Just suppose you wanted to make something of your life… Suppose you wanted to make a significant difference in the lives of other people… Suppose you wanted to impact at least one specific community, one neighborhood… Suppose you had the belief that people coming to faith in Jesus Christ would actually affect their eternal destiny and that their faith in and of itself could change their present and future ability to deal with troubles in this life…
Suppose you were willing to bring about this impact, this difference, over a long faithfulness, that you would be willing to be patient, tenacious, and gentle with people but impatient and irritated at poverty, injustice, and the damage of sin… Suppose you were willing to live among these people, and not just live in that place but to live before them with all your own struggles, fears, and needs, along with your faith… Suppose you were willing to live as their servant, to use your knowledge of God and His Word to teach them, through preaching, example and instruction, constantly pointing them to Christ while trying to be self-effacing and losing your identity (and thus finding it) in Christ…
Suppose you were willing to live as a pastor without being perfect at it, and willing to suffer the cost of being misunderstood or being falsely accused. Suppose you were willing to trust God for and with your money, for and with your marriage, for and with your children, for and with your “name,” your success, with the reality of your aging, your physical limitations, with the possibility of obscurity, with your culture…
Suppose you were willing to be abandoned to God, to live a life of prayer, repentance, study, and love….Suppose you were willing to gather a people, to create a new social reality in one geographic place, and were willing to live in the midst of the social and political reality of raising up new leaders, listening to them, learning from them, and being displaced by them…
Suppose you were willing to be abandoned to God, to live a life of prayer, repentance, study, and love….Suppose you were willing to gather a people, to create a new social reality in one geographic place, and were willing to live in the midst of the social and political reality of raising up new leaders, listening to them, learning from them, and being displaced by them…
Do you think it could happen? Do you think it would actually make a difference? Do you think you could do it with joy, do you think you could do it without self-righteousness? Well, could you do it, would you do it? Will you do it? In addition, not necessarily alternatively, will you pray that someone will do it, that God would send someone to do it?
We are looking for life-long and lifetime heroes in hard, normal, real life places. We are looking for church planters and pastors, looking for men who are full of God, with an insatiable hunger for more of Jesus, and more of His Word. We are looking for those whom God is sending, whose ambition is being fully realized in saying “yes Lord, yes to your will!” Normal human spaces are waiting for real, godly men, to take their places within them.
God’s “yes” line is always open, angels are standing by.