Written in Heaven

Several months ago now, I was going about my day when I felt the leading of the Holy Spirit to pray for a friend of mine. So I stopped what I was doing and offered up a rather brief prayer for this friend out of obedience to God. After a few minutes, I felt very strongly that I needed to call this person and talk to them. So I did. When they answered the phone we had some pretty average conversation, until I asked him, “How are you doing?” To which he replied, “Not good, I lost my job today.” At that point it became fairly obvious why the Holy Spirit put him on my heart.


Now, the point of this post comes after the fact. I got off the phone and to be honest, was pretty proud of myself for following the prompting of the Holy Spirit and felt very ‘pastoral’ in that moment. My next thought was, “I need to tell __________ this story.” At that moment, the Holy Spirit spoke to me in a very different way, asking me a very simple, but pointed question: “Why?” Why did I want to tell other people about this? Was it because I was genuinely concerned about my friend and his hardship, or did I want to impress everyone with my ‘sensitivity’ to the Holy Spirit? I hate to say this, but I think it was the latter.


God is continually teaching me humility in all areas of my life. Just when I start to feel proud of how humble I’m becoming, God slaps me around a little bit and I realize once again how much Matt apart from Christ flat out sucks.

The point is, what’s your motivation? If God asked you to do something huge for Him, but you couldn’t tell anyone and you’d never get recognition, would it still be as exciting a task? One of my life’s goals is to make the answer to that question a resounding ‘yes’ every time.