Ministering to the Lord

As I read this morning, I was struck by this phrase, "bless the Lord". It sounds strange in my ears. "The Lord is the source of blessing," I thought. "He does not need to be blessed."  Then I remembered the phrase "ministering to the Lord." I looked it up and found that it occurs several places in the Scriptures. 

As I pondered this, I wondered why it sounds strange to me. ministering to the Lord and blessing the Lord were important, even central, aspects of the life of faith in the Old and New Testament periods. Why do they sound so strange to me?

Then I realized that we have exchanged "ministering to the Lord" with "ministry for the Lord." We have subtly moved God out of the center and moved the focus of our lives onto the work. This new perspective puts us at the center. It is a way of subtly exalting ourselves and what we can do for Him. It puts the focus on us, or perhaps on "the lost". We wrap our idolatry up in spiritual sounding language.

He invites us to minister to Him, to bless Him, to enter into real relationship with Him. Then, He does the work. He does the saving. He does the ministering. From that place of humility and dependence He sets us aside for the work that He has for us (Acts 13). We tend to identify what we think we should be done and to ask Him to empower our plans, our methodologies, and our efforts. Then, as our plans succeed, we praise the Lord while siphoning of some of the glory for ourselves because we were the ones doing the ministering.

We need to recover the centrality of God. We need to place Him at the center. We need to focus our lives on ministering to Him rather than for Him. I choose this again today. I choose to wait on the Lord. I choose to bless the Lord. I choose to minister to the Lord.