THE GOAL OF THE DISCIPLE
“Now may the God of peace who brought up our Lord Jesus from the dead, that great Shepherd of the sheep, through the blood of the everlasting covenant, make you complete in every good work to do His will” (Heb. 13:20-21).
Those who are disciples of Jesus, love Jesus. Anyone who loves him has one simple desire: to please him. To do what he wants us to do. Another way to say that is that we want to do his will. We want his desires to be our desires. We want to look at the world the way that he looks at the world. In our every endeavor, we want to be well-pleasing to him (2 Cor. 5:9).
It is important to realize how many times the New Testament instructs Christians to be diligent to do the work of God. And there is nothing that pleases God except trusting in Christ and living for him. When Jesus is the most important thing in our lives, when we live only for him, then we can truthfully say that we are faithful to God.
God has called us to work. We are to be “steadfast and immoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Cor. 15:58). This is what God wants. Is this how we are living? Are we looking for ways to serve Jesus? Do we care about his work upon the earth? These are questions that we all need to ask ourselves and answer honestly.
God’s work is done only by God’s people. He is pleased when we desire to please him. But that desire will express itself in doing things for him. God’s work is doing good. When we do good, we are doing God’s work. The goal of the disciple is to please him. And we please him by loving him, and expressing that love by our good works.
A good work is a work that is good. In other words, anything that is good, when it is done for God, counts as a good work. There is no exhaustive list of good works in the Bible because we don’t need one. We are free in Jesus to live our lives for him by doing good in anyway that we can. “Therefore, whenever we have the opportunity, we should do good to everyone—especially to those in the family of faith” (Gal. 6:10).
God makes us complete for every good work. He works in us to do what he wants us to do. The evidence of God being in us—the evidence that we have a saving relationship with Jesus—is that we are working for him. Because God works in us both to want to do his will and to do his will (Phil. 2:13), this makes the life of the disciple a life of trust. We focus on Jesus, we trust in Jesus, and we believe that he leads and directs us to do his work. It’s all about focusing on Jesus.
Dewayne Dunaway
