Missions? Me?
This is the introduction of what will be a six-part series on “6 Ways To Reach God’s World”. Stay tuned for regular updates on this blog:
You matter to God! He delights in you. And through you, if you are open and willing to love through purposeful involvement, His love will flow like living water to people and places of His world of which perhaps very few among us are aware. In our fast-paced and global world, it can be a challenge to know how to become involved in God’s global plan. Things have changed so rapidly. Month’s-long trips by boat to faraway destinations have been replaced with 24-hour airline hops between cultures done by students, business people, and leisure travelers. Photos and artifacts carried home in trunks have been replaced with live video and daily blogs. We live in a time when discovering purposeful involvement in God’s affairs around the world requires us to be much more intentional.
If you’re reading this, you probably have at least some interest in missions. You know that God has called His people to go and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:19) and that, in the present state of the world, God is not receiving the glory due his name. I love how 2 Corinthians 5:18-21 tells us about what our job is: “…and God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sin against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” For God made Christ, who never sinned, to be the offering for our sin, so that we could be made right with God through Christ.” (NLT) The question now is what can you do about it? What intentional choice for purposeful involvement will you make? Perhaps God is calling you to go and be a “Frontline” missionary in the unreached parts of the world. If you sense this call, go for it! But if God has not invited you to pack up all your earthly belongings and head to another part of the world, don’t count yourself out of His plan for the nations. Just as we all fill different roles in our churches, recognizing some to be hands, some the eyes and some the feet (1 Corinthians 12), we can each fill specific roles in the global missions effort. To reach the 4 Billion non-Christians and more than 6,000 unreached people groups in the world, every part of the body of Christ needs to know and fulfill it’s function.
In this 6 part series, we’ll talk about six practical ways that each of you can be involved NOW to reach the people of God’s world: Learning, praying, going, sending, welcoming, and mobilizing. Other organizations have similar descriptions of how to get involved. However you try to capture this idea, it is clear that we as Christians need to find our role (or roles) in God’s redemptive plan. Might God have you engage more deeply in one of these? LEARN, PRAY, GO, SEND, WELCOME, MOBILIZE
Stay tuned as we unpack each of these practical ways to get involved in the coming months. The adventure of JFC Global Missions is about to get started. Thanks for reading!
Looking forward to it.