I am an alien. I am a wanderer. This is not my forever home. Yet, here I am. This is where I live. These are my neighbors. This life on earth is where I am called. The people around me are my calling. I am a steward of my job, money, family, and belongings as a means to provide for my calling. I am building toward a future yet to be fulfilled that promises an eternal life of justice, peace, love, glory, joy, and union with my creator and eternal family.
Until we know who we truly are and what our place is in Kingdom language, we will struggle to know how to work toward living out God’s kingdom here on earth. The moment we say ‘yes’ to Christ, we lay claim to a promise that we are no longer bound by the ways of earth and sin. We have new freedom through a covenant relationship that means our success and identity are also defined by different terms. Our baptism into God’s family is like taking a new job role. The job asks everything of us, tries our patience, often feels overwhelmingly difficult, involves getting nitty-gritty with others, often makes us uncomfortable, and truthfully, causes us to wonder if anything we do makes a difference. But this job is exactly the work that needs to be done. It is unlike any other work being accomplished, and in light of the concerns we’re facing across the globe and in our neighborhoods I’ve been wondering a great deal over what it means to live out the gospel in ways that will make a difference, ease fears, and bring Kingdom restoration.
A CALL TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Like many of us, my mind is consumed with how to respond to the global repercussions of Covid-19, racism, political tensions, and divisiveness that is breeding anger, hate, fear, and hard-heartedness among all humanity. The messages from news, our communities, and social media cause my heart to sink, but when I engage with people personally what I really hear is that something needs to be done, our world needs change. Most of us agree upon change, but we don’t all see change through the same lens, and the honest truth is that most of us are confused about how to respond to the rising global and local issues. Most of us feel overwhelmed, afraid, and unsure about the best way to bring healthy change.
You may think me naive, but I believe within the global Church there is a remnant, those who unreservedly embrace following Christ and his commands, who sincerely desire to live for gospel change—the reconciliation of creation. And I believe that it is only through Christ that we will be able to realize lasting transformation in our present world. These sentiments do not exist in every place or heart, and I solely speak as one person in the Church family knowing not everyone will agree, but I have hope because I see this remnant of Christ-followers faithfully taking up the call of Christ and standing in the gaps of brokenness and wrong-doing in our world in order to make way for healing, redemption, and reconciliation so that God’s Kingdom may be made known now.
A COMMUNAL CALL
As followers of Christ, when we join arms in living out the gospel we can enact global change. God does not discriminate, he is not bound viruses, color, borders, death, or our past, so when he gathers his children he’s building a new kind of world. He’s building a Kingdom family that is unique in that it is multi-cultural, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic, and able to be unified by one love, spiritual language, Kingdom-culture, and call. We become living models of hope that represent true global restoration. Our united redemption is a gift of grace enabling us to strive for a new kind of global community called to reflect compassion with empathy, restore humanity’s dignity as God’s created image-bearers, and the reconciliation of all people to God and each other. However, this job is not without challenges. It is demanding and strips us of all our hidden falseness destroying the kingdom of self in order to instate the Kingdom of God. Whether we accept to participate in the call or not, we will daily face a world in need of change. God redeemed us to live as a global Church family. Together, unified by Christ, we are his way of orchestrating change in our world, we become the way of doing something, but it won’t be on our terms.
WHAT THE CALLING IS NOT
Living into our call will look different for each of us because we live and serve in different places and among different people, so I can’t tell you what to do, but I have considered what this job is not, and sometimes knowing what it is not can help us to discern what we ought to do.
INDIVIDUALLY MINDED
Adoption by God is an invitation to join a family full of diversity, yet joined in union with God and his purposes. In the West, we forget that we are not only accountable to God, but to our brothers and sisters in Christ. How we live and act reflects upon each of us as a whole. Salvation is not for us alone and our relationship is not just about myself and God, it is within God’s community that we are strengthened by faith and love and able to invite others into fellowship. Embracing our communal elements of faith reflect God’s Kingdom here and now in practical ways. Individualism is not the way of Christ. As people of grace, who’ve experienced salvation, we should know the depths of our underserved fellowship at his table, so, who are we to withhold. A part of our mindset must be transformed to see others from all classes, races, groups, nations, and cultures as equal beneficiaries to the Kingdom. How we treat and live among our diverse family is what we reflect to the world around. It will either bring the redemptive change God longs for or divide the Church and look like the rest of the world; unable to find common ground. We must remember, our commonality is found at the cross and it unites us for a united purpose, it is our greatest assest.
