“And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age'” (Matthew 28:18-20).

JESUS’ FINAL INSTRUCTIONS TO HIS APOSTLES SHOULD BE OF MORE THAN PASSING INTEREST. If we wanted to know how Jesus viewed His own mission, we would need to look at the entire body of His teaching, of course, but His last words would be pertinent in a special way. What were the marching orders He gave to those whom He had selected to carry forward His work in the world?

“Disciple” is not a word we use much today, but it is a crucial word. The basic meaning is “pupil” or “learner,” but the extended meaning involves something deeper. A disciple is not merely under the instruction of a teacher; he or she is a follower of that person, one who emulates the life and character of the teacher. And that is what Jesus sought: not just students but disciples. His command to “make disciples” was a charge to proclaim the gospel to all who would listen and then to baptize those who sought the forgiveness of their sins. But while baptism was essential (there could be no discipleship without having “died with Christ”), baptism was just the beginning. Now forgiven and restored to God’s fellowship — and with the hope of heaven in their hearts — those baptized were to be taught “to observe all that I have commanded you.”

So the mission assigned to the apostles was disciple-making, and that could only be done through evangelism, the proclamation of the gospel itself. Whatever the apostles might have thought was more relevant, Jesus’ command never changed: make disciples.

We need to keep coming back to the central concern of Jesus. Yes, He helped people physically and emotionally, but His greater concern was always with their spiritual needs. “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). If we follow Jesus, our concern must be for the eternal welfare of people’s souls. So let’s not lose our focus. By God’s grace, let’s do what Jesus told His apostles: teach people how they can be with God when their broken lives in this world are done.

“The church has many tasks but only one mission” (Arthur Preston).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“But may the God of all grace, who called us to His eternal glory by Christ Jesus, after you have suffered a while, perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle you. To Him be the glory and the dominion forever and ever. Amen” (1 Peter 5:10,11).

AT SOME LEVEL OF OUR THINKING, WE KNOW WE SHOULD TRUST GOD. Whatever may happen, we understand that God can be counted on to help us get through our difficulties. But in practice, we find it hard not to worry. We become anxious about what may happen in the future, and we fear we may not make it to heaven. The long haul often looks very long indeed.

Yet God can be counted on, and we ought not to let any discouragement cause us to doubt that fact. Never having failed us before, God is the ultimately trustworthy source of help. “Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Hebrews 4:16).

But here is something important to ponder: it is God’s grace that we should put our confidence in. The God whom Peter said would “perfect, establish, strengthen, and settle” his brethren was not just a powerful or a glorious God, but “the God of all grace.” One of the reasons we become fearful is that we know we don’t deserve God’s help. But by definition, grace is unmerited favor, undeserved assistance, and that is what God’s help always is. Granted, God’s grace won’t help those who are actively and stubbornly refusing what they know of His will, but for those who are willing to take any step in His direction, they can be sure that He’ll help them take that step, whether they deserve to be helped or not.

We are rightfully thankful for God’s grace in forgiving our past sins, but grace looks forward as well as backward. The same God who graciously gave us a fresh start when we obeyed the gospel will help us in whatever way we need His help from that point forward. Yes, the way seems long and the obstacles seem fearful, but God will not begin a work in us and not finish what He has started (Philippians 1:6). He will see us through. That is precisely what grace means, and that ought to be the center and support of our confidence. Our salvation is nearer than when we first believed, and by His grace, we can make it the rest of the way.

Thru many dangers, toils, and snares I have already come;
‘Twas grace that bro’t me safe thus far, and grace will lead me home.
(John Newton)

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Devotion is not a thing that passes, that comes and goes, as it were, but it is something habitual, fixed, permanent that extends over every instant of life and regulates all our conduct” (Douglas V. Steele).

DEVOTION AND LOVE ARE CLOSELY RELATED, BUT DEVOTION ADDS AN IMPORTANT ELEMENT THAT’S NOT ALWAYS FOUND IN LOVE. Both love and devotion have to do with attraction and attachment, but in contrast to love, devotion tends to be more selfless and more settled. In situations where love might fluctuate, based on whether it was getting what it wanted, devotion would remain steady. As Douglas V. Steele says, it’s “something habitual, fixed, permanent.”

The joy of dedication. Giving oneself to a particular end, not just in affection but in dedication, is one of the most intensely joyful experiences open to us. But when was the last time you pledged yourself to pay close and loyal attention to some honorable “devotion”?

The joy of fidelity. Hardly less than the happiness that comes from dedication is that which comes from fidelity or faithfulness. If you haven’t tried it lately, try devoting yourself to something with steadfastness and allegiance. Be someone somebody else can count on.

