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Handiwork

 

For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do. (Ephesians 2:10)

          As noted in yesterday’s brief comments, if we are Christians, we don’t belong to ourselves. Our bodies are not ours, they belong to God. They belong to God even if we aren’t Christians, but in our rebellion against Him, we think they are ours. How dare God impose Himself on our lives, to make us miserable with His lousy rules? Even as Christians, we can and sometimes do resent this intrusion.

          Today’s passage tells us that God doesn’t impose His rules in order to make us miserable. He gives us those rules because They are part of what is necessary for us to fulfill the reason we were created in the first place: to do good works in Christ Jesus and to do what was prepared in advance for us to do. We need to obey those rules, we need to submit to Him in order to fulfill our life’s mission.

          There are those who turn up their noses at the idea that we have a mission. They set it as their mission to disillusion the rest of us of such a ridiculous notion. Of course, the fact that they set such a thing as their mission, that they aren’t content to go through life with no meaning in their  life, even though they deny it and try to strip a meaning from everyone else’s life is proof to me that we need a mission. We need a purpose. We want to have significance. We just want to choose that significance for ourselves, and to receive the glory instead of merely reflecting it.

          How much different would our lives be if we really, truly, honestly and completely understood that we are on a mission?

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