Have You Done What You Could for Jesus?
Doing good work for Jesus means doing what you can do.
Are you giving Jesus your best?
This is a question we all need to ask ourselves regularly.
What God expects from us as servants depends upon what we are can do.
The Text - Mark 14:3-9
Our text begins with Jesus entering a house in Bethany.
And being in Bethany at the house of Simon the leper, as He sat at the table, a woman came having an alabaster flask of very costly oil of spikenard. Then she broke the flask and poured it on His head. (Mark 14:3)
An “alabaster flask” held costly ointments and fragrances and had to be broken to be opened. Once it was opened, it had to be used in its entirety.
But there were some who were indignant among themselves, and said, “Why was this fragrant oil wasted? For it might have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they criticized her sharply. (Mark 14:4-5)
A single denarius was a day’s pay during the time of the Roman Empire. This oil was worth three hundred days’ pay - nearly a year’s salary. Obviously, this woman was rather wealthy.
Some criticized her sharply for “wasting” such a valuable resource on Jesus when it could have been sold and the money given to the poor.
But Jesus said, “Let her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a good work for Me. For you have the poor with you always, and whenever you wish you may do them good; but Me you do not have always. She has done what she could. She has come beforehand to anoint My body for burial. Assuredly, I say to you, wherever this gospel is preached in the whole world, what this woman has done will also be told as a memorial to her.” (Mark 14:6-9)
I don’t know if this woman understood everything Jesus was about to do and face, but one thing seems clear - she understood He was about to die.
Knowing that Jesus was soon to die, she did what she could for the Lord while she had the opportunity. As a result, what she did for Jesus continues to be told as a memorial to her.
The Application
The point of this section is not necessarily “You have to give a year’s salary to Jesus.”
The point is found in Jesus’ response to the woman’s actions “She has done what she could.” Not everyone could do what this woman did. Not everyone had a year’s salary sitting in an alabaster flask.
The application for you and me is: what can we do for Jesus? What are we capable of doing for the Lord?
The follow-up question we must ask ourselves is: Are we actually doing what we can for the Lord?
Maybe you don’t have a year’s salary lying around to give back to God.
Could you use your talents and abilities to teach a class? Could you use the relationships you have built with people over many years to serve as an encourager? Could you use your social media pages as a tool to spread the Word of God to others?
We often focus on what we can’t do when we ought to focus on what we could do.
Have you done what you could for the Lord?