Mission Critical
These twelve Jesus sent out with the following instructions: “Do not go among the Gentiles or enter any town of the Samaritans. Go rather to the lost sheep of Israel. As you go, proclaim this message: ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those who have leprosy, drive out demons. Freely you have received; freely give.
Matthew 10:5-8 (NIV)
In today’s times, how will oppressive forces be responded to? How do we change people, and how do we affect them so that they will see the value of surrendering to the coming of the kingdom of God? We do so by accepting a mission.
Jesus tells His disciples: Preach the message of the kingdom. Heal the sick. Raise the dead. And do these with devoted and obedient reliance on God for all your needs.
What do we do to change what appears to be the spiraling integrity of a culture?
Don’t begin by traveling to some far-off place to convert unbelievers. And don’t try to be dramatic by tackling some public enemy. Instead, go to the lost, the confused, and the people right in your neighborhood and help them to understand Jesus first. And when you engage them, tell them the kingdom of God is here.
It starts with understanding who the Lord has made you to be. The Lord has made you more than a disciple. You, child of God, can’t spend your whole life as just a learner, but you must be empowered to also be a messenger.
We are to announce that the kingdom of God is near, and we are to make sure that God is in every conversation. Whatever else you talk about while engaging in conversation, it is your job to make sure that the conversation doesn’t end without Jesus coming up. Insert Jesus in there somewhere, because the only way you change culture is to restore Jesus’s supremacy in the culture, one conversation at a time.
Thinking About Hurt Spiritually
Early the next morning they arose and worshiped before the Lord and then went back to their home at Ramah. Elkanah made love to his wife Hannah, and the Lord remembered her. So in the course of time Hannah became pregnant and gave birth to a son. She named him Samuel, saying, “Because I asked the Lord for him.”
1 Samuel 1:19-20 (NIV)
God permits Hannah to experience excruciating pain to help the nation progress.
Peninnah, Elkanah’s other wife, has children while Hannah remains childless. Peninnah is petty and torments Hannah about her childlessness. Peninnah provokes Hannah annually during family worship trips. Elkanah gives Hannah a double portion, acknowledging her pain, but it’s not the solution. Elkanah doesn’t understand Hannah’s distress.
Hannah’s hurt drives her to pray at church. Hannah’s deep hurt leaves her with nothing to pray about except her pain. Hannah prays for a child, silently, catching the attention of Eli. Eli discerns Hannah’s prayer and assures her that God will grant her request.
Hannah must believe in God despite no visible evidence. Hannah’s pain is allowed by God to birth Samuel, a significant prophet. Samuel bridges the judges’ period to the monarchy, anointing Saul and David. Samuel impacts God’s people forever.
Hannah’s hurt is part of her ministry to fulfill God’s will. God allows Hannah’s deep hurt to shape her for her role. God uses hurt as a tool to accomplish His will.
We should view our hurts spiritually, as unavoidable and part of God’s plan. Processing hurt spiritually prevents resentment and aligns us with God’s purposes. God’s sovereignty incorporates our hurts into His will. Hannah teaches us to think spiritually about hurt and not settle for mere signs.
Hurt is an indicator of needed change, not a permanent state. Hurt signals a need for intervention, growth, or surrender. Pain can inspire praise because it signals a coming change.
Hannah never blames God but prays instead. Hannah trusts God to address her pain without accepting blame herself. The key theological question in suffering is about God’s nature, not His actions. Hannah must not settle for signs but pursue God’s ultimate purpose. Signs are tools of encouragement, not endpoints, in God’s plan.
Angry at God
But to Jonah this seemed very wrong, and he became angry. He prayed to the Lord, “Isn’t this what I said, Lord, when I was still at home? That is what I tried to forestall by fleeing to Tarshish. I knew that you are a gracious and compassionate God, slow to anger and abounding in love, a God who relents from sending calamity. Now, Lord, take away my life, for it is better for me to die than to live.”
Jonah 4:1-3 (NIV)
The mercy God extended toward Nineveh upset Jonah terribly, and the more he thought about it, the angrier he became. Jonah was furious. He lost his temper, and he yelled at God.
Jonah decides, I’m going to tell God exactly how I feel, and he unleashes his anger towards God—and God accepts it. Don’t miss that. He listens to Jonah and accepts his anger because God accepts all of our emotions and He gives us freedom and safety to express them, even when they are about us being angry with God.
We understand Jonah’s anger, don’t we? Many of our social ills are our fault because we human beings have decided to define our morals, ethics, philosophies, and ideologies. We know that God sometimes exerts His sovereignty in human affairs and that at other times, God permits the full results of humanity’s choices. How He chooses which to allow and which to arrange can be confusing to us.
So like Jonah, we are angry. Now the question becomes, what do we do with this anger?
