As the Father Sent

Much of what you will read here is rooted in a very personal interaction I have had with the Holy Spirit. At one point in my life He confronted me with a quotation from Jesus. Jesus said:

Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.

The Holy Spirit challenged me with the understanding that this statement by Jesus was personally applicable to me. That set me off on an adventure to explore what it means to be sent like Jesus was sent.

At moments this adventure was terrifying. The discovery that virtually everything I had learned about church and religion was wrong was very distressing. What I thought I knew was based in the false idea that I had to do something to please God. To find out this was a lie totally upset my thought processes. At other times this adventure was very satisfying. When I discovered the Father loves me and will never give up on me, that was “Oh WOW!” awesome. When I discovered that Jesus never viewed women as second class citizens in His Kingdom a whole new realm of healthy relationships was opened to me.

So, I was encouraged to explore how Jesus was sent so that I might know how I was sent. Some aspects of this were so very obvious I wondered how I could have missed them all those years. Like Jesus saying He was not sent into the world to judge the world but that through him the world might be saved (John 3).  It was there in the book in black and white. So obvious, and yet my experience with the church had been to watch people being judged and made to feel guilty so that they would conform to the group standards. Most of my experience with the community of believers was exactly the opposite of what Jesus said. It was a stream of judgments with no practical help to save people from the continuing patterns of destruction in their lives. A stream of noise answering questions no one was asking. But a systematic avoidance of dealing with the real questions asked every day by troubled people.

I was forced to ask questions for which no one I knew had practical answers. For example: What does it mean if we are sent into the world as “the Word of God become flesh to dwell among men?” How does life look if we are coming to our own people but they do not receive us? I know I am not the Messiah, but what does it mean for me to be sent so that my part of the world might be saved?

Then one day near the turn of the century I was looking at Jesus’ instruction that we were to make disciples from every ethnic group. I began to compare all the religious stuff I had learned with the way Jesus operated. He did not make disciples by getting people to join an organization. He did not even form an organization. He did not make disciples by standing up front and inviting people to come forward to make a decision. Much of the time He was standing up front he intentionally spoke in parables so that most people would not understand Him. Jesus’ way of making disciples was quite different from anything I had seen in the institutional church system where I grew up.  Jesus accepted a few men who had been entrusted to him by the Father. He walked with them. He talked with them. He let them see every detail of how He lived his life. He answered their questions and spoke plainly to them. They chose to follow Him and He befriended them. They became closer than family to Him. He lived before them as an example of God the Father to them. He loved them deeply without regard to whether they loved Him or betrayed Him, acted without guile or acted like Satan. He loved them selflessly. He alone is our best model of a disciple maker.

And He instructed us to continue His example. He commissioned us. Not to build churches. Not to build congregations. Not to make converts. He commissioned us to follow His example by serving men and making them our disciples.

His, thus Yours,

Stuart