God Alone Is In Control

Vaneetha Rendall post:  Is My Suffering Meaningless?

A few weeks ago, I met with a friend who believes that while God draws near to us in our trials, people often suffer in ways that God never intended. God reacts to our suffering but never causes it.

To her, the Calvinist view that God has ordained all our suffering is inhumane. She sees it as completely against God’s loving character — hurtful at best, and vindictive at worst. Personally, I couldn’t disagree more.

Reformed theology has offered me life-giving hope in the wake of unspeakable sorrow. I understand it sounds cruel to say that God willed my infant son’s death. But believing that my son died against God’s will is far worse. That would mean that God is not in control, evil can ultimately win, and my future is uncertain. Moreover, it would mean that my son’s death was random. Meaningless. Without purpose.

I honestly cannot imagine a more depressing scenario. As someone who has endured adversity, my greatest comfort is knowing that God is sovereign. He has ordained all of my trials, and therefore, my suffering has purpose.

The Last Word

Purpose.

That one word changes everything. It comforts me when pain envelops me and darkness is my closest friend. God does not delight in my suffering, but weeps with me as he did in John 11. But his tears are not all that he gives me. He gives me hope and assurance that my suffering is not in vain. Just as Jesus cried with Mary before he raised Lazarus, the Lord cries with me, knowing he will redeem my suffering.

As Joni Eareckson Tada says, “Every sorrow we taste will one day prove to be the best possible thing that could have happened to us. We will thank God endlessly in heaven for the trials that he sent us here.”

It is comforting to know that everything God sends is the best possible thing for me. Nothing can derail his plan. No sin, no accident, no affliction. Satan does not have the last word on my suffering. God does. He has decreed it all and will use it all. As we see in the book of Job, God is not reacting to Satan’s agenda — God alone is in control of all things.

God’s Good Hand

This view of suffering is what led me to Christ. I was born in India and contracted polio at three months old. I endured numerous operations and was tormented throughout grade school for my disability, leaving me angry and bitter at God, doubting his very existence. I couldn’t understand how a loving God could let this happen.

But at age 16, I opened the Bible to John 9, where the disciples were wondering whose sin caused the blind man’s condition. Jesus explained that his blindness was unrelated to sin. His affliction was given so that “the works of God might be displayed in his life.”

That passage undid me. Just as God had a purpose in the blind man’s suffering, God showed me there was a purpose to my suffering too. Both were for the glory of God. My bitterness dissolved when I realized that the God of the universe had chosen me to display his glory.

While I saw God’s purpose in my contracting polio, I didn’t believe all of my trials were sent by him. Some ordeals felt like they came from Satan. But decades later I heard a sermon by John Piper which radically reoriented my understanding of God’s hand in our affliction.

He quoted Charles Spurgeon who struggled with depression all of his life and died of gout and Bright’s disease at age 57. Spurgeon said, “It would be a very sharp and trying experience to me to think that I have an affliction which God never sent me, that the bitter cup was never filled by his hand, that my trials were never measured out by him, nor sent to me by his arrangement of their weight and quantity.”

Yours Too

God weighs every minute detail of my suffering. Not a hair falls from my head apart from his will. That assurance sustained me as I weathered the onset of post-polio syndrome and my husband’s abandonment. While I was brokenhearted at both, I knew that God would ultimately use them for my good and his glory.

I will never know all that God is doing in my trials, but I have seen that he has refined my character, drawn me closer to him, and enabled me to minister to others through my afflictions. And it is my earnest prayer that through my suffering, the works of God are being displayed in my life.

My greatest joy is that my suffering has purpose. Yours does as well. To God be the glory.

Shape Our Hearts

Prayer: Lord, You are a great king, abounding in humility and love. When you launched your campaign and secured its victory, you did what no modern-day political figure would ever choose to do--you introduced yourself with humility and laid down your life as an offering. We pray, therefore, that you would shape our hearts to love the gospel message of mercy, meekness, and sacrifice. Help us live out this truth no matter how counterintuitive and difficult it may be. Amen.

