God's Purpose And Destiny For Our Lives

In this lesson we are going to talk about being shaped for serving God. Ephesians 2:10 says that we are God's workmanship we are created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared us to do in advance. We are God's workmanship which means God made you designed you, created you for a purpose. He fashioned you in such a certain way, in order to do His good works--He gave you the capacity to do that God prepared in advance. In other words, when God thought about it, He designed you in such a way that you can do what He has called you to do. We are His workmanship and God has designed us to be a contribution, not just to be a consumer.

It doesn't matter how long you live, but it matters how you live it. The duration of your life is not the key issue here-- it is the donation of your life. God has made us in order to do something. We are not just to sit back and be a receiver and a consumer, but we are to be a doer, and that is what we are going to be talking about.

Job 10:8 says, "Your hands shaped me and made me." Now we are not going to get into detail with your shape, but just let me give you five things to help you to know what God has called you to do. Those five things are found in the word "S-H-A-P-E."

"S" stands for spiritual gifts.
"H" is for your heart, e.g., the passions that God has put within you.
"A" is your abilities.
"P" is for your personality.
"E" is for your experiences.

All of these things make you who you are, and they help God use you for what He has called you to do. We all have a different shape, but some of us don't like all of our shape--and I am not talking in the physical either. God has made us different from each other because He has different purposes for us. God has made you unique to be able to do what He has called you to do.

1 Peter 4:10 says "Each one should use whatever gift he has received in order to make a lot of money..." okay--that is not what it says, is it? It says, "...each one should use whatever gift he has received in order to serve others."

God gave you what He has given it to you so that you can be a blessing. It is not just for you, it is to share. God has called us to serve. So another aspect of our destiny is to serve God by serving others. Yes, we serve God by serving others.

Jesus was telling a story relating to the judgment in Matthew 25. He said to His disciples, "When I was hungry, you fed Me. When I was thirsty, you gave me something to drink." The disciples said, "Lord when did we do that?" He said, "whenever you have done it to the least of these, you have done it unto Me." Did you catch that? It is a really important concept--whenever you have done it to the least, you have done it for Him.

That means that any time we minister to others, we are actually ministering to the Lord; whenever we serve others, we are serving the Lord. God has called us all to be servants and to be ministers.

Ephesians Chapter 4:11-12 says, "He gave some as apostles, some as prophets some as evangelists some as pastors and teachers." Now a lot of times when we read those verses, we say, "yeah those are the people who do ministry." But we don't always read the next verse (verse 12) which says "God gave those for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the building up of the body of Christ." God is giving gifts to the church in order to equip the saints--and if you have a relationship with Jesus, that's you. He gives these gifts to equip the saints to serve.

The King James Version says "for the work of ministry." You'll find the words "service" and "ministry" are used and tied together. It is the Greek word yakinas. We get our word "deacon" from it, and it basically means to serve. The word "ministry" gets misunderstood, because we sometimes categorize that word ministry just to talk about just the few people in church who have a job. In reality, anything that you do in the name of Jesus that blesses somebody, touches somebody or just expands the Kingdom of God in anyway, even in the least way--that's ministry. We have to broaden our perspective about what is ministry and God has called every one of us to be involved in ministry.

Ministry is not just for a few people who may be visible and who happen to have a title. Everyone in the body of Christ is a minister. You might say, "Well I don't feel like one." It doesn't matter if you feel like it or not, you are one because God made you one. I am not going to focus on how God shaped you for ministry right now, I will get to that later. But right now I want to talk about our attitude. We need to have the attitude that we really are God's ministers in order to really be used by God.

Jesus said, in Matthew 20:20, "Your attitude must be like My own, for I did not come to be served, but to serve." You know your shape kind of determines your ministry, but your attitude is a reflection of your maturity. I know somebody can really understand how God made them and how God designed them. I think that they can get a grasp of really their spiritual gifts and their abilities and their heart that God put I them. They can understand all of these things, and really understand a lot about how God shaped them for ministry, but not about their maturity. That is because the maturity is found in the heart. Maturity is found in the attitude. If you really want to serve, you need to be like Jesus and to serve like He did.

Serving like Jesus means several things. First of all it means available to God. It means that I am going to be available. Let's look at this first verse in Matthew Chapter 20: 30-32. It says, "two blind men shouted, 'Lord have mercy on us!' and Jesus stopped and called them, 'What do you want Me to do for you?' He asked."

The key word here is "Jesus stopped"--this means that Jesus was available. Sometimes you need to go through all of the gospels and look at all of the times that Jesus stopped, and you will find that Jesus did a lot of stopping. In fact, many of the miracles took place when Jesus stopped. Jesus did not said, "I'm sorry I got an agenda; I've got to be over in the south part of Jerusalem before too long." Jesus stopped, and a lot of those miracles that we read about happened because Jesus made Himself available. He didn't mind being interrupted. A lot of those miracles were interruptions.

Proverbs 3:28 says, 'Never tell your neighbor to wait until tomorrow if you can help them now.' Question is what keeps us from being available, what keeps us from being ready? Well one thing is self-centeredness, Philippians 2:4 says, 'Forget yourself; forget yourselves long enough to give a hand.'

You see a lot of times we are too busy to notice what God actually wants us to do. Jesus gave us a story about the Good Samaritan; remember that one? Some of those guys were too busy to help the guy on the road. A lot of times we wear a 'do not disturb' sign around our neck. I've got my agenda to take care of, I've got my plan and don't you understand I don't have time, I am on my track, I am on my plan and I just don't have time for interruptions.

We need to have discernment, because sometimes the enemy will use interruptions as a device to derail our course. But other times, those same interruptions can be a divine appointment waiting to happen. We need to be discerning enough to hear the voice of the Lord, to be able to know whenever God has put an interruption in our time for a divine appointment. If you are serving yourself, you will miss it.

Perfectionism is another issue in serving God. If you wait for perfect conditions, then according to Ecclesiastes 11:4, you will never get anything done. I think excellence is a good thing, and I think we should always purse excellence. But sometimes we make a "god" out of excellence--"if I can't do it perfectly, if I can't do it without any flaws, then I am just not going do it."

If perfectionism is an issue for us, then we need to change our attitude a little bit. Maybe you need to have the "good enough" principle--if this is good enough, maybe God will bless it. If God waited around for people to get perfect, then nothing would get done. If God waited for everything in our lives to get fixed, He would get nothing done on this earth. God uses imperfect people who have all kinds of problems and issues; God doesn't expect perfection before He starts using you. I do know fixing a few of the problems does help; it facilitates you being used. However perfectionism is not a condition that God uses, and we need to understand that.

Materialism is another attitude we have to deal with. Luke 16:1e says, "No servant can serve two masters. You cannot serve both God and money." Materialism is serving money and the bibles says you can't do that and serve God too. Sometimes we get so busy taking care of things that we don't have time to take care of people. We have to make sure that we are not so busy making a living that we forget to make a life.

We should always ask ourselves this question: "Am I going to be a kingdom builder, or am I going to be wealth builder?" Now there is nothing wrong with wealth. If God is bringing you into that place, there is nothing wrong with that. The issue with this is who is your master and who is your God and who are you serving? A lot of times we, are not available because we are busy out there building the wealth, so we don't have any time to build the kingdom. When that happens, the things we are so busy building are just distractions.

So the first thing to successfully serving Jesus is to be available to Him.