Every Christian is invited to join God on a mission, but we often struggle to know how to work with God. This leads us to engage in our ministry, whether paid or volunteer, with a posture that is out of alignment with God’s Spirit.
In Matthew 11, Jesus invites us to work with him, but more often than we care to admit we choose to work for him instead. The difference between working with God and working for God may seem subtle, but it can make a world of difference in how we serve. We typically default to working for God because we want to preserve our independence, autonomy, and control. This allows us to point with pride to the work of our hands: “Look what I did for you, God!”
This posture, which is so out of alignment with the Spirit, is revealed in the verbs we use to speak about God’s kingdom. When we envision our ministry work as something we are doing for God, instead of with God, it shows in how we describe our activity. We may say:
Our work will…
- Build the kingdom
- Expand the kingdom
- Grow the kingdom
- Or, advance the kingdom
In each of these uses, we are the ones who build, expand, grow and advance the kingdom. We conceptualize our work as creating the kingdom for God — it is a concrete reality in this world that we work to establish, build and grow. But if you search the scriptures for the way Jesus speaks about the kingdom, you’ll notice that he uses markedly different verbs in conjunction with the kingdom of God. Jesus invites us to:
- Enter the kingdom
- Receive the kingdom
- Watch for or wake up to the kingdom
- And pray to our Father in heaven, “May your kingdom come”
When Jesus speaks of the kingdom, he always does so with a deep faith that the kingdom already exists and it is fundamentally secure. God is the one who has built the kingdom, and he is established as its ruler. It’s a hidden reality that you and I are invited to enter, receive, and awaken to. It breaks into this world, for sure, but as Jesus says to Pilate, his kingdom is not of this world.
Working with God means our work begins with noticing. First, we enter this hidden kingdom and pay attention to what God is doing. Then, we join with him in what we already see him doing. In this way, we follow Jesus’s example, who said, “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does.” When we begin our work with noticing, our missional activity in the world flows out of our attentiveness to this hidden kingdom.
At Restoration Ministries, we seek to help people awaken to God’s kingdom through contemplative spirituality. In 1-on-1 spiritual direction, with prayer groups, and on retreat, people are invited to awaken to the mystery of God’s kingdom already among us and then join God in his work in the world.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
