Probably the most important thing to understand
about mission is that God is the one who does the calling, and calls different people to
different tasks. That’s why the Spirit has to come first.
If you want to know what it is that God is
calling you to do, the first task, and by far the most important, is to be
certain of your own saving relationship. If work needs to be done in your own
heart, do it first. Have you completely turned yourself over to Jesus? Do you know
for certain that He has accepted you? This question is not meant to imply that
He sometimes doesn’t. He promises to accept all who come to Him. It is meant to
emphasize that those who are uncertain of their own safety with God already
have trust issues and may not be the best ones to be offering comfort on the
front lines, though it is also true that in attempting to strengthen the faith
of others, we will strengthen our own, and it is a mistake to wait until we are
“strong enough, good enough, or perfect enough.”
Have you recognized the presence of the Spirit
in your life, even though you still find that astonishing, given what you know
about your inmost soul?
If these things are in good order, and if you
are feeling a call on your life, something that is starting to take hold of
you, a person or people group, even in your own neighborhood or workplace whom
you love and are drawn to and long to somehow help to see God clearly, then
your next task is to find a mentor or partner or group with whom to work. Different
missions require different workers, and yours may be a group mission (most likely)
or it may be solitary, but if that’s the case, it’s even more essential that
you have backup. Especially if you’re going deep into enemy territory!
Which brings up an often-ignored or overlooked,
but vital, mission—to be a backup person for someone else on the front lines.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, may simply be to stay in the
background with rations of heavenly manna, canteens of living water, the
biggest arsenals of prayer you can stockpile, and lots of bandages!
Spiritual Gifts: The trend in recent years has been to take inventory of the
spiritual gifts within a church family and to use those gifts in specific ways
to implement a mission strategy. This can be far more effective than simply using
the latest Power Point seminar to train everybody to
“do evangelism” and then sending them all out
shotgun style. Jesus did the same by giving His disciples tasks that complemented
their abilities and furthered the gospel commission. Of course, He often had a
better idea of their hidden gifts than they did, and still tends to ask people
to do things they are certain they could never do.
But it’s also possible to make a spiritual gifts
test of some kind the latest How To Do Evangelism method and get so caught up
in making precise definitions and lists of each one’s gifts (and arguing over
whether a gift should really be on the list or not) that still, no real outreach
gets done. Worse yet, people are discouraged and less likely to try again. It’s
simpler than we like to admit. Ask God. He knows what He wants you to do, and yes, He will tell you.
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