Useful Without Being Liked

He would put it this way, if he were being honest, and he almost never is about this.

I believe God uses me. I have seen Him do it. I do not believe He particularly enjoys me.

Fifteen years of that. He shows up, he does the work, he carries what needs carrying, and he has a settled and unexamined sense that his standing with God is functional. He is the reliable one. The one you can send. And that is a real thing and a good thing and he is not ungrateful for it.

But when he tries to imagine God being glad to see him, nothing comes. Not a denial, not a picture, just a blank where other people seem to have something.

And the shape of it is this: he has made peace with being an instrument. Instruments get valued for what they do, and they are not resented for being what they are, and nobody expects an instrument to be liked.

If you have made a settlement like that, come and sit on the sand. Nothing about your service is going to be questioned here.

The settlement was reached without Him

Let us look at how that arrangement got made, because a settlement has two parties and God was not at this one.

Somewhere, probably early, being useful was what got a person kept. Contribution was the visible currency, so contribution became the identity, and by the time God arrived the terms were already drafted. He was simply signed on to an existing agreement.

Notice that nothing in Scripture ever proposed it. No verse offered a functional relationship. The settlement was reached in one head, by one person, on the basis of how things had gone.

You are not an instrument. Nothing about your usefulness is what your standing with the Father rests on, and no year of service has ever established it. I am not saying it to be encouraging. The written word says he hath made us accepted in the beloved (Ephesians 1:6), where the acceptance is located in Christ rather than in output, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps it true in a man who has been reliable for fifteen years.

The name He gives instead

Here is what changed this for me, and it is not a strategy for feeling liked.

There is a passage where God renames a people who had been called Forsaken and Desolate, and the names He chooses are startling.

Thou shalt no more be termed Forsaken; neither shall thy land any more be termed Desolate: but thou shalt be called Hephzibah.Isaiah 62:4

Hephzibah means my delight is in her. That is a name given by God, in place of a name a people had earned, and it is not a job description or a rank. It is an expression of enjoyment.

He could have renamed them Useful. He could have renamed them Restored, or Employed, or Serviceable. He named them after His own pleasure in them.

You are somebody He delights in rather than somebody He deploys, and the Word puts the delight into a name rather than into a review. That is written down as a renaming, and the Holy Spirit is what drives it home in a man who has never once pictured being enjoyed.

Do not resign either

Something has to be said, because a man reading this by Thursday will consider stepping back from the work in order to prove something to himself, and that is the same settlement in reverse.

The service stays. It is good and it is real and it helps people, and none of it was ever wrong. What changes is only what it is being used to buy.

You have His delight already, and the work is an overflow rather than a payment. Scripture says the LORD taketh pleasure in his people (Psalm 149:4), where the pleasure is stated as His own disposition and no performance clause follows it, and it is the Holy Spirit who has held that over fifteen years of a man who thought he was an instrument.

And if this has cost more than anybody on this shore knows, if sleep has gone, if the evenings have started to frighten, please talk to somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if there is danger to anybody tonight. That is not a detour around God. It is one of the ways He keeps people.