Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Saturday, 14 June 2014 "We are God's coworkers"

Leawood, Kansas, United States - The United Methodist Church of the Resurrection Daily Guide grow. pray. study. for Saturday, 14 June 2014 "We are God's coworkers"
Daily Scripture: 1 Corinthians 3:4 For when one says, “I follow Paul,” and another, “I follow Apollos,” aren’t you fleshly? 5 Who then is Apollos, and who is Paul, but servants through whom you believed; and each as the Lord gave to him? 6 I planted. Apollos watered. But God gave the increase. 7 So then neither he who plants is anything, nor he who waters, but God who gives the increase. 8 Now he who plants and he who waters are the same, but each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. 9 For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s farming, God’s building.
Reflection Question:
The apostle Paul taught that God gives every believer gifts to use in doing God's work. We are all different, and God needs each person's individuality, shaped by our God-given gifts, to accomplish God's purposes. Today we read Paul "walking his talk" about the value of each Christian's gifts. He wrote that, although he and another teacher named Apollos had played differing parts in building up the church in Corinth, neither of them (or their followers) could or should claim that one was superior to the other. Both served God, and in the end, any glory for what they had done went to God.
Scholar William Barclay wrote of this passage, "This is extremely significant because it means that you can tell what a man's relations with God are by looking at his relations with his fellow men. If he is at variance with his fellow men, if he is a quarrelsome, argumentative, trouble-making creature, he may be a diligent church attender, he may even be a church office-bearer, but he is not a man of God." Who do you know who shines at drawing people together, rather than driving wedges between them? By the standard Barclay draws from this passage, how are your relations with God doing?
Family Activity:
As a family, talk about how each person can use his or her God-given gifts and abilities to serve those within and outside of the home. Use construction paper and crayons to draw pictures of your home, your neighborhood and the world. On the pictures, write or draw the gifts of each person in the places where they might be best put to work. Also, write or draw about ways each person's gifts can be used to serve others in those places. Thank God for giving these gifts to you and pray together, asking God to help guide you to use your abilities gifts. Display your family's pictures as reminder to serve and work for those who are in your home, neighborhood and world.
Today's Prayer:
Dear God, I love you. I want to honor you. Sometimes I miss the link between how I treat other people and how I honor you. Help me keep that in focus, and draw people together rather than driving wedges. Amen.
Insight from Yvonne Gentile
Yvonne Gentile serves on The Church of the Resurrection staff as the Director of Connections. Yvonne directs the team that helps people get connected into the life of the church through service, studies, group life, and other ways of involvement.
The Christians in Corinth were a contentious group of folks. They argued about everything – which apostle/teacher was the greatest, whose spiritual gifts were more important – they even sued each other over petty grievances.  They were caught up in a downward spiral of comparison and competition.  Today’s popular culture still encourages us to compare ourselves to others, to be in competition with one another, and to seek to somehow “come out on top.”
Like the Corinthian Christians, we can get caught up in viewing certain people as Christian “superstars”, but in God’s view each of us is important and necessary for the church to function effectively. One problem with a church that values one person’s gifts over another’s is that if some people are superstars, others are by default “less than” (even if that’s unintentional), and that’s not in line with God’s character. Instead of putting some people on a pedestal and assigning others a lower status, we are meant to see each other through God’s eyes.  I recently read the novel The Shack by Wm. Paul Young.  It was published in 2007, so you may have read it long ago.  God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit are characters in the book.  One thing that has stuck with me is a phrase God says repeatedly in the book: “I am especially fond of every one of my children.”  Not just the so-called superstars, not just the people I like (that’s a little convicting!) – ALL of God’s children.
The point of spiritual gifts is that we have different gifts, and every gift is important. In the Body of Christ, we are meant to live and work in harmony with one another. For instance, every weekend in worship, hundreds of people work together behind the scenes to make it possible for us to have an excellent and meaningful worship experience.  From the Facilities team who cares for our worship space, to the Technical Arts team, the Communications team, to the bulletin stuffers, greeters, ushers, and Connection Point team, the acolyte and worship coordinators, and yes, the musicians and pastors, every person involved plays a necessary and important role – all co-laboring to bring worship to life.
As Christians, every interaction we have and every action we take has the potential to help accomplish God’s purpose.  We are God’s co-workers too, whether we are serving inside or outside the walls of the church or simply striving to live our lives in a way that reflects God’s love.  You may spend your time as a volunteer coach for your kid’s soccer team, a manager in the corporate world, hanging out with friends at a coffee shop, as a stay-at-home mom, or something else entirely; wherever you are and whoever you’re with, the way you live your daily life impacts and influences other people.  Knowing that God is “especially fond of every one” of God’s children, we are called to be co-laborers in God’s mission to share love, peace, and hope through our words and actions.  As humans, we all do this imperfectly. The results, thankfully, are in God’s hands.
On Thursday I heard a beautiful prayer about being God’s co-workers, written by Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador.  It’s long, so I will share just a small part of it with you here:
This is what we are about:
We plant seeds that one day will grow.
We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise.
We lay foundations that will need further development.
We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities.
We cannot do everything
and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that.
This enables us to do something,
and to do it very well.
It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for God’s grace to enter and do the rest.
How can you, as God’s co-worker, plant seeds of love, peace, and hope through your normal, everyday words and actions in the coming week?
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