good deeds can distract you from God

It's noble to want to do something for God.

It can also be a distraction.

Perhaps Tim Hansel put it best in "You Gotta Keep Dancing"

“We may desire to bring to the Lord our perfect work. We would like to point, when all our work is done, to the beautiful ripened grain, and the bound-up sheaves.

And yet the Lord frustrates our plans, shatters our purposes and lets us see the wreck of all of our hopes, breaks the beautiful structure we thought we were building and catches us up in His arms and whispers to us,

‘It’s not your work I wanted, but you.’”

Good deeds... can actually distract you from God.

We are all infected and impure with sin. When we display our righteous deeds, they are nothing but filthy rags.(Isaiah 64:6)

guest post: beating busyness

From Jon Jaroska, Resource Connection of Connection Church

Honestly, when Tony first asked me to blog I said to myself, “Great. One more thing to do this week!?” So first, anger came over me, then depression, and then the guilt kicked in. Once I was past all the emotions it became clear to me to focus on what was really going on in my life.  

A bunch of “busyness” mumbo-jumbo.

I like to analyze things, so that's where I first drifted. As soon as I started to, though, God held me back. It was a wake-up call to pray instead, and as soon as I did He started to talk (even more surprising was I could discern some of what He was saying). I realized I often find myself just going about my stuff and not asking Him to tell me what I should be doing. It feels like that creates a huge hole in me knowing if I'm doing what I should be doing or wasting my energy on other things.

Maybe you can relate. For me, this created a call to action that I want to share with you.

I know that this may sound high on the horse (and believe me, I feel like I am the worst law-breaker at this sometimes), but stop procrastinating.

If you don’t have a problem with that, great - you are one step closer to pleasing the heart of God with your schedule. If you do struggle with it, you'll need a reason to get out of that cycle. Spending time with God will give you that.

Don’t wait.  Take a moment right now to ask God what He wants you to care about. You might even want to write down everything you have to do for the next seven days, then ask God which of those is most important. Pay attention to if your list is God-driven or you-driven.

While you're doing that, note how many times intentionally growing your relationship with God appears in your list somehow. Maybe you could take another step today and ask God to either change something on your list or insert something that He wants for you.