843 Acres: If You Want to Win a Campaign

Gospel at the Heart of our Proclamation

Trevin Wax post: The Great Commission Means Sharing Christ's Story, Not Yours 

Evangelicals love a good story. We’re all about “sharing our testimonies” and “telling our stories” and recounting our “spiritual journey.”

This emphasis on personal experience is one of evangelicalism’s strengths. We understand conversion as more than mere assent to Christianity’s teaching and more than mere observance of rites and rituals associated with the church. It’s no wonder that sharing our stories is a main aspect of evangelical identity and evangelistic activity.

But there’s a subtle danger lurking here. Because of our emphasis on conversion stories and testimonies, we can unintentionally make people think that evangelism is the same thing as sharing your experience.

We interpret The Great Commission’s “Go make disciples” as “Go tell your story.” They are not the same thing.

Here’s why…

Jesus and the Great Commission

When most of us think of the “Great Commission,” we start with the word “go.” The gist of Christ’s command is that we are to go into all the world and make disciples of all nations, baptizing and teaching, right?

But Matthew’s version of the Commissioning scene doesn’t start with “go.” The commission itself is sandwiched between two statements related to Jesus Christ: the first concerns His authority, and the second concerns His empowering presence.

The flow of the passage goes like this:

• All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Jesus.
• Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations…
• Jesus promises to always be with His people.

Luke’s commissioning scene gets at this same truth in a different way. For Luke, the focus is on the gospel going out in Jesus’ name.

• The Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms point to Jesus, whose death and resurrection fulfills Old Testament prophecy.
• Witnesses will proclaim a message of repentance and forgiveness of sins.
• This message is proclaimed “in Jesus’ name” to all nations.

For Luke, the name of Jesus is the source of authority. In Acts, this element is not emphasized in the commissioning scene itself, but in the rest of the narrative, where the theme of Jesus’ name carrying power and authority becomes a major point of the story.

3 Elements of Genuine Christian Witness

Both Luke and Matthew infuse their commissioning scenes with christological truth. So, how did the apostles, under the authority of Jesus, witness to the truth? Notice three elements:

1. The events at the heart of the gospel are at the heart of their proclamation. The sermons in Acts reveal how the apostles walked their hearers through the story of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection.
2. They are witnesses to the character of Jesus in the way they pattern their ministry after his miracles and show his compassion to those in need.
3. They are witnesses to their own Christian experience. The Apostle Paul, for example, recounts his conversion experience on two occasions in Acts (22:6‒21 and 26:12‒23).

What About Now?

So what does this mean for us today?

1. The events of the gospel – Christ’s life, death, and resurrection – must be at the heart of our proclamation.
2. What we do should also witness to Christ as we follow His example.
3. Our conversion experiences should back up our gospel proclamation.

If we get these out of sync, we hinder our effectiveness in fulfilling the Great Commission.

For example, some Christians may focus so much on the second aspect (what we do) that they fail to verbally proclaim the gospel (what Christ has done).

Another example: some Christians focus so much on the third aspect (our conversion experience) that they fail to properly proclaim Christ’s life and work.

Let’s look at this second danger a little more closely.

Christ’s Work in History vs. Christ’s Work in Your Life

The meaning of the word “witnesses” in Luke 24 and Acts 1, as well as throughout the narrative of Acts, refers to those who witnessed the work of the Lord and spoke of it to others. The witness of the disciples was centered on Christ’s life and work, most clearly seen in his death and resurrection.

So, let’s take note: the focus of apostolic preaching in Acts is not on the conversion experiences of the disciples, but on the work of Christ that makes conversion necessary. For this reason, we should ensure that our testimony of Christ’s work focuses primarily on what Christ did in history, not merely what Christ has done in our life.

The Place for Personal Testimony

That said, there is a place for personal conversion testimonies. After all, Paul appealed to his experience when testifying to his uniqueness as an apostle. The Samaritan woman ran into town and told of her conversation with Jesus. The man born blind, after being healed by Jesus, went and told everyone what had happened to him.

