Why Do You Do What You Do?

1 Peter 4:10 God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. 11 Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.

When you serve Jesus, why do you serve Jesus, and is love the stimulus? If it is for any other reason than your love for Jesus, it is worthless. You are just making noise for yourself and falling into the category of narcissism, and there are far too many people like that on social media. Serving Jesus is just that SERVING JESUS. No one else. Love has to be the driving force when we serve, and if not, it does more harm than good for the kingdom. And that is why we do what we do. Not to prove a point, not to degrade someone else, and not to be a WINNER. There are no victories for us. Only for Jesus, because He deserves all the praise and the glory.

Sports rule our thoughts and our intentions in almost everything today. Our lives are impacted by the lure of sporting competitions, and too much is too much when our sporting fetishes take over our thinking and our lives. In the Christian world, it has affected why we do what we do when we do it. Our desire to WIN becomes our reason for doing what we do. Paul wrote about this very problem in 1 Corinthians 13:10 God has given each of you a gift from his great variety of spiritual gifts. Use them well to serve one another. 11 Do you have the gift of speaking? Then speak as though God himself were speaking through you. Do you have the gift of helping others? Do it with all the strength and energy that God supplies. Then everything you do will bring glory to God through Jesus Christ. All glory and power to him forever and ever! Amen.

When our desire to be "on top" in everything drives us, then we have succumbed to a teaching that is opposite of Jesus and fully in line with a lost and dying world controlled by the enemy. Paul wrote about the depravity of the world, and when it takes over, all hell breaks loose, but comes disguised as heavenly. In the first chapter of Romans, Paul makes some very strong statements about this "slide" that looks very good and Godly, but the end is falling into a depraved mindset that makes our desires more like the world than the Lord. Romans 1:24 So God abandoned them to do whatever shameful things their hearts desired. As a result, they did vile and degrading things with each other’s bodies. 25 They traded the truth about God for a lie. So they worshiped and served the things God created instead of the Creator himself, who is worthy of eternal praise! Amen. 26 That is why God abandoned them to their shameful desires. Even the women turned against the natural way to have sex and instead indulged in sex with each other. 27 And the men, instead of having normal sexual relations with women, burned with lust for each other. Men did shameful things with other men, and as a result of this sin, they suffered within themselves the penalty they deserved.

With God, one thing leads to another, and Paul warned of the "inward" problem of "self" and what the desire to please "self" could do to us. Even believers. Narcicism is an easy mark for the enemy as he exploits the humanistic pride monster and compels that monster to do evil things, even to the point of depravity in sexual areas. The extreme things we are seeing now are from the base desire to "win" at all costs. Win for me. The translation is putting one-upmanship even in the church of our Lord, and that desire for self to be seen as winning is the first step toward moral depravity, and the end result can be utterly evil, beyond our imagination, but not beyond the imagination and plans of the devil. Paul skipped ahead in his teaching in Romans chapter one, which compels us to run away from this core beginning of depravity and step back into glorifying God and realizing His victory is our victory. It is good enough to serve out of love alone. I am not the winner. Jesus is the winner. His warning is to follow God and not let the world's lure of winning drive what we do and who we are.

1 Corinthians 13: 1 If I could speak all the languages of earth and of angels, but didn’t love others, I would only be a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing. 3 If I gave everything I have to the poor and even sacrificed my body, I could boast about it; but if I didn’t love others, I would have gained nothing. 4 Love is patient and kind. Love is not jealous or boastful or proud 5 or rude. It does not demand its own way. It is not irritable, and it keeps no record of being wronged. 6 It does not rejoice about injustice but rejoices whenever the truth wins out. 7 Love never gives up, never loses faith, is always hopeful, and endures through every circumstance.

Please step away from the pride monster and remember to serve Jesus with a heart of love and not with a worldly attitude of winning at all costs. Why do you do what you do?

Today's Message,

David Warren