By Ken Dillingham
Are We on Our Own in This?
When you think about living your life on mission do you sometimes feel like you need an innovative strategy? Do you think about joining some church program or outreach initiative? I believe that we can and should participate in the corporate efforts of the church. But the bulk of our life is lived outside of those involvements. Our greatest opportunity to make a missional impact is in the everyday stuff of life. You not only can do it, you were made for this.
Think about how Jesus redeemed you.
Did Jesus leave it up to you? To figure it out? To do it for yourself?
Did he give you a book of expectations and then say, “Okay, now if you live this out flawlessly then you can be saved?”
Obviously the answers to all of these questions is a resounding, NO!
Jesus did not leave us on our own to save ourselves.
What did he do?
He Paid the Price and Sent His Spirit
There were 3 simple things that happened:
(1) You believed. (2) You acted on your faith. (3) You received the transforming power of His Spirit in you.
God didn’t leave us to figure it out or work it out ourselves because He knew that it was not possible.
So, how about since you have been redeemed?
Do you think that now you are on your own in this? That God saved you and now it’s up to your own strength and power?
No! We still are in the process of those three simple steps. We are continuing to believe His truth and let it change what we care about. We are still acting on our faith. (We walk by faith and not by sight.) And we are continuing to be transformed by the power of the Spirit. (Both as we are led by Him and changed by Him)
So How About Living Your Life on Mission?
Do you believe that this is up to us? To do it? To figure it out?
Do the same principles apply as we do the Kingdom work of the mission?
God never tells us that he wants some result and then leaves us to figure out how to make it happen.
Remember that our whole life is part of a spiritual transformation. Between the “New Birth” and “New Body” we live a “New Life” empowered by God’s Spirit.
Think about Jesus’s promise of receiving the Holy Ghost – You shall receive power — and you shall be witnesses of me. (Acts 1:8).
So the power to be saved is also the power to live out our new lives on mission.
THE SIMPLICITY OF LIVING YOUR LIFE ON MISSION
What if you learned how to naturally engage with people so that you could know how to make the gospel good news to them?
What if you could identify the spiritually-hungry people that you encounter every day?
Your everyday life can be lived on mission. It is simply a part of who you are. You must believe that as you live your daily life you will interact with people who are being drawn by God’s Spirit. They are living in a broken world and face concerns and have fears. They are navigating life’s problems, feeling anxious and wrestling with questions. We all do. The difference between those who have hope and those who don’t is we know that Jesus has the answers to all these things. The problem is, we rarely engage with people on a level to be able to know how to bring them the hope we have. Remember, the gospel is “the good news” that Jesus is the hope to all of life’s dilemmas – both temporal and eternal.
One of the goals of The Dillingham Group is to help people realize how simple this can be. And that the answer is not a new improved invitation strategy. By helping people live their everyday lives on mission we can and will see the kind of multiplication movement that changes the world.
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