One of the saddest things in life is to see people who’ve never learned the joy of being devoted to something outside of themselves. Yet our culture is sometimes so self-centered we find ourselves having to fight that tendency. We become so engrossed in getting the world to operate as we want it to that we pay less and less heed to the larger concerns of life. So we need to be warned. As George MacDonald said, “There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.”

But even when we do practice a little devotion, there is another tendency we have nowadays, and that is to devote ourselves more to ideas and abstractions than to real, flesh-and-blood people. There is nothing wrong with being devoted to a worthy cause, of course, but it takes more character, and it should be a higher priority, to be devoted to some actual persons, whether many or few. Causes can surely be helped by our devotion, but people can be literally transformed!

“There is a difference between devotion to principles and devotion to a person” (Oswald Chambers).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

Whom have I in heaven but You?
And there is none upon earth that I desire besides You.
My flesh and my heart fail;
But God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.
(Psalm 73:25,26)

WHEN WE LOOK AT THE MATTER HONESTLY, WE CAN SEE THAT EVERYTHING COMES DOWN TO ONE SIMPLE TRUTH. The time comes when every other reality drops away and we’re confronted with the stark simplicity of this fact: we have no one but God, and because of our sin, we are cut off even from Him. This is a truth each one of us must deal with sooner or later. We may or may not deal wisely with it, but deal with it we must. God is waiting for us to do so. True religion has a chance to arise in our hearts when, as solitary beings, we confess how empty we are without God.

Most of us spend our lives leaning on props. We instinctively sense the need for “relationship” to other beings, but we foolishly build our relationships on the shifting sands of false principles. Feeling the urge to “do” something, we throw ourselves into a fury of daily activity. And driven to “acquire,” we heap up for ourselves a horde of assets and possessions. Our relationships, our activities, and our possessions — these become our props. And despite their undependability, they become the sum and substance of our lives. After a while, we can hardly see how totally we’ve come to lean on these things. We’re hiding from the truth, of course, but as long as our props are in place, we don’t worry about our alienation. Deep down, our hearts are a lonely void, but we’re simply too busy to think about it very much.

But what do we do when all the props are taken away? What do we do when we stand alone, nakedly individual before our God, with every other choice stripped away from us except our choice concerning God Himself? Do we choose to turn even more selfishly inward, or do we desire God and turn penitently upward? When the laughter has died down, the party is over, and all the guests have gone home, a human being finally has no other choice. The brutal fact is that we are cut off from everything we were ever meant to be connected to. And what we choose to do about that fact makes all the difference.

“Religion is what the individual does with his solitariness” (Alfred North Whitehead).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“For the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:12,13).

MOTIVES MAKE A DIFFERENCE, DO THEY NOT? When we fail to use good judgment, we hope people will see that we “meant well.” But there is another side to this. Actions that are good, at least in their outward appearance, may be contaminated by impure motives. If everybody could see what God sees in our hearts, they would often have to reevaluate even the best of our deeds.

So the question I must always ask is not only What did I do? but Why did I do it? The outward deed is certainly important (2 Corinthians 5:10), but the inward motive is even more so (Acts 8:20,21). God, of course, is the only one who knows our motives completely. We are “naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account.” He knows not only our words and deeds, but He knows “the thoughts and intentions of the heart.”

All of this means that when we’re considering the problem of sin, we need to see how deep it really goes. (And please understand, I’m talking about our own sinfulness, not that of other people.) Sin strikes deeper than we admit. If all that had gone wrong was that our behavior had become dysfunctional, that problem would be relatively easy to fix. But the problem is that our hearts have become rebellious. Selfishness taints nearly everything we do, sometimes so subtly that we don’t even see it ourselves.

And if the problem is this deep, we should expect the remedy to be radical. Bringing our innermost hearts back to a position of utter unselfishness, God will have to do some serious work. The battle to “take every thought captive to obey Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:5) will take more than a few days. And the process will not be painless.

It may be that our most pressing need is for greater self-honesty — and deeper repentance. The human heart is “deceitful above all things” (Jeremiah 17:9). So when we find ourselves doing something for multiple reasons, do we have the honesty to ask, “Deep, deep down, what was the real reason why I did that?”

“Man sees your actions, but God your motives” (Thomas à Kempis).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

Better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting,
For that is the end of all men; and the living will take it to heart.
(Ecclesiastes 7:2)

LOSE IS TO LEARN. Rarely do we part with anything valuable without growing in wisdom. Yet the experience of loss is one we usually resist and resent. If it’s a choice between gaining and losing, we’d much rather be gaining. As for any losing we might have to do, we hope to defer that as long as we can. Nevertheless it’s true: we learn more from losing things than we do from gaining them. So Solomon said that it’s better to go to the “house of mourning” than the “house of feasting.” That will be our perspective during times of loss if our priorities are what they ought to be.