Don’t hear me saying that we should stop giving personal testimonies! They are powerful.

We should work, however, to make sure these testimonies undergird and support the clear gospel message and don’t somehow replace it. What Jesus has done for me should always be connected to what Jesus has done, period.

What Happens When Personal Testimony Takes Over

Focusing primarily on our own experiences with Christ can unintentionally downplay the importance of the historic events upon which the Christian faith stands or falls.

An evangelist who speaks only of his personal experience with Jesus may be surprised to encounter others who speak just as genuinely of their personal experiences in Islam, Buddhism, or Hinduism. The initial desire to speak of what one has experienced personally may run into the rocks of multiculturalism, leading to a neutered presentation of the gospel that loses its basis in historical reality.

The role of personal experience in testifying to the work of Christ should be seen as a further evidence of the power of the gospel. It is not the gospel itself, but it testifies to its power.

To sum up: gospel presentations that include personal testimonies should take care to emphasize the gospel itself (the news of Christ’s death and resurrection), not merely our personal experiences of life transformation. A change of heart is a further demonstration of the gospel and should be used in personal evangelism, as long as the focus remains on Christ’s objective work on the cross.

Deeply Thankful

Jon Bloom post:  Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness

July 4th is the day we commemorate the Continental Congress’s declaration of independence from the nation of Great Britain. People still debate over whether or not Britain’s offenses warranted colonial secession and war. Regardless, it was a bold, very risky move for the signers of the Declaration.

Looking back over 238 years, with America now an affluent global superpower, it’s hard for Americans to get a sense for just how unlikely (humanly speaking) it was that the 13 United States of America defeated Great Britain in a war and survived as an independent nation. This might be a good summer to read 1776 by David McCullough.

Self-Evident Truths

What was it that drove our national founders to seek independence? What was the Big Idea behind the United States? I think it is captured in the first sentence of paragraph two of the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is among the greatest sentences ever written regarding what a civil government exists to preserve and protect. In the annals of history, it truly is a revolutionary statement: every human being has God-given rights to live, be free, and pursue their happiness.

So powerful is this statement that it has, over time and through blood, sweat, and tears, fueled (and is still fueling) the overcoming of various kinds of racial, gender, and economic injustices in the nation itself. May God grant that it helps fuel the overcoming of 41 years of legalized violation of the unalienable right to life of unborn men and women.

Where Did These Truths Come From?

We know that our democratic republican form of government has its origins in Athens and Rome and various other Western democratic experiments. But where did this vision for the dignity and freedom of all human beings come from? Jerusalem — by which I mean the Bible.

Yes, Greek philosophy was influential too. But the men who constructed the United States and crafted all of our founding documents and took such great personal risks (like committing capital treason) in order to launch a nation built on the foundations of these truths were indelibly shaped by the Bible, whether or not they personally believed its claims.

• Creator: It was the Bible that gave our founders their general consensus of Judeo-Christian monotheism (Deuteronomy 6:4).
• All Men: It was the Bible that gave them such a strong sense of the importance of the individual — every individual (Isaiah 45:23, Philippians 2:10).
• Life: It was the Bible that taught them the sacredness of human life (Leviticus 24:17, Psalm 139:13–16).
• Liberty: It was the Bible that ingrained in them deeply the emancipatory theme of “liberty for the captives” (Luke 4:18) that runs through the whole of redemptive history.
• Pursuit of Happiness: And it was the Bible that taught them that the ultimate pursuit of an individual’s life is to find joy (Psalm 16:11, Psalm 37:4,Psalm 73:25–26, Matthew 13:44, John 10:10, John 15:11, Philippians 1:21,Philippians 3:8).

Thank God for the United States of America

The United States of America is not the kingdom of God. Christians are citizens of a “better country, that is a heavenly one” (Hebrews 11:16). The Declaration of Independence and its self-evident truths is not the gospel of Jesus Christ. The socio-political freedoms we enjoy don’t set us free from the law of sin and death (Romans 8:2). If we sing, “I’m proud to be an American,” while invoking God’s blessing on the USA, we must remember that “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). God doesn’t like pride. And in view of some horrible national injustices and disgraces, we have cause to be humble.

