Kingdom Work

 

I had a dream of a man who was building a brick structure.  He created a low wall of brick and mortar that barely reached his knees and was not very long.  All the while, behind him, there was another man working on the structure, but the first man never looked back to notice the second.  

It came time for the first man to die.  He looked down at the short wall that he had built and lamented that he wished he could have done so much more.  He thought of all the years he had wasted before he worked diligently on the project.  As he entered heaven’s gates, the man who had been laboring behind him ran ahead of him and was there to greet him. It was Jesus.  As the man looked into that beautiful face, Jesus said, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant!”  

The man protested. “All I did was build this one little short wall.  I wish I could have done so much more for you.”

Jesus put his hand on the man’s shoulder and said, “Turn around, son.”  As the man looked back at the place where he had been working, he saw a magnificent cathedral rising into the heavens.

We aren’t doing the work of the kingdom on our own.  The Holy Spirit Himself is working behind the scenes, adding to everything we do.  Our brothers and sisters are doing their little part- building their little sections of the structure alongside us.  The same Jesus who multiplied five loaves and two fish to feed five thousand people is multiplying our work far beyond what we can see.

We may serve in such anonymous ways behind the scenes that we don’t see the people that received salvation because we prepared the environment where they heard the word of God and responded.  That person’s life may, in turn, touch the lives of hundreds of others, turning them to God, and it’s all because we taught their child in the nursery so they could attend a service, or worked on the media team that brought that live video into their home or did any of a dozen other tasks that created an atmosphere that brought about an encounter with God.

We will be astonished in heaven to see how many people that we never met have been brought into the kingdom because of something we have done that we considered to be of no consequence.

Just because you can’t do everything doesn’t mean you should do nothing.  We all have different callings and gifts that God has given us to use to build His kingdom.  We need every brick. 

1 Peter 2:4-5 says, “Coming to Him as to a living stone, rejected indeed by men, but chosen by God and precious, 5 you also, as living stones, are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

We are building and we are being built. Align yourself with the purpose of God to take your place in that spiritual house; it’s where you belong.

Connections

 

I don’t know why some people dream all the time and others never do.  All I know is that my mind is a virtual movie theater every night.  While most of those dreams fly out of my head as soon as the alarm goes off in the morning, I always look for meaning in those dreams that stay with me long after the day is underway.

My most recent dream involved a house on my uncle’s farm.  It’s a little place - just a little over 700 square feet because my grandparents built it as a place to spend their retirement years.  It sits on a little knoll overlooking the family farm, and it’s blessed with a gorgeous view.

In the dream, I was in the house with a couple of other women.  Looking out the window, I could see some men in the front yard and a few others in the backyard.  It was a beautiful sunny day, but the breeze coming off the mountain made it feel comfortable and cool.  Suddenly, from nowhere, there was a stream of water that lifted the little house from its foundation and floated it across the property over to an adjoining piece of land that belongs to my cousin’s widow.  

I felt no fear for my life as the house moved across the grass toward that plot of land.  The day was still calm and pleasant, and the house was smoothly gliding to where it would come to rest. All I could think about was that now we were going to have to get the house towed back to its original site and how much trouble it was going to be to get someone to come in and reconnect the water lines, the electric lines, and the septic tank.  That’s where the dream ended.

I’m not trained in dream interpretation, though I have read about it several times because of the many dreams that flood my brain, but when I meditated on this “movie in my mind” the next day, God showed me what it meant for me and for all of us.

The circumstances that moved the house weren’t big, scary, frightening things - just a gentle movement that somehow still had the power to move it from its connection to the foundation.  If we aren’t careful, even the daily events of our lives that are pleasant, or at least neutral, can move our attention away from God just as easily as a major tragedy that rocks our entire world.  Maybe those day-to-day events are even more likely to distract our attention because we aren’t guarding our hearts in situations that don’t seem threatening on the surface.

The connections that I worried about in the dream were symbols of three things that we lose when we allow distractions from our focus on God.  The first was the water lines.  Just as natural water is vital to our lives, the water of the Word of God is necessary to our spiritual lives so we can be both nourished and cleansed.  The electric lines represent the power of the Holy Spirit in our lives, which guides and teaches us as well as making possible miracles in our lives and the lives of others.  

How am I going to spiritualize a septic tank?  This represents discarding any “stinking thinking” that we have about ourselves and others - all the negative attitudes, lies of the enemy, sin, and worldly “junk” that our minds have picked up in the course of our lives.  Through repentance and renewing our minds, we can discard all that waste in prayer.

1 Corinthians 3:11 says, “For no other foundation can anyone lay than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ.”

That foundation provides all that we need if we don’t allow the circumstances of our lives to break us away from it.

2 Peter 1:3 puts it this way. “....as His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of Him who called us by glory and virtue...”

Why would we build on anything less, and why would we ever want those connections to be severed?