Prioritizing Ministry to God
One Thing Is Needed
Ministry to God is the foundation of our calling and should be prioritized in our lives. While God doesn't need our practical help, He desires our worship and spiritual sacrifices. These sacrifices include offering our lives, broken and contrite hearts, the sacrifice of praise, and prayers. Our worship moves His heart. Prioritizing ministry to God is essential, as it aligns everything else in our lives. The greatest commandment is to love God, and cultivating a relationship with Him should be our one thing.
Key Takeaways
Ministry to God is the foundation of our calling and should be prioritized in our lives.
Worship and spiritual sacrifices are ways we can minister to God.
Our worship moves the heart of God and captivates Him.
Cultivating a relationship with God should be our one thing.
Video Timestamps
00:00Ministry to God
02:01Offering Spiritual Sacrifices
03:02The Sacrifice of Praise
03:31Prayers as a Spiritual Sacrifice
04:28Preaching the Gospel as a Priestly Ministry
05:24Imagining God's Presence
06:28Moving the Heart of God
07:25Prioritizing Ministry to God
08:24The Greatest Commandment
09:49Cultivating a Relationship with God
10:48The One Thing
Video Transcript
Presence Pioneers (00:00.014)
Ministry to others is always the overflow of ministry to God and not the other way around. So we have to be a priesthood if we want to be all that God's called us to be.
So, how do we minister to God? Because it seems like that's an important thing. What does it mean? How do we become priests? How do we minister to the Lord? So, it's important to offer a caveat here. When we think of ministry, we typically think of maybe what I'm doing right now, preaching. Or maybe we think of praying for someone, helping someone, serving someone, encouraging someone. God doesn't need any of that.
No one needs to preach to God. No one needs to feed God a meal. God doesn't need encouragement, right? No one needs to pray for God. He's doing just fine. So how do we minister to Him if all of our definitions of ministry don't relate to a perfect, totally satisfied in Himself God that doesn't need anything? And so He doesn't need healing. He doesn't need anything practical.
He doesn't need to get saved, right? Again, let's look at 1 Peter. This is actually the, I think part of the verse that might be on the shirts. 1 Peter 2, 5.
It says, you also as living stones are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, here it goes, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. Ding ding ding. So here's what the holy priesthood, the royal priesthood does, is they offer up spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ. Okay, so what are those spiritual sacrifices?
Presence Pioneers (02:01.358)
I'm glad you asked. I'll give you a couple, and this is not an exhaustive list, but here are a few of them. Romans 12, 1. We offer our bodies as living sacrifices. We offer all of our lives as a worship to the Lord. Worship is not just the songs, it's not just the music, it's not just church. I believe at the heart of biblical worship, to understand it means that we offer all that we are.
Presence Pioneers (02:33.55)
Whatever we do, we do it as unto the Lord. So number one, we offer our lives as a spiritual sacrifice. Number two, we offer broken and contrite hearts. Psalms 51 -17. David understood this reality. He understood, God, you don't delight in burnt offerings and animal sacrifices, but the sacrifices of God are a broken spirit and a contrite heart you will not despise. Psalm 51 -17.
Number three, we offer the sacrifice of praise. So we do sing, right? We do praise. We do what we just did for an hour. That was ministry to the Lord. At least some of it was for some of us. Maybe some of us were just enjoying the music or whatever, but at least parts of it, I think we were really just offering God our love and our praise, right? So Hebrews 13, 15. It says to offer God a sacrifice of praise.
Number four, we all forgot our prayers as a spiritual sacrifice as priests Our prayers are like incense the Bible says Revelation 5 8 describes the throne of God and it says that these elders around God's throne are holding bowls of incense that it says are the prayers of the Saints and They ride they smell good to God like what we say to him smells good to him, which is like
That's so strange. And his desire is that our surrounding him in heaven are our conversations that we've had with with him. So it's amazing. That's a ministry to him. Right. It doesn't it doesn't help him. He doesn't praise doesn't add anything to God. Right. But it is a ministry to him. It is an offering of worship. So you can say how do you minister to God. Big picture worship. You can just say worship is how we minister to God.
But there's these specific spiritual sacrifices that the New Testament, and there's others that you can find. Actually, preaching the gospel can be a ministry to the Lord. Paul describes preaching the gospel as a priestly ministry. I forget where the reference is, but he describes it literally as priestly. So you can just look that word up. So I want to encourage you guys in your...
Presence Pioneers (04:57.39)
lives in your worship times at church. I think most of you, a lot of you are involved in worship ministries or want to be. As you play your instrument, sing your songs, pray your prayers, live your life, do it to God. Literally imagine Him. You're allowed to use your imagination as Christians. That's okay. God gave it to us. I literally sit down.
on my couch in my office sometimes and just imagine that Jesus is sitting there beside me and talk to him and it helps me because he is present with me but it just helps me to connect to that reality and I encourage you sing to him Misty Edwards has this old song I don't want to talk about you like you're not in the room you know and it's just like just love it like
God's not just out there somewhere. Maybe He hears our worship. Maybe He doesn't, but He's listening. He's like tuning in and He's receiving it. And I don't totally understand how all this works, but somehow it's blessing Him. Somehow it's like what they describe those old burnt offerings. It's like a pleasing aroma to God. God must like smells, I guess. But a pleasing aroma, incense to Him, right? He loves that. He receives it. And...
