Week Eighteen - The Bracelet

Beside the Well

            I have just finished reading The Greatest Thing in the World by Henry Drummond.  It is one of those books you simply must have read at least once in your life.  D.L. Moody used to require his college students to read it once a year while in college.  It is definitely a book that will remain in my library.

            As he discussed the will of God, he pointed out that Jesus’ single motivation was to be doing God’s will.  Scripture reveals that pattern.  At the age of twelve, as he sat among the educated men of the city, he answered his frantic mother; “I must be about my Father’s business” (Luke 2:49).

            Early in his ministry he informed the disciples, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work” (John 4:34).  Later he states, “I must work the works of him that sent me” (John 9:4) and even later He places more emphasis by saying, “how am I straitened till it be accomplished!” (Luke 12:50).

            Finally, on the cross he cries, “It is finished” (John 19:30).   He had completed what God had sent Him to do.  God’s will for Jesus was the cross.  Hebrews 12:2 reveals that, though the cross was a hard trial to endure, Jesus set the goal of pleasing His Father above the death of the cross.  He was obedient unto death—obedient to His Father’s will.

            So should it be with us.  It is to be a constant theme in our lives.  “To be truly valuable it must run through the whole life, be the thread on which everything else is strung, till it becomes the truest purpose of the heart that the Will of God be done.” (p 238). 

            That popped an image in my mind.  A Pandora bracelet is beautiful and well crafted.  The charms and beads are fascinating to look at, but what holds them all together is the bracelet or chain.  Without that, the beads will scatter and be lost.

            Our lives are only as beautiful and well crafted as the band that holds them together.  God’s will, and our doing of it, is the band.  All that is produced from there are the beads.

             So what is our allotted work? What is to be our core value and purpose? It is the same: to do God’s will.  God’s will may be service, it might be rest and waiting, and it could call for sacrifice and trials.  It can take many forms.  But our most solemn obligation is to obediently finish our work.  Rather, that He might finish the work He started in our life. (Phil. 1:6)  He alone knows what our work is and when our work is done.

            On that day when all our works are cast into the fire, only the true beads will remain and the thing that will link them all together is the band of obedience to the supremacy of His will.