It’s hard to believe that we have just one week left of A World Unbroken. It has been a great couple months as we have talked, learned, and journeyed together through the Story of God. May we live in the Story every day.
Here are some thoughts from our time together last night. The focus was Mission.
We started off the night with Ethan and Izaak singing together. Yep, if you weren’t there, you missed it. The two guys worked hard to harmonize together - not too hard to do. But it wasn’t that easy. Both of them had headphones in with music blasting. They couldn’t hear each other. That’s where the rest of the group came in. Their job was to give thumbs up or thumbs down to Ethan and Izaak so that they could change their tone lower or higher, and hopefully come to the same note. They all did quite well.
After the activity, we talked about how everyone worked to “harmonize” together. Everyone played a part, and everyone was in harmony. Then we read Acts 2:24-27, which tells the story of the early Christians, the first church, and how they lived in harmony together. They fellowshipped together, ate together, prayed together, and gave together. They gave to everyone who had need and praised God for his goodness. They were in harmony.
The Church is the vehicle of God’s Mission in and for the world. When we are in harmony together, in community together, we get to participate in what God is doing.
The second scripture focus, which formed the words of last night’s video, came from Romans 12. It’s worth reading here.
So here’s what I want you to do, God helping you: Take your everyday, ordinary life-your sleeping, eating, going-to-work, and walking-around life-and place it before God as an offering. Embracing what God does for you is the best thing you can do for him. Don’t become so well-adjusted to your culture that you fit into it without even thinking. Instead, fix your attention on God. You’ll be changed from the inside out. Readily recognize what he wants from you, and quickly respond to it. Unlike the culture around you, always dragging you down to its level of immaturity, God brings the best out of you, develops well-formed maturity in you.
In this way we are like the various parts of a human body. Each part gets its meaning from the body as a whole, not the other way around. The body we’re talking about is Christ’s body of chosen people. Each of us finds our meaning and function as a part of his body. But as a chopped-off finger or cut-off toe we wouldn’t amount to much, would we? So since we find ourselves fashioned into all these excellently formed and marvelously functioning parts in Christ’s body,
let’s just go ahead and be what we were made to be, without enviously or pridefully comparing ourselves with each other, or trying to be something we aren’t.
Love from the center of who you are; don’t fake it. Run for dear life from evil; hold on for dear life to good. Be good friends who love deeply; practice playing second fiddle.
Don’t burn out; keep yourselves fueled and aflame. Be alert servants of the Master, cheerfully expectant. Don’t quit in hard times; pray all the harder. Help needy Christians; be inventive in hospitality.
Bless your enemies; no cursing under your breath. Laugh with your happy friends when they’re happy; share tears when they’re down. Get along with each other; don’t be stuck-up. Make friends with nobodies; don’t be the great somebody.
Our Scriptures tell us that if you see your enemy hungry, go buy that person lunch, or if he’s thirsty, get him a drink. Your generosity will surprise him with goodness. Don’t let evil get the best of you; get the best of evil by doing good.
It was easy to keep the conversation going last night - there’s a lot there to talk about. One of the things we seemed to keep coming back to last night is that loving our enemies (everyone) is both probably the most important thing to do as followers of Christ and probably the most difficult thing to do. We shared stories of being betrayed by friends and ridiculed at school. Situations that leave us hurt and often far from wanting to express love. But we follow a God who loved his enemies and calls us to buy our enemies lunch. That’s hard. God is with us.
A couple summary statements about this scripture and about the Mission episode:
1) We are called to offer our entire selves, our entire lives, to God and to God’s Church. We cannot do it on our own. We find our function and meaning in God and in our role in God’s body of people and God’s kingdom. We can’t do it alone.
2) As we offer ourselves to God and to God’s Church, we become part of God’s Mission. We live lives that don’t make sense to the world because we choose to play “second fiddle”, love our enemies, and pledge allegiance to God alone. Because we do and live this way, we point the rest of creation back to God’s way. That is God’s Mission: to restore the world to it’s intended wholeness, to God’s way.
And that’s what we get to explore next Wednesday: Restored.
