Sent

 Again he said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.” John 20:21

If we are followers of the King, then we are going to be a sent people. We are sent out in His name. We are to be witnesses of His life and work, co-laborers with Him in His mission and ministry. If we are His followers, I think we know all of that, but do we know just how deep the call goes into our lives? Of that I'm not so sure.

I have a quote from Chris Tiegreen in my prayer journal that both challenges and convicts me. He writes, "Jesus' command(s) is comprehensive, compelling, and urgent. Give, pray, go, die if necessary." Do we dare to contemplate the depths of this charge? I believe we're willing to do all of these....to a point. We'll give, pray, and go to a point, a degree, a level. We almost always have an invisible line, a bottom line that we think going beyond is "unreasonable." We just don't think Jesus would ask that of us. And dying? I don't think we believers in the west can even comprehend that kind of scenario. Yet that scenario could well be coming upon us. It may already be upon us.

Are we, you and I, living with a sense of urgency today? When we look upon our family, friends, and those we pass by each day who are living without Him, do we have a sense of urgency that they should know Him? A member of my family, one who doesn't know Him, hasn't shown any desire to know Him, nearly died last week. He was a breath away from eternity. We're all a breath away from eternity. An eternity that each of us will either spend in an eternal hell or eternal heaven. It's not popular to talk about this much in the church these days, but both are very real, and one or the other await all of us. The determining element will always be what we do with Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Light. Have we an urgency about it all? In our prayers, our giving of ourselves, in our going to them with His message of life? Have I, and have you, an urgency? Charles Spurgeon, the master preacher of the 19th century, said in essence, that if one was determined to reject Christ, and step out into an eternity of darkness and death, then let them do so having to trip over our bodies, and with our arms wrapped around their legs in an effort to stop them from doing so. Have we been living in that way? Does it mark our witness?

Then there is the last part of the Tiegreen quote, that we be willing to die if necessary. Both literally and figuratively. Are we willing to die out to all self-interest in order to live for His interests? Are we willing to literally be killed for our witness as so many of our brethren around the world already are? Jesus called His disciples His friends. He also said that greater love hath no man than to lay down his life for his friend. Oswald Chambers said, "If I am a friend of Jesus, I have deliberately and carefully laid down my life for Him." This means the choice, the act, has already been made and carried out. Our lives belong to Him, to spend as He desires. How has He been able to spend your life and mine? Richly, or poorly? 

If we profess to be His disciples, then we have been sent out with His sense of urgency. Are we living out our witness with that  urgency? I fear too many of us are falling short of such a witness, of living with that urgency. Lord, rekindle Your passion in us. In me. May we go, preach, pray, give, and if you lead us to it, die for You. May all that we are be given over to all that You are. Paul said at the end of his life and ministry that he had sought to live in such a way that the loss of any soul could not be held to his account. May we each live in that way as well. Help us Lord Jesus.

Blessings,
Pastor O