Will God use you?

Will God Use You?

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            I often hear Christians talking about what it is we need to do, if we hope to be used by God. For some reason we think such conversations are useful and will lead us to somehow glorify God.

            I am increasingly not impressed by that sort of thinking. What do we normally think of when we describe someone who uses people? Is it a good thing when an employer uses his employees? Is it a good thing when a guy uses a girlfriend? What do we think of people when they have lost their last shred of dignity and self-respect that hang on to a relationship trying to continue being used by someone? I am sure that we imagine we are using the description of being used in a different way than in these other instances. But could it be that something deep inside us is driving us to imagine ourselves as those who need to find a way to be used by God? Could it be that we imagine that God is very distant from us, but if we learn to do all the right spiritual things we will be able to be used by God? I increasingly believe that if our thinking is at all like that then we have completely misunderstood and will completely misrepresent who God is.

 

Shutterstock.com image ID: 268489535 Copyright: GongTo

Do we somehow imagine God as a Taskmaster for whom we need to become usable?

 

            Perhaps this is one of the fundamental reasons why the religious leaders of Jesus’ day did not understand what Jesus was saying when he tried to reach them. He did try to reach them. You can see it in Luke 15 when Jesus is trying to tell the religious leaders that he has come to bring forgiveness, healing, redemption to the world. You can see when he pictures the understanding of the religious leaders, who like the older brother in the story of the Father and the prodigal is upset because the father throws a party for the return of the younger brother who had squandered his inheritance. The older brother is upset. Doesn’t this father understand how much this older brother had sacrificed to be the son like his father wanted? But that as it turns out was the older brother’s great fault.

            The older brother never understood what a father wanted in his relationship with his two sons. He wanted a family that was connected in love for one another. The younger son had turned his back on that. The older son had never really thought about that. For the older son, he had remained loyal to his father no matter how he didn’t spend his money on the wild trips and weak willed women. That tells us something of the older brother. He was upset that he had given up all those things when evidently he didn’t need to. The younger son comes back and the father throws him a big party. The older brother wonders why he sacrificed so much as if living a decent and faithful life was a sacrifice rather than a privilege.

            We have come up with the idea that God uses people, even if that sounds like a horrid attribute in anybody else we describe as using others. But I don’t recall this popular phrase being used in the Scriptures, this phrase of how God was able to use someone. Instead there are other descriptions. The prophets were men, and sometimes women (Deborah and the daughters of Agabus come to mind) who were granted to receive insights from God, and participated in visions God gave to them. These prophets were not described as used by God, but rather as called. Once they were called they shared that which they had received in their participation in what God had given them. The Apostles were not used by God but after being granted to spend years with Jesus had the opportunity of being taught by him so that they who had fellowship with our Lord could then open up a communal fellowship that opened the doors to those who now heard the Gospel message. The Apostles were not used. They were sent. They shared what they had participated in with others.

            But perhaps we see the fullness of how God relates to us through His Son Jesus Christ. Jesus was the only begotten Son who God loved with perfect love. Jesus was the adult son of the Living God who was regarded as being equal to the Father. This was the one who the Father was willing to give all authority. God showed his love for the world in giving his Son. He did not redeem the world by using his Son but by giving his son.

            I have come to believe that I will never be used by God. I don’t believe God wants to use you either. But I do believe that He who is love, wants us to participate in that divine love shared between the Father and Son and Holy Spirit and made ours through Jesus Christ in whom God and man are made one. He wants us to participate in this eternal divine display of God’s infinite love. As we participate in this love, our Father wants it to reshape us. As it reshapes us He wants it to be reflected through our lives into the lives of those around us. He wants us to live lives in which we live lives shaped by God’s divine love and so that in our lives we will bear image of the God who is described by the Apostle as love.

            God doesn’t want to use us. He wants to love us. He wants shape us by his goodness and love until having been shaped by his love, we will bear his image; the image of the one who is love. This is why God both created and redeemed us.

 

My 200th blog

My Two-hundredth Blog

Written by Dan McDonald: aka the Panhandling Philosopher

 

            This blog is my 200^th blog. I am including a photograph of me for free. It probably is no great prize as I tend to like other people’s photographs but when I see my photograph I say something like “OK, you’ve seen it, now let’s move on, thank you!”

Photo taken in a meadow in front of the church where I attend

 

            I’m not sure I gained much wisdom in writing these 200 blogs. But looking back on the experience of writing 200 blogs in 27 months has definitely left me with at least one impression.

            The chief impression I am left with is how forgetful most of my blogs have been. I don’t mean that other readers have forgotten them. The truth is to remember the first blog I offered on my blog spot, I had to scroll back to the beginning. I didn’t have a clue what my first blog was, and I wrote it in February 2013. It has made me to think of thinking, writing, and blogging like eating food. There are few dinners we eat that we can remember months later, but they have had their impact on us even if they are not specifically special or able to be remembered. There are few times when a dinner is so special we remember it for months to come. I am learning that my writing is that way as well.

