All in Vain

Transcript

Greetings in Jesus’ name. Welcome to this beautiful new morning.

 I hope that today our walk with God will continue to give us intimate revelations, understanding and perspective on the heart and the mind of God.

When be read the book of Psalms we would find such intimate conversations that God’s people have with God and sometimes they are upset, sometimes they are just frustrated, sometimes they just pouring out their sadness or their anger in the presence of God.

One such example is seen in the book of Psalms chapter 73 verse 13 – “All in vain I have kept my heart clean and washed my hands in innocence.”

This is his complain before God. He is comparing his life with wicked people in his city and wicked people are always prospering and here I am not able to see results and I’m not able to see growth an increase in my life! And that’s why the Psalmist would make such a remark about his own purity and innocence.

This was all in vain! I did keep my heart clean and my hands innocent but what is the point of it what is the result!

One of the characteristics of God is that He is okay if you’re frank with him, he welcomes you to talk to him, he welcomes you to pour out your heart to him because when you do begin to pour out your heart before God and you are vulnerable with your confessions, feelings and thoughts, some of these misconceptions, wrong understandings about God that we have, it gets exposed and we get the place and the right context to fix them.

We see in Psalm 73 how the Psalmist now he goes into the presence of God into the sanctuary and he receives answers and solutions to all the questions that he was asking God and later he begins to change his confessions.

So, if you’re feeling confused, upset and frustrated, it’s okay for you to come into the presence of God and you can be open and vulnerable and pour out your real intimate thoughts or your worries, concerns, struggles and doubts put it out in the presence of God because it’s only in the presence of God that you will actually find help and solutions and answers to what you’re going through.

The other perspective is that Psalmist here he is expecting the purity of his heart and the cleanliness of his hands the innocence of his hands to bring in a blessing from God and he’s doing whatever he’s doing with that wrong motivation, he is expecting that to be the basis of his prosperity, that to be the thing that will cause God to have favour upon him.

Does the Lord bless us when we do the right thing? Absolutely! But the problem is when the sole motivation for doing the right thing is to receive a blessing from God. That is why this guy turned around to say all of this was in vain!

May it never be that our love for God, our worship, our service to God is only to receive something from him, because if that’s who we are then at the slightest delay or the slightest disappointment we will turn back to say that our worship, our dedication, our consecration all of that was in vain and by his very confession this Psalmist cancelled out the amazing life that he lived.

He cancelled out the consecration, innocence, purity that he had, just by his confession!

Instead, if you would have just said, I don’t understand how this works because sometimes I’ve seen the exact opposite, so I’m going to wait on the Lord, I’m going to trust in him, I’m going to expect the Lord to give me answers; that would have been the correct perspective.

Today we need to fix the motive, the intention, the purpose of our heart, why are we serving God; is it so that we can receive something from him? Or is it with a clear understanding that he has already done more than enough and now it is our turn to give our life as an acceptable and pleasing sacrifice to him.

The worship is primarily for God’s glory; will you be blessed when you worship him? Absolutely! but even if he doesn’t bless, we will continue to serve him, we will continue to bless him, this was the confession of Shadrach Meshach and Abednego to king Nebuchadnezzar. He threatened to draw them into the fire if they have wouldn’t bow down to the image that he had made but they said our God he is able to save us from the fire that you’re preparing against us but even if he doesn’t save us, we will still continue to worship him, we will still refuse to bow down to this golden image.

I pray that today we will have the same attitude, that we will not look at anything that we have done for the Lord or for the people of God or for the body of Jesus or for their churches that we been planted in and never should we look at anything that we have done and cancel it out saying all of this was in vain.

Because our reward, blessing or promotion it comes from the lord.

Let’s pray: Father, we thank you for your blessing, your grace, for your provision in our life and today we surrender ourselves to your mercy your grace. We ask you to fill us, ask you to give us the grace to stay strong even when we don’t see the result of our worship immediately because we love you. Only your will matter in our life, your plans matter, your way, your glory, your honour is all that matters in Jesus mighty name we pray, Amen.