Day 5: What Is Our Mission? | 1.8.26

A believer is a follower of Jesus sent by Him as His Father sent him. The influencing factor is not the needs of people, but the commanding invitation of Jesus to walk even as He walked. The source of our motivation, in our service for God, is behind us, not ahead of us, namely the empowering experience of His Holy Spirit and fire. We often tend to put the inspiration of the experience out in front, sweeping everything together before us and making it conform to our definition of religious success. However, in the New Testament, the experiential motivation is put behind us and is the Lord Jesus Himself. The goal is to be true to Him—to carry out His plans.

Personal attachment to the Lord Jesus and to His perspective is the one thing that must not be overlooked. The great danger for each believer is that God’s call will be replaced by the needs of the people, to the point where human sympathy for those needs will completely overwhelm the meaning and real purpose of being sent by Jesus. The needs are so enormous, and the conditions so difficult, that our mental capacity will falter and potentially fail. We tend to forget that the one great reason Jesus gives His followers a mission is not to make it our priority to promote the people, their education, or their needs, but is first and foremost the command of Jesus Christ, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations” (Matthew 28:19).

When looking back on the lives of men and women of God, the tendency is to say, “What spiritually sharp and intelligent wisdom they had, and how perfectly they understood all that God wanted!” But the spirituality, sharpness, and intelligence supporting them were the mind of God, not human wisdom at all. We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the divine guidance of God on display through childlike people who were “foolish” enough to trust God’s wisdom and His supernatural nature at work in and through them.