Jess shares her thought for the week; relationship over performance.

In a world where everything seems to come at a bit of a cost and our relationship seems to be built upon “you do something for me and I’ll do something for you”, God operates in our relationship with him just a little bit differently.

In the story of Mary and Martha we see Martha busying herself with so much things that are going on whereas Mary is just simply sitting at the feet of Jesus, to which Jesus responds in a very gentle way to Martha to say that Mary has surely chosen what is better. This is because Jesus is a lot more concerned and values our relationship with him a lot more than our performance.

It’s not that Martha was doing anything wrong, in fact culturally she was doing what was expected of her; she’s working hard, she’s being a good hostess, she even gets to the point where she’s thinking “Lord don’t you care that I’m doing all of this?”. And I wonder if we get in that same habit today. “Lord look what I’ve done for you, isn’t it so great, won’t you give me a bit of recognition?”. But the Lord is a lot more concerned with our relationship with him than a transactional process over our performance for him.

I wonder if stories like this in the Bible, and countless others, are teaching us to just slow down, to rely on our relationship with God and to learn to just develop that further. We can do this in a lot of ways but the ways we know best is through conversation, which is just through prayer, through getting to know God which can be done through reading his word and also just spending time with God like you do a best friend.

Every week one of our members shares a short thought aiming to inspire you for the week. You can watch previous Thought For The Week videos by clicking here.