But we should be deeply thankful to God for the United States, “for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God” (Romans 13:1). Even with its defects, sometimes tragic defects, we should never be so critical and cynical of our government that we lose sight of the historically unprecedented freedoms we enjoy, especially the freedom we have to worship according to our conscience.

I recently shared lunch with a Christian leader who lives in a country that is among the most difficult and dangerous in the world to be a Christian. What our brothers and sisters endure there is heartbreaking. Yes, God has allowed this governing authority to exist too for purposes we don’t understand, just like he allowed Nero’s oppressive and bloody regime when Paul wrote Romans 13. We must pray for our Christian family in hard countries and ask God to grant them some of the freedoms we enjoy and advocate for these freedoms wherever we can.

So today, as we remember the American Declaration of Independence, let us thank God for the miracle of a nation that holds dear the biblical values of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And let us who live here thank God — while keeping America’s injustices and disgraces in view — that he has allowed us to live under a system of government designed to preserve and protect these inalienable rights. Imperfect as it is, it is among the very best ever constructed by sinful, selfish, proud, power-hungry human beings.

Our Only Hope

Excerpt from Don Carson post

...

But now in Isaiah 64, the prophet utters one of the most wrenching pleas found in Holy Scripture: “Oh, that you would rend the heavens and come down, that the mountains would tremble before you!” (Isa. 64:1). That is the only hope we have: we cannot save ourselves. Nothing of our resolutions and gimmicks and religion will suffice. God himself must rend the heavens and come down. Isaiah is not denying God’s immanence; rather, he is saying that God must actively intervene on our behalf to save us, demonstrating his power once again, or we are lost.

Three other elements of Isaiah’s intercession must not be missed. First, no one recognizes more clearly than Isaiah that the God to whom he is appealing is also the Judge whom we have offended. “But when we continued to sin … you were angry. How then can we be saved?” (Isa. 64:5), he asks. That is the heart of the dilemma—and the hope. Second, not only does Isaiah understand that sin separates us from God, he also identifies himself completely with his sinful people: “All of us have become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous acts are like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6). The greatest intercessors have always recognized that far more connects them with the common lot of sinners than what distinguishes them—and in any case they do not hesitate to plead with God on behalf of those who will not plead for themselves. Third, Isaiah deeply understands that if God rescues us, he must do so out of grace, out of mercy, out of pity—not because we have any claim on him. That accounts for the moving tone of Isaiah 64:8-12.

When have we last prayed with such insight and passion?

Joshua 4; Psalms 129-131; Isaiah 64; Matthew 12 is a post from: For the Love of God

Before All That We Need Grace

Emily T. Wierenga post:  To the Evangelical Church:  From a Recovering Progressive

There I was, dressed in my corduroy slacks and a mushroom cut wondering why it hurt so much to be 4 years old.

I was raised in a good Christian home.

I was a polite pastor’s kid.

We had the right Serenity Prayer wall hangings. We said grace at every meal and went to church every Sunday and flossed and said please and thank you.

I wasn’t allowed to play with Barbie dolls or look at fashion magazines. I was given a purity ring and books to read by Dr. James Dobson.

There wasn’t a lot of room for error.

But that was the problem.

Because all we do, when we keep our children in bubbles, is raise nice little heathens.

Dad was the minister who preached about a loving God from the pulpit and I couldn’t find him. I couldn’t find a loving God.

All I could find were a bunch of hard-fast rules, leotards and sitting up straight and don’t stare, don’t interrupt, don’t talk with your mouth full, don’t swear, don’t lie, don’t cheat, don’t have sex before marriage, don’t let anyone know that you might have doubts about anything. Because saved people don’t sin.

But where are the “do’s”? Where are the YES’s? Where are the hurrahs and the hosannahs, where is the wine of Canaan? Where are the resurrected?

