We are an Offering to the Lord

As stewards of God’s garden, our lives are like that of a hired gardener, working to ‘keep’ God’s creation, His Kingdom holy. To look after animals as in Genesis 2. Paul’s writes that we are to throw out seeds, to water, and that God gives the increase.

I’ve found myself recently fascinated with irrigation systems and how, at first when owning a home, there are certain points in time in which you tend your house and plants. Sporadically watering what is in need, giving fertilizer, the right amount of sun, weeding, and any other attention with intruders. As we grow in our ability to tend this home and its property, automation becomes a goal of thought, how to optimize resources, especially time. Then, it hit me when we were talking about living as an offering to God, that our lives must also move towards automation when serving the Kingdom. Sure, seeing a need in the family, in our brothers in sisters, in our paths to doing what we are called to do, will always be in our lives, just like planting seeds, or weeding, but, processes of automation are inevitable in our lives too, if we are to increase and grow, to move ahead.

God’s Automated System

…The Church!

When we look at Acts 2, in the Apostle’s Doctrine (42-48), we see the disciples of Jesus living together, sharing what they had to those in need, each one giving to each other, owning nothing. This system of resource sharing continues in the Church today. We are God’s Automated System.

I think of my church’s Women’s Ministry and how we have a clothing drive, a donation-based shopping opportunity where people share clothes of all sizes, kinds, and styles to others who bring their own clothes to trade and share. Just as with this example, the Church as a whole operates in the same way.

Now, in a COVID-19 world, in a society that is moving to less and less social meetings with new opportunities to meet and influence others in the same positive way, the Church is in an even greater position, and obligation, to ramp up discussion on continuing to share in resources, whether it’s the ‘Calling Tree’ ministry or the prayer chain email. What happens now is, if we as a people can find ways to share our resources, as an offering to god, as the entities from which God works directly towards others, and not only His children but all Creation, if we can become a strong body operating as the Apostles did in Pentecost, then the Church is again acting in that purity as She was in the day of Christ’s resurrection.