Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Vol 2:21 Being a Missional People - Living in Openness to God

This past Sunday was the last Sunday of the Easter Season, which brought to conclusion the series the congregation I am serving has been focusing upon throughout the Easter season – Being a Community of the Resurrection. The focus of this series, taken from 1 Peter, was discovering the characteristics of being a community of the Resurrection in today’s world. We focused on being a community born into a living hope; a community that lives as aliens in society demonstrating a different reality of being human; a community who are living stones demonstrating the new human community that God is creating; a community that shares in the sufferings of Christ; a community that serves in the way of Christ in the world – doing and saying what we hear God saying and doing; and this past Sunday our focus was upon being a community that humbles itself before God and casts its anxiety on God because “it matters to God about us.” In response to this utter dependence upon God for living, God lifts us up to our rightful place, using the same language of Christ being exalted – our rightful place is to be the new humanity that God is creating, a community of people who live in communion with God in all that we are and do.

Being such a community is what it means to be missional. We are not a community that merely has a place for God, rather we are a community that is deeply rooted in communion with God, deeply rooted in God’s Story and Vision, deeply rooted in our attachment to Jesus Christ, deeply rooted in being led by the Spirit.

Missional is about being the people of God on purpose and with purpose. We live seeking, desiring, longing to participate with God in what God is up to in our world. What God is up to is not a side-interest of ours as a community centered in Jesus Christ, it is the primary motivation for our living and for our actions – we want to notice what God notices, we want to move where the Spirit of God is moving, we want to participate in the redemption and making whole of the world as God is, in short – we see every aspect of our lives being for the purpose of participating in God’s purposes.

For me that changes my whole outlook on what my life is about, what my life in my community is about.

This morning I was talking with someone who was struggling with doubts about God – doubts are good and I believe lead us to give up on our trying to figure God out on our own. Doubts bring us to a place where we have nothing to offer God leaving us open to experience God as God chooses to reveal himself to us. May we, as a people who seek to be missional, not put all kinds of things in the way of God becoming full in our lives, but may we be open to receive whatever God desires to pour out into our hearts, our minds, our lives by yielding our lives in a posture of openness to the Spirit of God.

I believe then we will see what God sees in very new ways.

1 comment:

  1. "...we see every aspect of our lives being for the purpose of participating in God’s purposes."

    Lately, whenever I read passages like the quote, I feel ever more strongly that "God's purposes" in a missional sense must be as much about bringing the message of the Gospel to a lost, desperate world as it is about seeking personal growth and maturity. Even if you expand the personal circle to include believers you regularly fellowship with, it doesn't have the same impact as really reaching out. The fields are white for the harvest and the signs of the last days are becoming stronger every year across many facets of the world.
    While we try to figure out how to get along with each other and walk with God, we make it seem like hard work and no fun. So much for the power of the Spirit if we don't do life any better than unbelievers - or professing atheists. We have got to SNAP OUT OF IT!

    ReplyDelete