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Our All-Consuming Ministry

The Ministry of Reconciliation is something we find ourselves pre-occupied with. We don’t continue in the work of the ministry because it is a hoop that we need to jump through to please God, but it seems that we are quietly driven to it, or compelled. It must be a part of repentance that creates that dynamic in us. But that is how Jesus is, focused on just one thing; reconciling people to the Father, carrying out his will.
Yet, typically it seems, our old nature has a default mechanism, if not confronted, makes us say, that we can minister as we pursue a multitude of other things. When separated from God, most of our focus is taken up with our pursuit of security, personal value and a pleasant life, this consumes us. And as we run after these things, with good intensions, we think that we can also carry out the Ministry.
Agenda is the question; we can’t carry out multiple agendas. What is ours?
Paul concludes 1 Corinthians 15 with a remark that these folks are to give themselves ‘always’, ‘fully’ to the work of the Lord. Sounds a little redundant, but it’s not. ‘Always’, means all the time, pretty straight forward. ‘Fully’, means to be doing more that just enough and that it be increasing. When ever you’re driven to something, you increase in it. When you’re pre-occupied with something, you think about it when ever your mind is left to it’s self. What ever is fore most in our minds, even our dreams that linger in the shadows, dictate our decision making. Slowly, but surely, what we are pre-occupied with develops our everyday lifestyle. It steers us here, and makes decisions there, so as to bring about this desire we are after.
Giving ourselves ‘always’ and ‘fully’ to the Ministry of Reconciliation is a by-product of the repentant heart. As time goes on, and the Father is making us more and more like the Lord Jesus Christ, we become less and less interested in the temporal pursuits that used to make up our lives. Not in the way that the world becomes less interested, like in mid-life crisis where people become discontented with the system that they thought would satisfy them. We become interested because something better is growing in us, changing us, causing us to look at life from the Father’s perspective. Developing in us the compassion that he has for his children, and to act upon it by giving our lives that they might know him. Like yeast, it begins to take over more and more of our life as we knead it in. And knead it in we must, causing it to become a part of every aspect of our living.
Abandoning our old life and taking up our cross sets us on a road that will completely absorb us in time. It is a work that brings a great amount of satisfaction, because we are working with the one who designed us to relate with him day in and day out. The old life becomes abhorrent in time, not even worth thinking about. To work where he is working, is our only desire and to be consumed by his will becomes our life.