So eventually I stopped eating.

I stopped eating because it was the only voice I had, and I did this from 9 to 13 because it was my way of saying, I don’t like this thing called evangelicalism. I don’t like the way it makes me feel dirty and unloved. The way it makes me silent and unheard.

And then God reached down when I was 13 and dying on a hospital bed, when I was 60 pounds and hypothermic and the nurses wondering how I was still alive, and me not really caring until they called me a miracle.

And I started to think, maybe God is real after all.

In order for us to raise kids, and congregations, who need Jesus, we need to let them do just that: need Jesus.

But if we’re not letting them feel the brokenness of the world, if we’re not letting them press their heart to God’s through the pain of humanity, they’ll simply feel guilty over their sin versus realizing they need a Savior.

When we teach our kids the right things to do and say, without allowing them to express or experience brokenness, they will be imprisoned by a deep sense of shame and guilt over the brokenness they inevitably feel, versus understanding the very reason we need Jesus in the first place.

Jesus did not come to save those who do and say the right things, or to turn mean people into nice people, or bad people into good people.

No, he came to resurrect us.

But we cannot know we need resurrecting unless we first experience death and decay.

God didn’t string me up from the sky and treat me like a puppet; he let me be born headfirst into a world full of sin, into the arms of sinful parents. But he knew he would show up at the right time and save me.

And that’s what we need to do, as Christians. Trust God enough to show up at the right time and save our children.

As a young adult, I found Brian McLaren. I found Rob Bell and Anne Lamott and Madeleine L’Engle and Nadia Boltz-Weber, people who believe you can be real and love Jesus too, and it’s the thing that I clung to.

I didn’t have to be good. I didn’t have to be nice. I just had to love Jesus.

And for a while, this emergent, progressive, neo-Christian theology sustained a relationship with Jesus, with no strings attached.

But then I got greedy. Because I didn’t feel that I owed anything to God, I began, instead, to feel entitled.

I began to think God owed me all sorts of stuff, and when he didn’t give me what I wanted, when he didn’t prosper me, I gave up on him. Because I wasn’t really serving him in the first place.

No, God was serving me.

And then one day my friend prayed with me. For three hours.

My friend, who is a counselor, and me, a 32-year-old woman with a 7-year-old heart. The little girl inside of me crying for the years I’ve tried to silence her.

All of my own little girl issues awakening.

And I never saw this coming because my dad and I are good now. We’re friends now, but we didn’t used to be. And that little girl, the one who’d felt ignored by her pastor-father, needed to be heard. Seen. And I needed my mentor to take me to that wounded place.

So she does, this woman who saw this hunched-over writer and knew it wasn’t genetic.

She took me to a God who ran the long road to meet me, his robe flying, because he'd been waiting. And I realized, even as he held me: it had never been about whether or not God was loving or real.

It had never been about progressivism or evangelicalism or any kind of "ism."

It had been about perspective.

I was raised to view life through the glasses of missiology (how we live), which informs ecclesiology (how we do church), which then informs Christology (how we view the life of Jesus). Instead of interpreting the world and church through the life of Christ—instead of starting with Christology—I'd been taught to view the church, and world, through my behavior.

And my behavior was either wrong or right, and there was no middle ground, there was no grace, because I didn't start with Christ.

It's not bad to have rules. In fact, it's good, and sin is something we battle from day one, and we need saving from it. We need to overcome it and live in the fullness of the resurrection. We need sanctification, justification, and one day—glorification.

But before all of that, we need grace. Grace is not the end but the beginning. From day one, it's about a loving God pursuing us, and the theology follows. Because once you realize how much your Father loves you, all you want is for him to teach you how to live.

We don't learn how to live in order to feel the love of God. We feel the love of God and then desire to know how to live. 

And when I finally stood up from that prayer, three hours later, the shadows outside lengthening and my tea grown cold, my friend took me to the mirror in her downstairs bathroom and showed me my reflection.

