Wasted for the Lord
Watchman Nee was a very active Christian minister, author, church planter, and teacher and established the movement for local churches in China. When the Communist Revolution took place, he was persecuted and imprisoned, where he lived the last twenty years of his life. One of the truths he wanted believers to understand was the value of being wasted for Jesus. He would preach, “It is a blessed thing to be wasted for the Lord.”
Watchman Nee is not the only Christian leader to teach the value of being wasted for our Lord. Richard Wurmbrand, the author of “Tortured for Christ” and founder of “Voice of the Martyrs,” was a Jewish-Christian that lived in Romania during the same approximate time as Nee. He was also an active Christian minister and author imprisoned and tortured by the Romanian Communists. Alone in his prison cell, Wurmbrand would preach sermons.
One of the most challenging requests our Savior can ask of us is to wait. Waiting feels like being wasted. God has saved us, commissioned us, and gifted us. We’re supposed to be in the battle. Why would Jesus put us on the shelf and not use us? Or, even more, difficult for American Christians is actually to be wasted; to be in a local church that won’t preach the gospel, but our Lord doesn’t give us the liberty to leave or to have a ministry taken from us, and we’re left with a hole in our hearts and our lives.
God is sovereign, so He seldom answers our “why.” Part of being saved is our death and regeneration. This world is no longer our home. So, it is a blessing whenever Jesus uses us, and if that use is to be wasted on Him, how marvelous!
“Then Mary took about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume; she poured it on Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her hair. And the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume.” (John 12:3-4 NIV)
Photo by Patricia Valério on Unsplash