Servants of the Lord

Psalm 123:1 and 2
"To You I lift up my eyes, O You who are enthroned in the heavens!
Behold, as the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master,
As the eyes of a maid to the hand of her mistress,
So our eyes look to the LORD our God,
Until He is gracious to us."

I read that verse last week in the book The Heavenly Man, which is an autobiography about the Chinese Christian leader Brother Yun. It's a verse that he quoted to himself over and over again while undergoing extreme torture and persecution in a Chinese prison (by the way, I highly recommend the book to those of you who want to read a story about a devoted Christ follower.)

I know one thing. I want this to be my testimony that I can say from my heart.

So, I've been thinking about the "servant/slave- Christ follower" analogy. "As the eyes of servants look to the hand of their master..." A servant is required to always be looking to his master for instruction. For example, once a job is completed, he returns to his master to ask, "What would you have me do next?" And, if he wanted to stay in his master's good graces, he would go and do whatever it was his master asked of him. That's the way that we should look to the Lord! We should be waiting on Him, on His will, ready to jump at His commands at all times. And I'm not talking about the big things. Those are the issues that most of us are wanting to participate in. I mean in the everyday, nitty gritty things. For me, that means when I come home from work, will I ask God, now what do you want? As I was about to write this paragraph, I thought, "Ryan, here you are writing a blog post about seeking God's direction, and you haven't even asked Him what He wanted you to do with this time." lol He brings conviction! So, I stopped and asked Him. Rachel was at the store with her sisters, Nathan was asleep. I thought this was the perfect time for a blog post. Well, as soon as I asked Him the dishes came to mind. Just as quickly my fleshly aversion to washing dishes also rose up. Isn't it crazy? "For the flesh sets its desire against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh." Ephesians 5:17 How true!

Another way that a slave would need to look to his master's hand is for his sustenance. It's the only way he could live! You know, most of us husbands/fathers, wives/mothers, brothers/sisters would do whatever it took to provide for our families physically. We would clean out septic tanks if need be (no offense to you septic cleaners ;)! We would do the most disgusting, repulsive, exhausting things if need be before we would see our families starve or go without housing. But, to what lengths are we willing to go for the spiritual provision of our families? Just think about it a bit.

There's many other ways that this analogy can be applied. Think about it for a while. It's rather enlightening to our walk with God and how our relationship with Him should be. He makes us His sons. But, He has purchased our lives at a high price. How could we give Him any less than our eternal service?