I always had a hard time with the idea of going to conferences as serving one – especially at young people’s conferences. It has taken a long time to see this, but the reason why I had a hard time with this is because I always saw serving in my mind and in my flesh, instead of seeing it in my spirit.
In my mind, all these grand ideas spring up – how I can transform my group, how I’m going to have them do this and that, and they will share in every meeting etc. However, none of those things happened and so it became frustrating… All these grand ideas never came to be and when their behaviour was troublesome I almost gave up and threw in the towel.
What I began to see recently is that when we serve and shepherd the saints/young people we need to do it in our spirit, and we also need to take the Lord as our pattern and see what it is that the Lord is doing…
We people can do some terrible things that grieve the Lord’s heart, but He still sticks with us and nourishes us – the Lord never removes Himself, He never abandons us, nor does He expect an overnight change. He has made Himself so available to us to the point that when we just call, Oh Lord! He is there.
The Lord works on us constantly despite how challenging we can be in our flesh, and bit by bit He gains more and more ground in us.
We begin to see that the Lord is the ultimate pattern for us to follow in serving and shepherding. When you see and experience how the Lord serves/shepherds us, it touches you and you begin to see how we should follow this pattern. [guest post: bro. Abasi]
