“Here I am… use me!” I prayed in quiet desperation hoping that the God of the universe would hear my simple sentence prayer and know that my heart was to be used by Him.  But was that really my heart?  Was I really asking Him to use me or was I simply asking to use Him?  The more I reflect on the deceitfulness of my own heart the more I realized just how far from God my heart really was.  Like a child begging to be lifted up by his parent only to reach something formerly out of his grasp I was begging God to exalt me so that I could grab a hold of something cheap and tawdry like the approval of others.

Why do we chase such small things as money, power, recognition, etc. when the only one who really matters in never far away?  I used to read biographies of great men and women who had blazed a trail in history and ask God to make me like them.  I would read about their devotional habits and tied to hard to mimic them thinking that was the key to unleashing God’s power in my life… Oh how foolish I was.  They weren’t looking for God’s power in those early morning sessions, they were looking for God!

This is what it means to be righteous.  They were not looking past the Creator for his blessings, they were looking to their Creator as their blessing. That’s the secret!  It was there all along!  Those who are greatly used by God are often those who seek only to humbly obey Him and walk in righteousness.  They are not righteous for the sake of having others look at them (that’s what the Pharisee’s did).  They just honestly have looked for and trust God and somehow in the mix, these are the people God uses… the one’s whose greatest ambition is to simply please Him. And at the end of the day, isn’t that all he is really after? The full devotion of my heart (Then he can use me however he wants).