On the Lookout for God at Work

By Thom Mollohan

One of two great perils in the world that we face today is the ever present danger of missing God at work. There is hardly any greater tragedy than, our neglect of God’s Word, failing to recognize His presence in our lives, His activity in our circumstances, and His invitation to join Him in His work of redemption.

If we are a people who take His Word lightly, perhaps inwardly yawning as we flip through its pages or openly yawning as we sit under its proclamation, we can’t help but be a people who fail to recognize Him when He is working.

Several years ago, I decided one night to shave off my beard for a change. I shaved and cleaned up, preparing for bed. When I pulled back the blankets I found one of our children, who was not quite three years old, nestled snugly against his sleeping mother’s side. He had awakened in the night and climbed into our bed. I quietly lay down beside him and started to drift off as well. His little hand stirred and reached up to touch my face as he often did. When he touched my chin and then felt my jaw, he jerked his hand back and sat straight up in bed. “Mom-e-e-e-e!” he screamed. “There’s a man in the bed!” My wife bolted upright and looked around startled while I fumbled to switch on a bedside lamp. It took several harrowing minutes, but we finally convinced him that I really was his father.

Because I came to him in a way that he did not expect, he had a hard time recognizing me and accepting me for who I was. In a similar way, we are frequently in danger of missing out on God’s work to constantly blow the fresh winds of renewal and growth into our lives because He moves in ways that we, with our limited human perspectives, fail to recognize.

“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at His work to this very day, and I, too, am working’” (John 5:17 NIV). A wonderful promise, don’t you think? For if He is indeed at work in the world today, we have an assurance that the power of God Himself is still infiltrating the bastions of powerlessness and despair created by humanity’s tendency to try to make it through life without Him. We Christians seem to have a lot of trouble believing that God is truly on the move today in the world and in our lives. Thus, when His Holy Spirit stirs our hearts to respond to His invitation to know Him by taking His Word to heart, we fail to recognize His presence. We shrug off such promptings, suffocating the faintly glowing embers of passionate worship and heavenly service that He would fan into roaring and glorious flames. And failing to recognize Him means failing to experience a unique blessing that He would pour out upon us if only we were ready to acknowledge Him and embrace His work in our lives.

Perhaps we are often simply too preoccupied with our own plans, or maybe we’re too afraid that such whole-hearted devotion to Him is excessive or “weird” and that it can’t REALLY be His love stirring our hearts. Maybe we “feel Him out” a little, enjoying the encouraging aspects of being Christians, but sometimes pull back when what He impresses upon our hearts fails to match what we always envisioned He’d do, because what we had imagined is either too little or too selfish for an infinitely graceful God.

Of course, the other great tragedy is recognizing Him but in the end simply having no room for His Word in our hearts. During the days of Jesus’ physical incarnation on earth, some folks listened closely to Jesus’ words, nodding their heads at things they liked but criticizing Him and even condemning Him for things they didn’t like. Instead of looking inside their own hearts, eager to let the transformative power of God challenge and remake their ideas of who He is and what He’s like, they rejected things He said that simply “didn’t fit.”

 “… you are ready to kill Me, because you have no room for My Word” (John 8:37 NIV). How terrible when we have no room for His Word in our hearts! It’s not that our hearts are too small (God’s love enlarges hearts, after all) it’s rather that they’re too cluttered with pride, selfishness, fears, and resentments. But the Savior still looks, into our lives and our hearts, and He still offers us hope through His Word. “‘Who are You?’ they asked. ‘Just what I have been claiming all along’, Jesus replied. ‘I have much to say in judgment of you. But he who sent me is reliable, and what I have heard from him I tell the world . . . I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught Me. The one who sent me is with me; he has not left me alone, for I always do what pleases him” (John 8:25-29 NIV).

Perhaps we all would do well to look at the great big heart of Jesus! Why, for instance, would He wander from village to village, healing and teaching people who were fickle in their loyalties and frightfully less interested in genuinely reconnecting with God than with having some short term need being met? He graciously poured out love and grace upon them (as He does upon us), knowing that they’d reject it far more often than they’d embrace it, yet SOME would turn… SOME would listen… SOME would respond… and SOME would say yes to His invitation to life.

And if we also would dare to make room in our hearts, if we’ll really dare to love Jesus, we are given the promise that God Himself will reach down into our lives and meet us, lifting us out of worldly worries and defeatism and bring us into fellowship with Himself. “Jesus replied, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him’” (John 14:23 NIV).

(Reprinted with permission from A Hunger for More. Thom Mollohan is the pastor of Pathway Community Church in Gallipolis, Ohio, and may be reached for comments or questions by email at pastorthom@pathwaygallipolis.com).