Are You Building the Wrong House?

“Unless the LORD builds the house, the builders labor in vain.” 

Psalm 127:1-2 (NIV)

The toiling in our lives can amount to much. 

Or it can amount to nothing mountable at all. 

Imagine waking up one morning and realizing that you missed it. The life you’d dreamed of filled with the fullness of joy and all things that make a soul sing, just passed by. 

We all ache to make something of our lives. To build purpose from our existence and leave behind a noteworthy legacy. 

But what if we’re laboring night and day only to turn up empty on our results?

Back in high school I excitedly announced that I planned to attend beauty school. As a child I played with old-fashioned-cone-hair-dryers and fake hair spray for more hours than I can count. I loved the work of making women feel beautiful. 

But some of my friends crushed me with their opinion that beauty-work is not “Christian enough” work. 

I didn't attend beauty school for other reasons, but those words festered in me for years. They bothered me. They temporarily tainted my view of what is considered holy work. 

Over the years God gifted me new lenses to see that when Jesus is involved, all work is holy.

Just as the sunrise awakens the world each morning, so our gifts awaken the world to see Jesus. 

Jesus uses your gifts, your passions, your dreams, to make you into an artist that sings of His glory just by being who He made you to be. Just as He is intentional with painting the beautiful sky each morning, so He is intentional about the work you were made to do. 

What the Lord creates of our lives is artful-beauty. He brushes his supernatural against our natural and makes it something miraculous.

No work is too small if Jesus is at the helm. 

But when we leave Jesus out of the equation and choose selfish gain over surrendered living, we lose out on the gift of our natural work miraculously becoming His supernatural work. 

The greatest heartache of this life will not be about missed promotions or a messy home or a lack of time to commit to more. The greatest heartache of our life would be to devote our lives to building our own kingdom and miss the gift of Jesus’ very presence in our lives.

Dear sisters, let’s not toil for a home we were never meant to build. Let’s, together, lay down our vain-tools and pick up the ordained-tools we are meant to work with. Toiling daily to build a home that is hand-stamped by Jesus. 

For that is the most beautiful legacy of all.

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Going Deeper

1. What house are you building now? Yours? Or God's?

2. What natural work were you made to do? 

(Hint: The things that make you feel alive and fulfilled)

3. How can use those natural gifts to allow God to do supernatural work ?