Ready to do Good Deeds

I really, really enjoy reading through the epistles in the Bible. There is just so much in them that reminds me of how I am supposed to live. I love the wisdom and directions that I can gain from them. I have been reading through the New Testament in my morning devotion time and last week one of the books was Titus.

Here is some of the verses that really caught my attention:

 "Remind them to be subject to rulers, to authorities, to be obedient, to be ready for every good deed, to malign no one, to be peaceable, gentle, showing every consideration for all men." Titus 3:1 & 2.

  I can learn from everything in those verses but what really got me to thinking was the phrase "to be ready for every good deed". Though our good deeds (works) cannot buy our salvation or make us good enough to go to heaven they are still mentioned fairly often as something we want to do. We want to do what is right and good because God has given us everything and we love Him and want to please Him.

  Good deeds can be made up of a wide variety of actions. God has made each one of us different from anyone else with different talents and skills. A good deed might be giving something to the poor, being hospitable, helping to fix someone's car, sharing food with someone, helping somebody work at something, giving, etc.   There are many ways to do a good deed.

  It was fun to think about how we might be ready to do good deeds and what we could do to be more ready.

  In the ready category - We have various skills that we could use to help someone. Some of our newest skills (for the kids and I) is getting a bit better at carpentry and knowing how to use more tools than we did before - we could potentially use those skills to help others. I have thought about the fact that we have way more clothes, blankets and household items than we truly need and so if we saw someone that truly needed any of those things we could give them some of what God has blessed us with. We have room to be hospitable - we have extra places that people can sleep. We have plenty of food on hand that we could share. We are learning the scriptures so that we can share God's word with others. There are other ways that we are ready to do good deeds but I will leave it with that.

Some of the ways that I thought about that I would like to work at getting more ready for doing good deeds are: Having extra meals (or maybe breads) made and in the freezer or something like that that I could easily and quickly take to someone who just had a baby or who is sick or something of that nature. There are many times that I have thought that would be a nice thing to do but I don't have anything ready right then and that is the time that works to do it.    I also thought about the possibility of  getting passports in case God would want us to go to another country to do good deeds. I do want to get our well with the hand pump drilled so that if there would be a time that people in our neighborhood would lose electricity we could share fresh water with everyone. There are other things that I am thinking about as well.

  I think it is a good mental exercise to think about what good deeds I am ready to do and what I maybe should do what I can to get ready for. We have been blessed - lets be a blessing to others!