I work in a warehouse that is not temperature controlled and so it gets very hot during the Spring and Summer months. I work at least 50 hours a week. I wore a pedometer once and recorded almost 6 miles worth of walking in a single day at work!
Needless to say, I am wore out when I get home at night and by Friday night, I feel quite weary. All that being said, I enjoy my job very much and do not really desire to go anywhere else for employment.
A very demanding job, but what is more demanding in my life is Christianity and well, Christ Himself. The phrase 'bought with a price' has meant more to me in the last few months than any other phrase in the Bible (1 Corinthians 6:20). And this is where I am going with all of this. I have been in many discussions in the past few weeks concerning this vast subject. Many questions have gone unanswered, not because there isn't one, but because we do not always know how to apply attitudes the Bible tells us we ought to have. All Christians would say, 'I've been bought with a price' but not all Christians live as if they had been bought with a price. Ask yourself, 'How would one live if they had been bought?' I can assure you that you would not do what you want, but would seek to do what the one who bought you desires you to do. And so you see that we 'know' many things, but do not practice those very things we know, which according to the Bible is very dangerous. "But prove yourselves doers of the Word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves." James 1:22.
And so through Christianity, God is demanding obedience and sacrifice from me on a regular basis, of which I am not complaining about, but merely making the statement so you can see that my job and my God are, at times, opposing one another because I am flesh and run out of energy quite frequently. Coming home on a Friday night, feeling tired and sometimes annoyed about some small issue at my job makes it difficult to find the time to go out and tell the world about Jesus Christ's sacrifice and offer of free grace. And as I sit here and type this out, I see the almost foolishness of even saying I am too tired to do that. This is the greatest news ever. How can anyone ever be too tired to do this? And yet it happens. Love must be the fuel within that carries me out to the people. Love is the very thing that has drawn me to God and now, as in Song of Solomon, the King is now drawing me away from my comfortable things out to better things, but it costs. It costs comfort and pain and stress. Love is a very taxing emotion where one spends all of himself to please the other in the relationship. This is how we ought to act in our short life here on earth. And if there is no fruit visible, you can say with Isaiah, "I have toiled in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; Yet surely the justice due to me is with the Lord and my reward with my God."
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