            This made me think of how as an Anglican, for most of this millennium, I learned a simple table prayer that goes with every meal whether an ordinary meal or a “dine at your finest restaurant” affair. Maybe when we sit down to read a book or when we sit down to think and write a piece for a blog we should think of this as sitting down at a table to take in or prepare food for the mind and soul. Then the same Anglican table prayer would resonate with our activity whether what we read was something common to be read and probably forgotten or something special to be remembered as a great event. We would pray: “Bless O’ Father, these gifts to our use and us to thy service. Make us mindful of the needs of others and grateful for all thy blessings through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

Swordfish at Becco Restaurant – 355 West 46^th Street, New York, New York

            For me, one of the memorable dining experiences was eating swordfish at Becco’s an Italian restaurant in the area known as restaurant row along Manhattan’s West side not far from the theater district. I ate the dinner alone when the person I was scheduled to meet had to postpone. I felt a bit sorry for myself but I did want the experience of eating at a fine Italian restaurant. At first the table next to me was also empty, but soon three ladies were seated there. I tried not to look over at them too much, but I undoubtedly failed because we hardly ever fail at anything so much as when we tell ourselves not to do something. If we want to succeed at not doing something we don’t preach “don’t do this” to ourselves but rather we set our minds on doing something else. Trying not to look at three attractive ladies when you are sitting alone in a restaurant probably didn’t succeed very well. Hopefully my gawking was kept to a minimum. But I did notice how their eating differed from mine. I was trying to absorb the whole of a Becco’s experience whereas they were eating like they would be back and so took ordinary eating portions. They had salads and some pasta and called it a meal. I remember hearing them talk of the show and their dance routines. Evidently they were performers on Broadway. In other words they were simply working folk meeting at a restaurant while I was traveling a long distance to New York City to experience something I had never before experienced.

            My first blog was a review of the movie Ondine. I actually still like what I wrote. Believe me there are things I have written that leave me cringing with things I placed in my blogs. I like writing movie reviews, especially the kind where I review a movie that I came to love that I think most of my readers may have never experienced. There were a couple of other early movie reviews that I can still appreciate when I read them. There was “The Mill and the Cross” which is a movie that imaginatively portrays a sixteenth century artist explaining his masterpiece to a buyer of fine art. The artist is portrayed describing how he places the crucifixion of Christ in a setting in sixteenth century Holland. The setting of Christ’s crucifixion is in the middle of the painting surrounded by a living city with people going about their ordinary lives, scenes brought to life in the movie. The artist explains how Christ’s cross is in the middle of everything where it is hidden by the townspeople’s activities. Christ’s crucifixion right in the middle of everything is obscured only by our being captured in all our daily routines of life. A third movie review I enjoyed writing was written about the definitely not for kids French movie entitled “Don’t Look Back”. It was a psychological horror movie depicting a devastating self-identity crisis in which the main character is presented by the combination of two actresses; Monica Bellucci and Sophie Marceau. Maybe what I offered was less like the fine offering of Becco swordfish and the surroundings of a fine Manhattan restaurant. But hopefully if I may have offered tasty Polish sausage and sauerkraut; or some hearty bacon, eggs, and toast with coffee. Hopefully if what I have written is not memorable it is generally satisfying and leaves the reader at least in a better frame with which to tackle the day’s activities.

            I love to write. It is part of who I am. Writing is one of the ways I process my thoughts. But most of us writers, we have to learn that our writing is seldom the vehicle that dramatically changes our world. I was watching the movie “Entertaining Angels” when I began to consider what I would write about in my 200^th blog. The movie tells a little bit about the story of Dorothy Day. She started out life with aspirations of being a journalist and writer. She presented her articles to newspapers hoping to be published. She hoped to change the world. Eventually she began feeding, housing, and helping the poor while also co-founding a paper called “The Catholic Worker”. Eventually the paper had more than 100,000 people subscribing to it. But a time came when decisions had to be made whether the paper or her community centers helping the poor were going to receive the resources needed to continue to grow. She chose to invest her time and resources in her presence among the poor in Depression era New York City. She invested in Christ’s poor. She determined that it was more important to have direct impact on a small number of poor than to have large subscriptions to a periodical preaching about helping the poor. That is the way food and thinking works. Food and thought are meant to provide us with strength and energy and direction for our daily activities. Dorothy Day wasn’t an Anglican, but if she had prayed an Anglican table prayer, the life’s direction she discovered would likely have been similar for her activity seems like an answer to that prayer: “Bless O’ Father, these gifts to our use and us to thy service. Make us mindful of the needs of others and grateful for all thy blessings through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

 

An autobiographical work of Dorothy Day’s life