You must fight to not let your anger and disappointment choke out your obedience to God. He has already moved on your behalf enough times and with enough power that—even while you don’t understand—you can trust Him. You can trust that God, who gives you profound love, will also accept your deep hurt and anger and will, in turn, unfold the mystery of His will in all of it.
An Act of Obedience
Now Abel kept flocks, and Cain worked the soil. In the course of time Cain brought some of the fruits of the soil as an offering to the Lord. And Abel also brought an offering—fat portions from some of the firstborn of his flock. The Lord looked with favor on Abel and his offering…
Genesis 4:1-4 (NIV)
The first thing we read about Cain and Abel is that Abel kept flocks and Cain worked soil. The very next thing we read about them is that both of them gave to God from the flock and from the field—they both gave offerings to God.
It forces you to focus on how early in Scripture we see obedience and love for God being demonstrated in the giving of offerings to the Lord. Before Scripture ever tells us about building an altar, before Scripture introduces us to the construction of a temple, before Scripture gives us liturgy that shapes Israel’s worship, there is the offering of firstfruits to the Lord resulting from labor.
It sets undeniable expectations regarding how God interacts with us. Cain and Abel must have been taught that God gets your first and God gets your best. The question then becomes, where did they learn this from? Where did Adam and Eve learn what they, in turn, taught Cain and Abel? They apparently learned it from God. God taught them that offerings ought to be given.
We see the fruit of their teaching and how the whole offering expectation reveals the condition of the human heart and spirit—the love, or absence of love, one has for God, the duty and devotion that is to be an undeniable part of living in relationship with the God who creates and sustains. Humans did not create giving. This is not a human-created construct. The expectation connected to spiritual growth, the demonstration of love for God, the exercise of spiritual discipline—this was God’s idea.
God determined that one of the ways you grow in Him, relate to Him, and demonstrate love and gratitude is to give. Stop letting people make you afraid to engage the connection between how you love God and how you give. Don’t let people make you unnerved when it comes to loving Jesus and it being reflected in how you even think about money. Scripture teaches that even before we are introduced to a percentage of giving or the regularity of giving or the generosity connected to our giving, we are introduced to the fact that it ought to be out of our first, and it ought to be our best.
The Way God Wants to Be Seen
The two of them, sent on their way by the Holy Spirit, went down to Seleucia and sailed from there to Cyprus. When they arrived at Salamis, they proclaimed the word of God in the Jewish synagogues. John was with them as their helper.
They traveled through the whole island until they came to Paphos. There they met a Jewish sorcerer and false prophet named Bar-Jesus, who was an attendant of the proconsul, Sergius Paulus. The proconsul, an intelligent man, sent for Barnabas and Saul because he wanted to hear the word of God. But Elymas the sorcerer (for that is what his name means) opposed them and tried to turn the proconsul from the faith. Then Saul, who was also called Paul, filled with the Holy Spirit, looked straight at Elymas and said, “You are a child of the devil and an enemy of everything that is right! You are full of all kinds of deceit and trickery. Will you never stop perverting the right ways of the Lord?
Acts 13:4-10 (NIV)
Saul has been doing ministry among Jews in Damascus and Jerusalem, then is shipped off to Tarsus. Now, encountering a sorcerer while witnessing to the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus, it signals that the Lord’s invitation is moving beyond the Jews and salvation is being offered to the Gentiles. Saul, named after Israel’s first king from the tribe of Benjamin, also had the Roman name Paul at birth. Luke uses Paul here because it suits evangelism to a Roman official and Gentiles. The Lord needed him to show up in this new space in a way that helped God accomplish His will.
Paul is sharing the gospel with a Roman official, part of that world that connects with his Roman name. God at times needs you to show up in ways that make His presence more inviting and impactful. The challenge is: Can you accept in faith that the Lord is asking you to show up in spaces based not on how you want to be presented, but how He wants to be presented? How you’re seen in one space may differ from another, requiring sensitivity to the Spirit to steward how He expects you to be heard.
Sometimes we want to show our full selves—opinions, brilliance, titles—but feel convicted to limit it, to listen more than talk. It’s all about how you steward yourself so that you won’t frustrate how the Lord wants to be seen.
The gospel sounds the same from Saul as it does from Paul, but it will impact the official’s life when received from a fellow Roman citizen, Paul, rather than Saul. Where the Lord has you and who He has you around is so that He can be seen and heard to make salvation and the kingdom a priority.
We often say, “I’m not changing for anyone,” preferring our own ways. But the text teaches that the Lord expects us to steward our lives to support the gospel’s impact. The principle is: Be your whole self everywhere, but steward your whole self with the Spirit. How you show up aligns with how He wants to be revealed in that space.
