Sunday, December 17, 2006

It's a good thing...I think?

So I couldn't sleep last night. While trying to not think about why I wasn't falling back to sleep, my mind was whirling with this thought that is kinda in response to a sentence Heather wrote on her blog a week or so ago.

My midnight thought:

If you are a believer and doing good things without consciously owning or ascribing them to the cause of Christ, are they not actually good works? As in, if you aren't thinking "I want to bring glory to God" or "Jesus would do this" as you performed fruit-of-the-spirit-like things, are they not really good works (like you don't get credit with God or men, and your faith is possibly dead), or are they just good actions that you've been trained to perform and negated if they are done without actually thinking of them as Godly actions? I don't know if I explained this well, but maybe someone will get what I am trying to say.

Heather's "One Sentence" that started this thought process:

"The death of a faith is not the instant action of the rebellion but the slow, painful death of inaction."

5 comments:

amelia said...

Hmmm...I hope that some day loving people the way God has called us to becomes so natural for me that I DON'T think about it, that it's something I am and that I just do without analyzing why or how or for what, but that it flows as a natural part of me.

anne said...

Are they "real" actions if you have to think about them? In a sense, when you are trying to form Christ-like actions/habits/disciplines you are thinking about it all the time. You are intentionally making those choices for good, etc. But once they become your "new" habits as God wants them to be, once we have become "new" creations with new actions, we shouldn't necessarily have to think about them, should we?

I see people who are older & wiser than I, who I would look to as Godlike examples of what I want my life to be and I imagine that their godly actions aren't given a second thought. They just do what they are in a sense "trained" to do by discipline. Which I don't think is a bad thing. That is what we are supposed to do. It can become a rote thing, but so can running far well or writing well or whatever. You don't have to think about it anymore because you've done it so often.

So those are my few cents. I think we need to be conscious of our actions and our motives for them should be forefront, but we should also be able to just act as Christ would want us to without having to analyze our every move first.

Fabulous question formed at midnight!! :)

heather said...

Yes! I was QUOTED! Awesome. It's my first time. "I'd like to thank my fans, and my first pet, Rosie, and all the little people..."

I think you answered your own question: Fruit of the SPIRIT. The work of the HS in our lives is not necessarily conscious - in fact, it's pry deepest when you don't have to think about it anymore. I think God still gets the glory - we don't have to GIVE it to him - and it doesn't have to have the 'Christian' label, either(remember, this word should be used in noun form only, anyway).

p.s. did you get out of bed to write this one down? i always feel bad when i furiously turn on the light to jot down and brilliant midnight thought...

heather said...

"What you do not understand, treat with reverence and be patient, and what youdo understand, cherish and keep."

-Augustine of Hippo
_Sermons for Christmas and Epiphany_

Cheeky said...

I think why I wrote this post is because I'm finding myself in a season where I'm not as actively digging into the word and seeking to get to know God as much as I have done at other times in my life. Right now, I'm just living what I know--not consciously thinking about doing good works etc, but just finding that I do them kinda naturally. It's almost like I've studied, prepared, and am aking a test without my notes and we'll see how I do. I know I'll still need to review, as well as move on to bigger, better, deeper, harder, more challenging things, but I'm doing the best I can 'til "put your pencil down, exam time is up". There's also a lot I didn't know I didn't know, so I've got some big study time and heart to heart time coming up...