Greatness

I just attended a conference.  To my way of thinking, there are two kinds.  One leaves you on an emotional mountaintop…recommitted to living in the light of God’s grace with the help of the Holy Spirit, not to earn anything but simply because you love Him so.  The other finds you driving down the highway scratching your head and pulling out the lectures mentally to decide if you want to nod or shake your head, eager to pull out your Bible to investigate.  Both are faith-affirming and challenging.  Both have dangers.  

The inspirational conference can leave you broken at the bottom of the mountain when you run up against a world that is unbelieving, that did not attend those sessions with you.  The doctrinal sessions may challenge the very choices you are making.  Forget those you have already made!

So you can travel with me north on 95 fighting a serious questioning of who I am, less than two hours out of Orlando, where we attended the Gospel Coalition Conference.  The theme was Coming Home: the New Heavens and the New Earth and the emotional content was, indeed, glorious.  How could it not have been?  But the Bible content was amazing as well.

The heaviness I was carrying came more from my desire to want to do something BIG for God, living large for His glory.  I listened to amazing speakers who were reaching 6,000 people in the room, many of whom were pastors, as well as over 23,000 over the internet.  The music was moving and I thought, “How wonderful to be able to guide someone to the place where I am now.”

Don’t get me wrong.  I wasn’t thinking about money here, or power or fame (there’s nothing I would desire less).  I just want to do something powerful in God’s name for His glory!

He set me right.  The young mom that gets up and changes the sheets for the child who has been sick at 2:00 AM and does it in grace and love?  That’s profound.  The man who sets the alarm for 6:00 every morning, gets up and goes to work in the heat of the outdoors, and comes home and loves on his wife and children?  No way can we know the effects of that kind of love and commitment.

We are about to start a Bible study on spiritual gifts at church.  How timely this is!  Each of us as believers has some one or more gifts given to us by the Holy Spirit.  We don’t have the same ones…how could He accomplish His purposes that way?

Most of us have the same routine, day in and day out.  It gets boring, tiresome because we are laboring under the curse of sin.  But if we do it simply because we love Jesus and have a desire to please the Father, if we do it because we are looking more at God than ourselves, that is greatness.