Everything I do is Pointless, I want to do Something with Purpose

Ever feel like this? I know I have. When I was 18 I started interning at my church. It was an unpaid internship and I had no  idea what to expect out of the behind the scenes work at a church. For almost a year the biggest responsibility I had was washing pitchers of water and organizing bins for youth group. That’s what everyone dreams of when they think of working at a church, right?

“God is more concerned about developing your potential than you are!”

I would sit in meetings and hear my mentor delegate “significant” tasks to the rest of the team only to end with looking at me and saying, “Bubs, organize the bins and wash the pitchers.” After two months of that, I had enough. So when my mentor left for his 8 week sabbatical, I e-mailed him telling him I quit. I didn’t sign up to work for free and wash pitchers.

He got me in contact with another mentor and had him talk to me. He said, “Bubs, have you prayed about this?” Of course I hadn’t. He said, “Give God a chance to speak to your heart, if you come back and still don’t want to, then quit.” God had one chance – if he didn’t speak to me in my devotions, it was over. I opened to Isaiah 49:3.4:

³ He said to me, “You are my servant, Israel, and you will bring me glory.” ⁴ I replied, “But my work seems so useless! I have spent my strength for nothing and to no purpose.Yet I leave it all in the Lord’s hand;I will trust God for my reward.”

This verse changed my life forever. I felt like my work was useless, done for nothing, and for no purpose. YET…I leave it in God’s hands – I trust Him for my reward.  I developed this mentality and decided to stick with the internship.

One Thing Leads to Another

For an entire year, I set up bins faithfully every week. At the end of the year, I got asked to give my first offering. I started getting more responsibility. I interned a second year and at the end of my second year, I got asked to speak for the first time ever. Which led to more speaking engagements, more responsibility, and eventually 4 years after I interned, I got hired on staff at my church.

What Would Have Happened if I Would Have Quit Because I thought Everything I did was Pointless?

I wouldn’t be writing this, I wouldn’t be on staff, I probably wouldn’t be living for God. My Conclusion? God has you where you are for a reason, for your development, and if you’ll learn to trust Him for your reward instead of people, in His timing, He will promote you and allow you to do great things for Him, but first, you have to be faithful in the things that seem absolutely worthless.

What if Nobody Remembers You?

¹⁰ Obviously, I’m not trying to win the approval of people, but of God. If pleasing people were my goal, I would not be Christ’s servant.                                                                                                       Galatians 1:10

It’s hard to go through life not wanting people to like you, to be impressed by you, or even wanting others to envy you. But in reality, not that many people are thinking about you as much as you think they are anyway. My friend Zack Blair taught me this truth when I was asking him his opinion about what I thought others thought about a decision I was making and he said, “Bubba, people don’t wake up every morning thinking about you.” Ouch! Haha! But it’s true!

I’ve heard it said that we spend the majority of our lives trying to impress people we don’t even like and in this case, that don’t even really think about us as much as we think they do.

I was thinking along these lines and the question came up, “What if I lived and died, and nobody remembered me?” Because in reality – regardless of what I do in life, 50 years after I die, nobody is going to remember me.

My conclusion: What I do in life will matter in eternity. Jesus said to Peter that he should have one focus in life if he loved Him: “Feed His Sheep.“  I believe that is God’s call on all of our lives – to point people to Him. That’s it. If that becomes our focus in life – lifting people and pointing them to God -> we’ll be free from wanting to please and impress people and our focus will turn to pleasing God.

“What we do in life, echoes in eternity”

And while people here won’t remember me, there will be people in Heaven as a result of what I did while I was here. They will come up to me and you in Heaven and say, “Thank you for pointing me to Jesus, I’m here because of you.” I’d rather have 1 person tell me that I made a difference in their lives for eternity than 10,000 remember my name in 5 years.

Application? Lift people and point them to Him. Stop caring what people think of you. God will remember what you did for His Kingdom, and so will the people that are in Heaven because of your life – that is all that matters so do what God has called you to do and at the end of your life you’ll be able to say along with the apostle Paul - I’ve fought the good fight and finished my race and to the people I’ve touched, it’ll have made all the difference.

Book Review: A Tale of Three Kings

I’ve heard about this books hundreds of times from people, and finally got the chance to read it because of Bible School. The book is a quick and easy read, and it is excellent. It takes the stories of King Saul, David, and Absalom and compares how they led people and treated each other.

The tag-line of this book reads: “A study in brokenness” – which is very fitting. This book really taught me that God longs to have broken vessels who want His will above their own. Our ministries are not our own, they are God’s, and can be taken from us at any moment. The best any of us can do is just live our lives fully-devoted to God and trust Him that if we live lives of integrity and live for doing His will, that one day we really will hear, “Well done, my good and faithful servant.”

Final Grade: 8.5/10    Buy it here

Here are some highlights:

“In David’s darkest hours, we knew them as his pre-king days, but he didn’t. He may have assumed that was his lot forever.”

“David never spoke to people about authority. He never spoke of submission, but everyone submitted to him.”

“Many pray for the power of God. More every year. Those prayers sound powerful, sincere, godly, and without ulterior motive. Hidden under such prayer and fervor, however, are ambition, a craving for fame, the desire to be considered a spiritual giant.”

“After the passinf of time, and the way you react to that leader, be he David or Saul, reveals a great deal about you.”

“Men who speak endlessly on authority only prove that they have none.”

“Beginning empty-handed and alone frightens the best of men. It also speaks volumes of just how sure they are that God is with them.”

“I desires His will more than I desire a position of Leadership.” – David