We humans are both “acquisitive” and “possessive” creatures, aren’t we? We love to acquire — to get and to gain — and having acquired at least some of what we want in this world, we feel a sense of entitlement to it: This is mine. I possess it. It would not be good for this ever to be taken away from me. We are loathe to part with anything we have acquired, whether our money, our possessions, our health, our pleasures, our privileges, or our relationships.

Yet in a “temporal” world, there is nothing that is not temporary. Do you understand what that means? It means there is nothing that is yours to keep. Whatever you have, you are going to have to let go of it — except God. And I am not talking about what happens at death. If you live very long, you’re going to part with most of what you enjoy before you die. And when the things you have cherished are taken away from you, one by one, you will grow in wisdom. You will learn more from losing things than you ever learned by gaining them. And what you will learn is that God is all you have to have. He is the only thing you can’t do without.

If nothing ever changed and we were allowed to keep our situations and our relationships as long as we wanted, we’d soon forget about God. Our tendency is to try to “possess” the creation and pay little attention to the Creator. But knowing our nature, God lets us enjoy our boons and benefits for a while — and then takes them away from us. With every loss, He is teaching us to fix our hearts on Him. So let me ask you: looking at life like that, is losing what you love in this world good or bad? You be the judge.

“Sometimes the best gain is to lose” (George Herbert).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds, and watch their renewal of life — this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do” (Charles Dudley Warner).

THERE IS AN ELEMENTAL, AGE-OLD JOY THAT COMES TO US IN THE ACT OF PLANTING. No matter how urbanized our culture becomes, it’s not likely we’ll ever outgrow the pleasures that were a part of our ancestors’ agricultural way of life. Getting our hands into the soil, planting seeds, watering them, and nurturing the greenery as it begins to grow, these are joys that have a rich heritage in our hearts. Planting is almost pure happiness, and we need to do more of it.

Planting is an act of faith and trust if ever there was one. No one would ever plant anything if he or she weren’t willing to take a risk. Planting is based on the confidence that there are things we can do today that will make a difference for good tomorrow, and anytime we plant a seed, we make a statement about the future: we may not know many things about it, but we’ve chosen to point ourselves in that direction, and we believe the future’s worth making an investment in.

By far the best planting we ever do, however, is not agricultural but personal. When we make new beginnings with other people, either by entering into new relationships or doing things that reinvigorate old ones, we are “planting” in the very highest sense. And we should enjoy this to the extent that it becomes an observable part of our character and conduct. We should want to be people who’re known to do a lot more planting than we do uprooting.

The exciting thing is that it’s never too late to do some planting. We may have done little of it in the past. We may even have blighted things that were planted by someone else. But the more life has gone badly for us in the past, the more it’s “planting time” right now.

The results that can come from planting good things in our relationships with others are truly amazing. A bountiful harvest can come from even modest plantings, if the seeds are sown in love. The soil doesn’t even have to appear particularly promising. We just have to believe that the timeless laws of growth have not yet been repealed.

“Plant a word of love heart-deep in a person’s life. Nurture it with a smile and a prayer, and watch what happens” (Max Lucado).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

This I know, that in my flesh I shall see God,
Whom I shall see for myself,
And my eyes shall behold, and not another.
How my heart yearns within me!
(Job 19:26,27)

SIN SEPARATES US FROM ALL WE WERE MEANT TO LOVE, AND IN OUR SEPARATENESS WE LONG FOR WHAT WE’VE LOST. Alienated from God, from other people, and even from the natural world around us, we live within the walls of a lonely prison. We faintly “remember” walking in the garden with our God, Friend with friend — and we vaguely dream of doing that again.

Satan tempted us to believe that self-rule was a wise choice. He said it would lead to a better life than God’s law would allow. But Satan lied, and things didn’t work out as he said they would. We are the victims of a cruel hoax, a lie concerning God’s law. That law does not interfere with anything that could accurately be called life. To the contrary, it’s the very thing that would have made real life possible! It was meant to connect us to God and our fellow creatures in ways that would truly fill us up and provide all we were designed to enjoy. When we rebelled against God’s law, we disconnected ourselves from the possibility of any real relationship. And in doing so, we said good-bye to every good thing that comes from real relationship.

