God shaped assignments: What's yours?

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Have you ever wondered if what you are doing "fit" with what God's assignments look like?

Are we doing enough? What if we stop serving in the youth program or in the choir, will that be showing a lack of faithfulness? God wants people who stick with things, so perhaps we should keep on going.

Have we done things the right way? Whenever we evangelize there should always be follow up shouldn't there? After all how will people grow in the Lord? We wouldn't just abandon a new born baby would we, so how can we lead some one to the Lord, helping them to be born again, without taking on the personal responsibility of discipling that person? That wouldn't seem right.

These are examples of the kinds of questions that come to our minds as we evaluate our service for the Lord. And there is a sense in which these are healthy questions. But unfortunately many of us fall into bad thinking patterns, thinking that the implication in the question provides its own answer, and that isn't necessarily the case.

Take the example of Philip from Acts chapter 8. Philip is preaching to multitudes of people in Samaria. Verse 25 says that he was ...preaching the Gospel to many vilages of the Samaritans.

A great ministry going on, not one a person would think it right to be leaving to go to a "smaller" assignment. And yet in the next verses we read:

But an angel of the Lord spoke to Philip saying, "Arise and go south to the road that descends from Jerusalem to Gaza." (This is a desert road) And he arose and went; and behold there was an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians who was in charge of all her treasure; and he had come to Jerusalem to worship.

Can you imagine leaving the multitudes in the villages of Samaria to find yourself led of God to a desert road? Our first thought might be,

"Lord, I think I took a wrong turn somewhere. There's no one here, well no one except one person I see going down the road. So I've got a problem: I think I goofed up. Perhaps I didn't hear you correctly. Am I in the right place out here in the middle of nowhere?"

Been there? Are you there today? I know the feeling.

And yet Philip was precisely where God wanted him to be. Thankfully Philip hadn't had any evangelism training. He just did what the Lord led him to do. (I'm all for evangelism training by the way. I'm just making a point.)

Philip leads the Ethiopian to the Lord, even baptizes him and then poof!, Philip is whisked away by his own desires to avoid the hard work of follow up and his irresponsbible fear of not being a good teacher. No, it doesn't say that does it. It was the Spirit of God that snatched Philip away.

Verse 39 And when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away; and the eunuch saw him no more, but went his way rejoicing.

Funny thing that. Didn't the Spirit of God know that follow up was going to be needed for the Ethiopian? Didn't the Spirit of God know that the Ethiopian needed to find a good church to go to? You get the idea.

Of course the Spirit of God knew these things. But the Spirit of God had another assignment for Philip right then. The giving of assignments was and is the Spirit of God's responsibility, not ours.

Don't get confused when God gives you a temporary assignment that doesn't fit the size of the one you have just come from or the one you think you should be going to. God is the assignment giver, both in terms of what the assignment is and how long we are in our assignment.

You might call our assignments God shaped. He molds the clay of the shape of our role, not us.

So relax! Follow God's leading and don't let yourself be squeezed into some pre-conceived mould, not even by your pastor. Your number one responsibility is to the Lord. Yes there are human beings we are to answer to, and rightly so, but only in order of priority, and God comes first. Be at peace about that.

And be at peace in your own skin, even if you find yourself on a desert road when others think you should be in the villages somewhere. You may discover that your greatest assignment in life is just up ahead in the life of a person whose path may intersect yours for only a few minutes.

With them like a brand picked from the burning, you may be God's set of "tongs" to pull them out of a firey eternity.