Living Sent PART III

by Landon Reesor

Now, against the backdrop of the hatred the world has for the Church, pause for a second and remember that God is our Father.  And I can tell you as a father that if one of my children was in an environment where I knew that they were hated and being persecuted, I would do one of two things.  I would either try to resolve the conflict quickly or I would just remove my child from that environment immediately.  And part of me assumes that God, as a gracious Father, would do the same thing for us as His spiritual children.  But in His greater wisdom and because of His mission, He doesn’t.  In fact, Jesus doesn’t pray that God would take us out of the world that hates us.  He prays the exact opposite!  He prays that God would NOT remove us.

Instead, He asks the Father to do two things …

1 – He asks the Father to protect us while we’re in the world

2 – He asks the Father to continue to change us and prepare us to be used specifically for Him

And then He says, “Just as You sent me into the world, so I have sent them”.  Wow.  Think about that for  a minute.  Let that sink in.  In the same way that Christ was given a mission that God had established for Him long before the creation of the world, we have a mission.  Just as He was sent into the world to show a radical love and share a life-changing story, so we have been sent into that same world with the opportunity to display that same love and communicate that same story.  We are extensions of Christ.  We are His Body.  We are the physical expression of Jesus on this planet and we have inherited the same cause He lived, died, and was resurrected for … the redemption of the nations.

And yet the only way for us to accomplish that is to live “sent”, to recognize this commission we’ve been given, and to live everyday with this missional mentality...

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