“God has made us what we are, and in our union with Christ Jesus he has created us for a life of good deeds, which he has already prepared for us to do.”1
It’s hard for us to believe that the God of the universe concerns himself with the trivia of human lives, like a broken window in a single mom’s kitchen or the faded and peeling paint on the exterior of a widow’s house.
The thought that God doesn’t care about these things makes it easy for us to not care as well. But we’re on dangerous ground if such is the case. The Bible makes it clear that God is in fact interested in such minutiae and that, consequently, we should be too.
It is because God knows such seemingly insignificant things as when a sparrow falls to the ground and how many hairs we have on our head that we are not to worry, Jesus says (Matthew 10:29, 30). God saw to it that the number of fish Peter and the disciples caught following Christ’s resurrection – 153 – god into the Bible. We know that Paul wanted Timothy to bring his coat and his scrolls and parchments and that he wanted Philemon to prepare a guest room for him only because God felt it was important for us to know these details.
The fact of the matter is, God is extremely concrete. He doesn’t like it when we merely espouse an ideal of love. He wants acts, deeds; specifics matter to him.
Take the biblical story of Ruth, for example. There she is, walking along, going out to the barley fields. She is doing a good deed on behalf of a widow named Naomi by gleaning barley in the fields for her. A native of Moab and a widow herself, Ruth has just accompanied her mother-in-law back to Bethlehem. As she walks along to glean in the fields, she has to choose which field to go into.
All history hinges on this decision. If she turns one way, she will remain simply one more poor peasant girl. But if she turns the other way, she will become the matriarch of the line of David and of the messiah. As it turns out, she “happened” to turn into the field of Boaz, the Bible tells us. And the rest is history. Ruth’s simple good deed had eternal consequences because God had “planned it beforehand.”
Your simple, seemingly insignificant acts of kindness and love have the same kind of eternal consequences because God has planned them beforehand as well. That broken window? That faded and peeling paint? They have more significance than you realize.
This post first appeared in Doing Good Well, by Herb Reese, and in NewCommandment.org.
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