think about the creative side of life. Why write a song when it’s just one song? Why write a book when most of them are never read? Why paint a picture in an age of digital technology? It doesn’t change the world. Does it?
Read this quote of N.T. Wright, out of his book Suprised by Hope. I ran across it in The Hole in Our Gospel by Richard Stearns. Read about how the things you do for the kingdom are, in fact, ushering in that kingdom here! The song, the picture, the one starfish and the not-so-lonely women all have eternal significance.
But what we can and must do in the present, if we are obedient to the gospel, if we are following Jesus, and if we are indwelt, energized and directed by the Spirit, is to build for the kingdom. This brings us back to I Corinthians 15:58 once more: what you do in the Lord is not in vain. You are not oiling the wheels of a machine that’s about to roll over a cliff. you are not restoring a great painting that’s shortly going to be thrown on the fire. you are not planting roses in a garden that’s about to be dug up for a building site. You are — strange though it may seem, almost as hard to believe as the resurrection itself — accomplishing something that will become in due course part of God’s new world. Every act of love, gratitude, and kindness; every work of art or music inspired by the love of God and delight in the beauty of his creation; every minute spent teaching a severely handicapped child to read or to walk; every act of care and nurture, of comfort and support, for one’s fellow human beings and for that matter one’s fellow nonhuman creatures; and of course every prayer, all Spirit-led teaching, every deed that spreads the gospel, builds up the church, embraces and embodies holiness rather than corruption, and makes the name of Jesus honored in the world — all of this will find its way, through the resurrecting power of God, into the new creation that God will one day make. That is the logic of the mission of God.
Wow. Did you catch that?
That’s how we can do everything we do as if for the Lord. It is his. He will fill those words, those deeds, those songs with his transformed and resurrected power. They are part of the kingdom, now and then. It may be one starfish, but it has eternal implications.
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So …you’re saying keep going right….:) Thanks a good word at a good time.