631 Where Do You Draw the Line? - John 10:11

Where do you draw the line? What won't you do as a follower of Jesus? 

Hi, I'm Mike Henry Sr. with Follower of One. Thanks so much for joining me again today on the podcast. I'm grateful for you listening to these daily devotionals and sharing them. If you will.

Today. I want to continue what we talked about starting yesterday. So yesterday I talked about John 10:10. Today, we want to talk about John 10:11. Jesus is still speaking. And he says, "I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep." 

And the question, "where do you draw the line is where do you draw the line when you're following Jesus?"

I wrestle with this from time to time. Fortunately, God hasn't called me to really dangerous laying down my life. I think about Secret Service agents who are, or expected to die in the line of fire, protecting the President. I think about other things that go on as well. Jesus is telling us the good shepherd - that's Him - lays down His life for the sheep.

He's going to die on the cross, for all of us. He also tells us in John 15,  "Greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friend." This laying down our lives or where do we draw the line, I think comes directly relative on a day like today, when, as this airs we're on Day 4 of the Marketplace Mission Trip the second week and our topic is "deliver excellent work".

Do you draw the line in the quality of work that you do? Do you give away your career in your time and your energy to serve the people around you? Some of this ought to sound a little radical. I have trouble with some of these statements too. Did I do everything I could? No, I could have gone farther.

I could've stretched harder. I could have delivered more. And if you've worked with me in the past, you're aware of that. So at least we're honest. I want to help us as Christ-followers consider the things that God asks us to do in service to our friends and our coworkers. One of those is to make sure that we deliver excellent work, that everything that we do is excellent. We want to make sure that the excellence of our performance is noticeable. Not because of what it says about us, but what it says about the person that we follow. Everything that we do because we follow Jesus matters forever. I think it counts forever.

Jesus said that even a cup of cold water given his name and we shall not lose our reward. And so if everything that we do, because we follow Jesus matters, then how we do our job because we follow Jesus matters. Let's do excellent work today. Figure out what you can do to make it easier for the people that you work with.

What can you do to make your quality of work better? I also want to encourage us to make sure that we're not showing off or that we're not showing up to our coworkers. Our job is to make them successful. Our job to help them get ahead in the world is the easy part; getting ahead eternally is what our ultimate goal is.

We want to help people get ahead eternally. I want to help every person that I know move one notch closer to Jesus because that step is on the path to their ultimate success, not to their temporal success, but to their ultimate success. That's why we focus on doing excellent work on Day 4 - Week 2 of the Marketplace Mission Trip.

Speaking of the mission trip, if you've never taken one of these trips before you don't really go anywhere. It's devotional, but we do it together. You can find out more about it at https://community.followerofone.org. Create a profile there and join the online community and you'll get invited on the next Marketplace Mission Trip.

There's always another one starting in just a few weeks. Thanks very much for being a marketplace minister and for making a difference. Your faith matters. Thanks.