He's moved by it. I want to move your heart. It's all I want to do, right? How does God's heart get moved by us? That's crazy.
But it does. He's moved by our worship. He's not changed by it, but somehow God has emotions and those emotions respond to our worship in a beautiful way. Song of Solomon 4 .9, this picture of the bride and the bridegroom, Jesus is like this bridegroom and he says to the bride, you have captivated my heart, my sister, my bride. You have captivated my heart with one glance of your eyes.
Presence Pioneers (06:58.254)
You know, when we just look at Jesus, it says we've captivated His heart. That's amazing, isn't it? That we can captivate the heart of God. We can move the heart of God with our worship. That's our ministry to Him. Why would we not want to do that? So, that's what it means to minister to the Lord.
Like I said earlier, not only is it what we were made to do, not only is it what we're going to be doing forever, but it is the genesis of our mission that God has given us to accomplish in the earth right now. So I want to take the last few minutes here and I want to talk about prioritizing ministry to God and making this a priority in your life. Because in my experience,
Most things will pull us away from this, not to this. We're all busy, right? You ask anybody, how you doing? Busy. Good, but just busy. That's how everybody's doing. Life is so busy. We've got so much going on. We've got screens everywhere vying for our attention and 30 second videos that are flashing. So our attention span's gone. And so it's like, how do we take the time to be before God and minister to Him?
in our lives. We have to love him first. That has to be the wellspring of everything else in our lives. Jesus was asked, I think they were trying to give him a trick question, what is the greatest commandment in the law? And I always think, if I was asked that question, if I didn't already know Jesus' answer, I think my answer would be,
Oh, there's no greatest commandment. It's all the Word of God and it's all valuable. You know, some real nice spiritual sounding answer. But Jesus actually answered the question. He said the greatest commandment is to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. Matthew 22, 37 -38. And He says this is the greatest and the first commandment. The first commandment.
Presence Pioneers (09:19.406)
So Mike Bickle says we need to get the first commandment in first place in our lives. The second commandment is like it, love your neighbor as yourself. But it is second, right? And it's important, but the first commandment is love God. And the second commandment is love others. And I don't believe we can love others to the extent that God desires for us if we have not first cultivated a relationship with the Lord.
in secret place. Learn to minister before him. And I know many of you already minister to God. Maybe you don't use that language, so I'm not trying to say there's some mysterious ministry to God that you have to do. I'm just trying to help you understand what happens when you worship, what happens when you cultivate that intimacy with the Lord in private. But it's gotta be first. King David said in Psalm 27, four, there's one thing I desire to the Lord.
and that will I seek." And then he describes three things. That I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord and to inquire in His temple. So I love that he's like, there's only one thing I want, God. And here's those three things. But they're all really one thing. Their relationship with Him. Their knowing Him and loving Him. Being in His presence. Seeing Him, beholding Him, and hearing His voice. That's...
relationship with God. David called it his one thing. So David did more than one thing. David was the king of a nation. He was a governmental leader. He was the leader of the military. He was a warrior. He did a lot of things. He did not just do one thing. He was not sitting in his prayer closet all day. He had a lot of stuff going on in his life. He was busy.
right? If anybody was busy, but he said there's one thing that's needed. What's the point? The point is, it's not that I only do one thing, it's that I do the one thing first. And if I get this thing right, then everything else in my life comes into alignment. If my relationship with God is in order, then it affects everything. That's what it means to make your relationship with God the one thing.
Presence Pioneers (11:48.398)
This phrase, one thing, comes up again in Luke chapter 10, the story of Mary and Martha when Jesus is at their house and Martha's busy getting all the food ready. Mary is sitting at the feet of Jesus listening to His voice, ministering to Him, if you will, praying to Him, if you will. And Martha gets offended because she's trying to get all the work done and Mary's just sitting there listening. She's probably also side note.
Probably also offended because women weren't supposed to sit and listen to rabbis and Jesus was letting her listen. Jesus just was so honoring to women in that culture of the day. So Mary's sitting there, she's a woman, so she's not supposed to be listening to a rabbi. She's not helping Martha out, but Jesus defends her. Luke 10, 41, Martha, Martha, you're worried and troubled about many things, but one thing, there's that phrase, one thing is needed.
Mary has chosen the good part which will not be taken away from her. It's not that work doesn't have to get done, but it's that we have to get our priorities straight. We have to get things in our lives in order and prioritize His presence, prioritize priestly ministry to Him above everything else.