Investing In Others

God is not unjust; he will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them. - Hebrews 6:10

It is an interesting journey, this Christian life. Things often do not follow in a logical order as we think they should. One would assume that when God changes a life, that person would have no trouble remembering His promise for his or her life. We all know, however, this is not the way life works. It is often far too easy to forget what the Most High did in our lives even yesterday. As we live our lives as we ought, speaking life and offering hope to those around us and seeking the Lord with everything we have, we are promised that the things we do are not forgotten by God. We have a problem with this thought, though. In our American culture we must pay our debts ourselves, be a self-made man (or woman ;-), standing on our own two feet taking help from no one. This leads to many complications when it comes to our relationship with God. We want to earn our place in His presence. We want to prove to Him that He should love us. We want to prove to ourselves that we are worth loving. Therefore we have such a hard time believing that our sins are cast into the sea of forgetfulness. We have an easier time believing that it is we who are cast into that sea and we must cry aloud for Him to notice us once again and wrap us in His arms. One of the worst things about this mindset is that it makes you so worried about working to please Him that you miss what He wants to do in your life.
Not all Christians are like this, however. There are those who see every situation as an opportunity to stand for Christ and offer Him to those around them, Christian and non-Christian alike. The struggle then becomes believing that as you water others you yourself will be watered in return. When you can only see the needs of those around you and try your best to meet them it is easy to feel like you have nothing left for God when it comes to your quiet time. Looking at the scripture above, we are reminded that as you love God's people, you are actually loving God. It is easy (most of the time) to realize that as we sing worship songs we are loving God. Or when we are sharing with someone what He did in our life we are loving Him. Or when we pray for revival we are loving Him. In actually we are told that what we do to the least of our brothers we do to Him, both good and bad. Be encouraged this day that as you aid the people of God, as you lift your brothers and sisters from the miry pit of depression, as you help them leave the doldrums of hopelessness, you are in fact giving love to the very one who enables you to do such things. The Prince of Peace, the Mighty One, the Everlasting God.
If you want to give God a hug, go up to one of your Christian friends and give him or her a hug. And realize that you are also embracing He who lives inside of him or her. After all, we are temples of the Holy Spirit, are we not?