Doing Great Things For God
Anyone who has faith in me will do what I have been doing. He will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father. John 14:12
For several years now, I have been reading and hearing from many of our brothers and sisters that they want to have an impact on the world. They want to do “Great Things for God” and get frustrated when that doesn’t seem to happen in a specific time frame. Part of that is the culture that we live in and part of it is our own nature and impatience.
I want us to look back to a time that the world was in chaos and people did as they chose. In Genesis 6: 5-6, “The Lord saw how great man’s wickedness had become, and that every inclination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil all of the time. The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain”.
I don’t think that our current culture is much different. So, let’s look at the man, Noah, who “found favor in the eyes of God”. Other than this one phrase, what do we know about Noah? We know he built the ark, mentored his sons, gathered the animals, preached to his generation, lived on the ark for over a year, planted a vineyard after he left the ark, got drunk and cursed his son, Ham, because he saw his father’s nakedness. That’s a lot of information. Let’s look at a few of these items.
Noah built the ark. Did Noah have any knowledge of how to build? Did he have the proper tools? Was he a shipwright or even a Master woodworker? We don’t know. But he found favor in the eyes of God.
Noah gathered the animals. How did he know which were clean and which were not? Those rules weren’t written down yet. But he found favor in the eyes of God.
He preached to his generation. God told Noah what he (God) was going to do to the world and everything in the world. Noah could not help himself. He had to forewarn his neighbors. He found favor in the eyes of God.
We see in this story a God-sized vision for Noah and he answered God’s call for his life. He lived counter- culturally to his generation yet found favor in God’s eyes. Did he know that it would take him one hundred years to accomplish this vision? Probably not, but he stuck to it day after day until God told him it was time to get in the ark.
There are other lessons here but they are for another day and future post. God used Noah to accomplish this vision because of how Noah was different from his neighbors, not in a self-righteous way but because He honored God and was available to God’s leading. He also stuck with the plan and made an impact in God’s timeframe not his own. I believe Noah’s great thing was the first thing, “Noah found favor in the eyes of God”. So maybe your next "Great thing for God" will be simply finding favor in His eyes.
by Gary Tucker