So for now, even the best of our relationships fall short and we can only imagine what it would be like to be perfectly related to everyone around us. Even if we allow Christ to bring us into a redeemed earthly relationship with God, our connections in this world will only be a foretaste of the fellowship that waits for us later. Yet this hope is the single thing in life most worthy of our pursuit, no matter what lesser things we have to let go of. Hell will be a writhing mass of lonely beings, utterly cut off by their own choice from anything outside of themselves. None of us really want that, and yet we drift toward that destiny by refusing to let God lead us out of our isolation and into real relationship. When we decide what, if anything, to do about our loneliness, we are deciding between life and death.

“The deepest need of man is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness” (Erich Fromm).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Now the Lord had said to Abram: ‘Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you'” (Genesis 12:1).

GOD’S COMMAND FOR ABRAM TO LEAVE THE FAMILIARITY OF HIS HOMELAND WAS “DISTURBING” IN THE VERY BEST SENSE OF THAT WORD. It is not a term that has very positive connotations, perhaps, but in regard to the more important side of life, events that are disturbing are often those that work to our greatest advantage.

Difficulty. No doubt it would have been easier for Abram to stay where he was than to make the long, dangerous trek to a strange country. From nearly any angle you look at it, it was a hard thing that God asked Abram to do. But Abram was not primarily concerned about ease, and years later, he was a better man for having endured the hardships God brought into his life.

Disruption. We don’t know what plans Abram may have had for his life, but if he had any, the Lord’s call to leave home surely disrupted them. To disrupt is to “throw into confusion or disorder,” and it’s an unwelcome concept for those of us who thrive on order and predictability. But the Lord knows we need many other things more than we need to know what’s going to happen next.

Disturbance. In my dictionary, “disturb” is only two pages over from “disrupt.” It means to “break up or destroy the tranquility or settled state of.” God’s plans for Abram would have done that for him, to say the very least. Yet in the long run, Abram’s great disturbance helped bring about his salvation — and ours. When God disturbed Abram’s life, it was an act of sheer grace.

With too much tranquility in our own lives, we tend to forget God. Yes, we may continue to study our Bibles and attend worship services, but as long as our lives are pleasantly predictable, our need for God becomes a nice religious theory rather than a desperately felt desire. With no real grief or fear to keep us awake, we “doze off,” spiritually speaking. For our own good, then, we need to get out of our ruts and go on some fearful adventures, the kind that require real faith. If we don’t, God may have to disturb our comfort. He may have to say, “Get out of your country . . .”

“You know no disturbing voice? God never points out for you a pathway altogether different from the one you had planned? Then, my brother, you are living still in the land of slavery, in the land of darkness” (G. Campbell Morgan).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com

     

“Thus says the Lord: ‘Will they fall and not rise? Will one turn away and not return?'” (Jeremiah 8:4).

ONE OF THE WONDROUS ASPECTS OF GOD’S CHARACTER IS THE LOVE WITH WHICH HE WAITS FOR US TO TURN BACK TO HIM. Only He could have made it possible for us to return, of course, but since He has done so, a failure to return is contrary to all wisdom, and even to common sense. Listen to the words with which God implored Judah in Jeremiah’s day: “People of Jerusalem, when you stumble and fall, you get back up, and if you take a wrong road, you turn around and go back. So why do you refuse to come back to me? Why do you hold so tightly to your false gods?” (Jeremiah 8:4,5 Contemporary English Version).

The God who waits for our return is a God who has promised us forgiveness. We can’t fathom the value of what He had to sacrifice to make this forgiveness available, but we can stand in awe of the sacrifice and its underlying love. More than that, we can determine that our gratitude will be shown in our deeds. We can turn back to God, grounding all our hopes in the goodness of His character and living out the balance of our days in commitment to His truth. However foolishly we have forsaken Him, God remains the God He has always been. Long ago He revealed Himself to Moses as “the Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin . . .” (Exodus 34:6,7). “To the Lord our God belong mercy and forgiveness, though we have rebelled against Him” (Daniel 9:9).

But the God who waits for our return is also a God who has promised us rest, and rest is surely what we need. Although we were designed for joy, most of us have worn ourselves out in counterfeit pleasures and substitute satisfactions. Hardly even knowing what we were looking for, we’ve been looking for joy in all the wrong places, and with truly tragic results. Our foolishness has worn us out. But God has made possible our return to Him, and it’s only in such a return that the prospect of real joy can spring to life. Here is where our homesick hearts should come to rest. Here, at last, is where we find a perfect Friend.

“There can be no happiness equal to the joy of finding a heart that understands” (Victor Robinsoll).

Gary Henry – WordPoints.com + AreYouaChristian.com