There’s another reason I like March. It’s the month of my birthday (and many of my good friends too). With no distractions from any significant holidays (St. Patrick’s Day notwithstanding), the month is a perfect time to celebrate my special day.

The value of birthdays, for all of us, is to rejoice in what our unique life has brought to the world. Hopefully we have all impacted many other people with our gifts, talents, work, personality, and encouraging spirit. I love the fact that each of us is specially designed by God and precious in His sight, even with all our failings. As beautiful and perfectly ordered as nature is, Jesus was careful to point out that we are more important to God than any leaf, bird, or flower. “Are you not much more valuable than they?” He asks rhetorically in Matthew 6:26.

We are important, to each other and to God. But sometimes I get carried away with my importance. How about you? I can begin to think that I should spend all my time on improving me and my focus becomes absorbed with my health, my dreams and goals, my likes and dislikes, my personal fulfillment.

When I get that way, I can forget that my story wouldn’t be worth much if it weren’t for His story. He made the decisive difference in everything I consider good in my life. The truth is, had the Lord Jesus Christ not been willing to lay down His life for me, my life story would look very different from what it is today. He turned my life “from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God” (Acts 26:18). Without His intervention, I would still be “without hope and without God in the world” (Ephesians 2:12).

When I get puffed up with my own importance, I lose sight of the fact that I am saved for a purpose that transcends my small little world—what I like, what brings me pleasure, what I need. If I’m not careful, I can start perceiving the Lord of glory as someone primarily concerned with improving my life, forgetting that my story finds its greatest expression in proclaiming His story.

God told His people through the prophet Isaiah: “I have redeemed you; I have summoned you by name; you are mine. … You are my witnesses” (Isaiah 43:1, 10). As His witnesses in the world, what should our primary focus be? To draw attention to ourselves or to exalt the One who is worthy of all adoration, glory, and praise?

We are important, but only in relation to Him. After all, it is to Him that all knees will bow and all tongues confess at the end of the age. Aren’t you glad that we will be among those who will willingly and joyfully bow before Him, “lost in wonder, love and praise”?

Witnesses testify to what they know. Good witnesses seek to accurately and thoroughly explain what they know took place. As God’s witnesses, we testify both to what He did in redemption for every person and what He did in our individual lives. As one of the twelve disciples, Peter said they were “eyewitnesses to his majesty” (2 Peter 1:16).

While we weren’t there to see the Lord Jesus in the flesh, we know Him just as intimately through the revelation of the Holy Spirit in our lives. So God calls us to be His credible witnesses and to make His story known, even at the expense of our own personal desires and comfort.

A few months ago, this issue surfaced rather dramatically in my life during prayer. The Holy Spirit began to challenge me in an area that I thought was settled long ago.

For many years, Tony and I have served the Lord in our “separate but equal” ways—he did the traveling and ministry work out there and I worked for Jesus at home in a full time job and through local ministry opportunities. We prayerfully considered other alternatives, but we decided that it made good sense to minister out of our strengths rather than our weaknesses.

Tony was the adventurer, the front-line soldier, who loved new challenges and meeting new people in different cultures. I was the one who liked being home, routine, and predictable circumstances. I was the soldier who was content to stay behind the front lines and serve the war effort in a support role.

After seeing this arrangement work well for many years, I was surprised when the Lord began to challenge me to take another look at it. Over the following weeks, I was gripped by a new sense of urgency about winning people to Christ. As I thought about the opportunities Tony had to reach out to the lost, and knowing I could be there to support him in that work if I chose to, I began to feel like “an unprofitable servant” for the Lord.

Sure, I was serving Jesus where I was … but was I fully engaged in the spiritual battle, or was I hiding behind my own preferences? Probably the most convicting and convincing question that the Lord asked me as I sought His will was the following. “Is this about your comfort or my kingdom?”

Timing in God’s service is vitally important. I wasn’t ready for this call six months ago, or six years ago. I may not feel ready even now to begin to put myself more in the front lines of ministry and to engage in things that are definitely outside of my comfort zone, but the fact that I am being called there is evidence that God believes I’m ready. As Charles Finney said, “If God commands something, that is the highest evidence that we can do it.”

With God’s grace helping me, and my willingness to give it a try, I know it can work. After all, it’s not about my comfort … it’s about His kingdom! So, I’ve taken the rather drastic step of becoming Tony’s travel partner.

From a distance, obedience to God’s calling can seem restrictive and unpleasant. But once you make the decision to obey—whatever the cost may be—you find that you are filled with a joy and peace that you didn’t have before. Jesus said it was His peace and His joy—something the rest of the world can’t know.

People who don’t know God are constantly seeking fulfillment and happiness through personal enrichment and pleasure, but they never seem to find them. Yet Scripture tells us Jesus went to the agonies of the cross knowing that joy would come from His willingness to obey His Father’s will (Hebrews 12:2).

Joy eludes the self-centered, but those who choose to deny themselves for the sake of the kingdom find it. “If you obey my commands,” Jesus promised His disciples, “you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father’s commands and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete” (John 15:10-11).

You may not be called to the front lines of service at this particular time, but He does want you to be open to the possibility. He asks all of us to be willing to examine our hearts in the light of His Spirit and to be ruthless in our goal to see our lives from His perspective. As Oswald Chambers said, “The best measure of spiritual life is not ecstasies but obedience.”

If we insist on calling the shots and never doing anything outside of our comfort zones or natural abilities and strengths, we may miss out on the joy of serving Him in His power and strength. Just think … His story can change hearts and transform our world. So what better use of my time and energy can I make than in making Him known?

As one astute man wrote: “It has taken me half of my life to discover that my business in the world is not to try to make something of myself, but rather to find a job worth doing and lose myself in it.”

Sometimes we forget that we are not our own—that we are bought with a price—and our first priority must be to Him. As we make ourselves available, He can call us into the service where we will best express His story to the world. Jesus promised that we will find our lives by losing them in His great purposes. How exciting is that?!
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