Serve Your Way to the Top – 7 Lessons I Learned While Serving My Way onto a Church Staff
Lesson 6 – It’s the Changed Life, Not the Crowd that Makes the Difference
19-20My dear friends, if you know people who have wandered off from God’s truth, don’t write them off. Go after them. Get them back and you will have rescued precious lives from destruction and prevented an epidemic of wandering away from God. James 5:19-20
Something I’ve been recognizing lately is that whenever Jesus would heal someone or impact one person’s life, often the crowd would be wowed by the actual event other times the crowd would be upset and in disbelief. However, Jesus never really cared what the crowd thought. He cared about the person He was ministering to. Jesus didn’t care about attracting crowds, He cared about impacting individuals.
Too often – we focus on drawing a crowd and forget about the individual. While crowds are great because it means more people are hearing the Word, we forget that it’s each of those individuals being changed by God that truly makes the difference. A marriage restored, an addiction broken, someone with no purpose grabbing hold of God’s purpose for their lives – it’s a beautiful thing. It’s a compilation of changed lives that makes a move of God and a crowd an amazing thing, not a crowd of people just there for an event or experience.
Some Thoughts on this:
1.) The Crowd will Never Be Big Enough – Unless we recognize the power of one changed life and value it for what it’s worth, we’ll never think there are enough people in our ministries.
2.) When the Crowd Comes, It’s not a Big Deal – We often think if we’re able to minister to a large crowd, we’ll be satisfied. That is not true at all. We have to find our worth in Christ, so when God does bless us with more influence, we won’t be disappointed that it doesn’t provide the feelings of success we thought it would. A big deal in life is when we’re free from worrying about attracting a crowd and worrying more about impacting one life.
3.) Nothing is More Fulfilling than Touching One Life – There isn’t anything more fulfilling than knowing you’ve made a difference in one person’s life because you were obedient to God.
4.) Be Faithful with One, God will bring Many – The bottom line is that if we’ll be faithful with the one person in front of us, God will continue to bring people in front of our path so we can minister to them. In time, you’ll be impacting more people than you could have dreamed of, and it’s not because you’re so awesome, it’s because God knows you’ll be faithful with the one.
Focus on ministering to one person today – make a difference in their life!