FLASHY
Christ’s life should remind us that he did not enter the world with pomp and circumstance. His Kingdom, though powerful, is not forceful, wealthy, or elitist. God’s remnant living out the gospel is more like a grass-roots movement. As he humbly enters our lives, peacefully invites us to be with him, and graciously loves us, we too should live like this among our neighbors. Our family spans the globe and we’ve each been placed on a plot of land that deserves God’s tending. As his ambassador, we are more like farmers than diplomats. Farming and tending take time, patience, long-suffering and great attention. If our aim is to be loud and flashy in order to be heard, then we will likely misplant the seeds or plant in insufficient soil because we aren’t listening. Often we rush a crop that inturn yields little because we were in a hurry or worse we grow nothing but self-focused toil. God doesn’t push agendas and he hasn’t left all the work up to us. Christ leads us by example and shows us how to serve with genuine relational care. Reconciliation among creation means attending, noticing, listening, and engaging deeply with others in an intimate way. Putting aside the ‘see me, notice me’ mentality opens us up to living our call in a way that puts others first and strives toward reclaiming dignity and healing for all people.
PRIDEFUL
Jobs can easily become our identity. We easily get wrapped up in thinking we are what we do or how successful we become (a.k.a wealthy/comfortable). This happens just as easily when we believe the full responsibility of saving souls, building the Church, or establishing justice, equality, healing, and peace is up to our efforts alone. This is the way the world measures success. When Kingdom work revolves around us and our said accomplishments that’s when pride takes grip. We bear God’s name, we represent God’s Church, we live God’s heart in outward expressions, we inherit the Kingdom, but God builds his Kingdom. We simply show the world how his love has transformed us, live humbly like Christ by example and with care, and surrender to God’s intentions so that the transformation in our lives spreads in the places we go and in the lives of the people we meet. God’s handiwork speaks for itself when we live a surrendered, obedient and humbled life before God. As humble servants of the Kingdom, our identity is not bound by what we do for Christ, but how we are loved by Christ, which in turn, compels us to love others in the same way and opens their path to the cross.
INSTANTLY GRATIFYING
Considering mending all that seems wrong in the world easily feels like an insurmountable task to overcome. Some days it feels easier to isolate myself from life and people, ignore reality and hope it will one day go away; we’ve all been there, but that is just a lie Satan desires us to believe in order to give up what is holy and pleasing to the Lord. Our reward in Christ often seems hidden, which reminds me of Jesus’ parables on the Kingdom in Matthew 13. The Kingdom is difficult to sow, it is a precious hidden treasure, bursts forth from a tiny seed, grows among the weeds, and is often ignored or missed by our poor sight and hearing, yet there it has been all along, growing and multiplying until the time of total revelation. The reward is not immediate gratification as we have grown accustomed to, it is a long game leaning heavily on our faith that God’s promises are true, lasting, and always fulfilled. And if we take the time to look out into our world, we will see our brothers and sisters across the globe in the recesses loving in hard places, mending broken hearts, sacrificing comfort for those in suffering, setting the captives free, caring for the prisoner, seeking racial reconciliation through repentance and forgiveness, feeding the hungry, healing the sick, giving of themselves without thought of self or reward to God and others for the reconciliation of all creation to the Creator so that we may all experience love, peace, justice, and wholeness in our present place of calling for generations to come.
We can do something. Together we have a call to fulfill.
Who we see ourselves to be, and how we view our purpose as Christians makes a difference in how we will respond to the needs of our world. We can not sit back and wait for Jesus to return, he’s already given us the task of reconciling what is broken to himself in order to make it right on earth. We do have hope, there is a way to change. I’d like to know where you find yourself responding to Covid-19, travel bans, political tensions, racism, and overall creation care, so please leave a comment below.
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