Mark 3:14
And He appointed twelve, so that they would be with Him and that He could send them out to preach
Pastor shared about this passge on Sunday and suddenly it dawned upon me that truth that Jesus chose disciples first for the reason of communion and fellowship, not to delegate tasks for them to do.
For a long while, I've been very drawn into the acts of service. Honestly, every Sunday and Saturday, coming to church was really to do work. Even in service and before service, it's all about seeing if any of the Rangers were here, on time or just missing. Excluding the preparations for the Rangers' programme, was the 'need' to either do a little bit of tuition or catching up to see if people were indeed coping well in school and their work. Didn't help that the daily prayers always seemed to be rotating around the tasks and people in the ministry that I am involved in. so as you can see, it was really becoming a situation of me bring entrenched with the entire work-service purpose, rather than communion.
Yes, I know that life consists more than the abundance of work and tasks, and really doing the stuff in the ministry and dealing in lives is also a passion out of doing the heartbeat of God, but somehow, when the communion is absent in the abundance of work, it is time to recount the steps.
When I encountered that passage in Mark and it stirred in me, 2 biblical individuals popped into my mind. The first of which was Adam. The bible says in Genesis 5 that man was created in the likeness of God, and when Adam was created, God made him guardian over the entire Earth. Geneis 2:15 records that "the LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it." Even though the task of man was to be the guardian of earth to serve the Lord, from the later accounts in Genesis 3, God walked amongst Adam and talked with him.
I'm almost sure that the conversations which God had with Adam were not that of a master giving his worker more tasks. I.e - "Adam, have you pruned this plant, harvest that fruit tree, found which lost animal..." Rather, it was a close communion which I assumed was centred around how Adam felt, what he learnt and saw....basically casual, never-ending chit-chat talks like that we have with our own close friends.
The second individual is Moses, a man whom spends so much time in the presence of God that God even acknowledges "I have known you by name."
It's time to get myself to refocus back on knowing the God whom I'm created for, rather than to serve the God whom I think I know. May you and I never serve out of a calling and forget to know more about the caller, that God will never say to us on the day of final judgement - "I do not know you"
Blessings,
M.
"Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his time; Noah walked with God. "(Genesis 6:9)
