Cory Lebovitz

Have you ever noticed how easy it can be for us to miss what is really going on? I experience this a lot in parenting. I sometimes get so focused on doing things around the house to take care of my little girl that I can miss the most important moments. Sometimes it is cleaning up her dishes (taking care of her) while she is asking me to come read her a book. Other times I might miss her asking to watch a movie with me because I am paying bills. The point is I can easily miss the most important thing going on in my house because I am busy taking care of the house.

If we are not careful, that will become the story of the Church.

As leaders it is possible to do the work of God and actually miss some of the biggest activity of God among us…we can miss the movement of God here and now. We can miss the biggest thing happening just like the story in Matthew 25 of the sheep and the goats. It is in that passage when the King (Jesus) returns and begins inviting followers to take their inheritance and honors them for their small and simple acts of service to the King. To the followers these were just simple acts of service – yet to the King they were everything. The followers were confused because they did not see the bigger picture happening all along.

You see we have the tendency to invite people to come make a difference and miss the difference that is being made within them as they serve. God designed our acts of service to be a main vehicle for our discipleship. We can miss this fact because we are busy, or because we have our attention on other things.

How does God go about changing our lives for the better? How does he transform us from who we were to who He created us to be? Conventional wisdom says knowledge is power – the more a person knows the more they will change. If information and knowledge were the key than our world would be a better place because of the advent of technology and the Internet.

God created us with a capacity to learn and understand. However experience shows that growth in our spiritual journey does not come from the amount of content we have consumed, but rather through transformation as we serve.

Some of the best “God stories” happening within the church are likely the ones being birthed right now by people who are greeting, or parking cars or teaching kids or running technical equipment. As you seek to invest and build God’s Church be careful you do not miss the biggest thing God is doing – because as you serve Him you are likely to find that the greatest thing God is doing is not through you, but in you.