I heard so many gems from Dr. Siang Yang’s sermon and leadership training on Sunday. One line that really jumped out at me from the leadership training was “Don’t try to do great things for God. When you try to do great things for God, the emphasis is on the great things. It’s not about God, it’s about how great you are and the great things you do. Do things simply for a Great God.”
He was spot on. If your goal is to do great things for God, it’s so easy to constantly think, “Is this good enough for God? Am I doing enough?” which spirals into something similar to works-based salvation.
God may not always call us to big things, but he always calls us into faith and obedience. As Samuel put it,
“Has the Lord as great delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices, as in obeying the voice of the Lord? Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to heed than the fat of rams.
1 Samuel 15:22
Obedience is important to God, in both the big and little things. Moses led the Israelites through a desert for around 40 years. He obeyed God in this big assignment, but hit a rock instead of speaking to the rock to get water from it as God had instructed, so God denied him entry into the Promised Land. It was something so small and nearly insignificant, but it changed the trajectory of Moses’s life.
God values our obedience and trust in Him more than us striving to do something big for Him. May we learn to focus on the God we serve more than the things we do to serve Him.