gratitude

was emo-ing badly today during service. i suppose i was just grouchy. was demanding of God what i could expect from Him, what promises i could claim, or whether the whole Christian life was service and suffering...

the scriptures seem to back me up here. Jesus told his disciples this: that if they had a servant who had spent the whole day working in the fields, and came back in the evening, would they not tell the servant to prepare dinner and serve them first before eating his own dinner? and would they thank the servant for doing what he had been told to do? so must we be, having done all that has been asked of us, say only that we are unworthy servants... in another passage, Jesus tells his disciples that anyone who puts his hand to the plow and turns to look back is not fit for the kingdom of God...

was flipping through the gospels during service... sermon was about parenting, so not immediately applicable to me. i stumbled upon a familiar passage, talking about the kingdom of God... it says that the kingdom of God is like a man who discovered a treasure in a field, who then went and sold everything he had and bought the field. and so i was reminded that all our life and all our service has already been bought and paid for, and that it was God who gave us the great gift of salvation first, such that we now give Him our whole life in gratitude.

It reminded me of a song:

It's the great gift of Your salvation
Working in me, working in me
It's the life giving taste of heaven
Your kindness revealed, your kindness revealed to me

I went for a seminar thing yesterday, dozed through bits of it. But one bit which I do remember was when the speaker reminded us that the only acceptable motivation for obeying God is our gratitude. Never should we think that we are somehow doing God a favour, or gaining brownie points with God. Nor should we even work merely out of a sense of duty, lest we should make an idol out of our sense of duty.

I've always insisted that everything I do must have a reason. But it seems to me now that this is another form of pride.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=waYUzxK8TYA

a hypothetical question

one of the questions i've posed to certain wise people i know is this: why should people get married?

the only answer that seems true is because they want to. so that they can enjoy the greater intimacy that can only come from marriage and actually living together and committing to each other for this lifetime. but something about this answer gave me disquiet.

i guess that i have this mindset where wanting to do something isn't a good enough reason to go and do it. and as i think about it more, i guess this is a reaction from my past, where every thing that i wanted was something that was bad for me, and the bible verse which made the most sense to me was Jer 17:9, "The heart is deceitful above all things."

it also doesn't really jive with the idea that my life is no longer my own, and that everything i do is in service of a higher calling. and yet, as the seminar i went to today touched on, service is the wrong concept.

it's abit of a paradigm shift to think that some of the things i want are actually good things, and that i should just go ahead and strive for them. and i guess marriage falls into this category.