“What do you see?” she said.

I saw a girl who had come home.

Unreached Peoples

Jonathan Parnell post:  Putting Your City in Its Place

A few years ago, before starting a routine read through the Book of Acts, I picked up a green colored pencil to highlight every mention of cities and regions I might come across. Each occurrence of a geographical name was to be softly shaded. Beginning with “Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria” (Acts 1:8) to “Cyprus and Cyrene” (Acts 11:20) to Seleucia, Perga, Lystra, Attalia, Neapolis, and so forth, whole pages became sprinkled with green. The highlighting forced me to pay attention to names that I commonly overlooked, names that were, of course, ancillary to the book’s message. Or so I thought.

One of the basics of good reading is to understand that repetition signifies importance. But interesting enough, the importance of location had never caught on for me in the Book of Acts, even though it’s everywhere.

Place Matters

Maybe it was because Luke only cites a few cities twice, or maybe because I dismissed the geography as something expected in a historical narrative, but either way, the frequency of location didn’t stand out to me until I saw the green. That’s when it became clear: Luke cares about these places.

Once you keep your eyes peeled for it, the centrality of location becomes hard to miss in this story about the gospel’s advance. Every turned page means more discoveries, sometimes even dozens, of the church expanding into new pockets, crossing new borders, turning the world upside down, one locale at a time.

The advance of the gospel in these places is why geography is important to Luke. Each mention of a city or region is telling us how far the gospel has gone, how far it can go. Its advance, after all, is a real advance. The gospel isn’t an ideological movement for abstract, amorphous peoples; it’s the good news proclaimed to people who are surrounded by the concreteness of somewhere, some place. The where-ness of it all matters in the Book of Acts, and it matters for the mission of the church.

And we should be careful that this doesn’t get overlooked.

Ethne Who Are En

One of the biggest contributions to the modern missions movement occurred in 1974 when Ralph Winter pointed out the “people blindness” that characterized Western missionary strategies. Addressing the Lausanne Congress on World Evangelization, Winter explained that the distinctions of unreached peoples based on political and territorial borders were insufficient. The real barriers to the gospel, he explained, were cultural and linguistic, not geographic. John Piper says, “Winter’s message was a powerful call for the church of Christ to reorient its thinking so that missions would be seen as the task of evangelizing unreached peoples, not the task of merely evangelizing more territories” (Let the Nations Be Glad, 180).

This recovery of ethnē (Greek for nations) as “people groups,” not World Cup countries, has made a tremendous impact on missionary efforts, giving the church a clear picture of what’s left to accomplish the Great Commission. And at the same time, while ethnē refers to ethnolinguistic peoples, we should not forget that these peoples are always ethnē who are also en (Greek for in) somewhere. The ethnē are always peoples in a certain place, whether indigenous lands or foreign cities. If we were to lose sight of the ethnē en, of the real flesh and blood in real contexts behind the ethnolinguistic graphs, then it could distort our strategies to prioritize translation over going, to be more about shipping books than crossing borders, even though we actually need both.

Perhaps worst is that a shriveled sense of locale might lead us to abstract lostness, to make it all math, all about numbers and percentages, which, when coupled with globalization, could truncate our efforts to become a mere transmission of information to faceless blocks of the world population. This could happen — if we lose touch with the tangibility of our mission. It turns out, even if by a different form, we might not be immune to “people blindness.”

The Here-ness of Humanity

We must remember that people are always people in a place — a place, as one author says, is “not just any place, not just a location marked on a road map, but on a topo, a topographic map — with named mountains and rivers, identified wildflowers and forests, elevation above sea level and annual rainfall” (Peterson,The Pastor, 7). The point is the “here-ness” of humanity — that we understand the actual, material, physical existence of the people Jesus commissions us to reach.

People are always in a place, and therefore, our mission must mean, at some point, that one of us steps into that place. For how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how will they hear unless someone goes to these ethnolinguistic peoples where they are, where they live, with rolled-up sleeves and dusty feet, to preach the gospel — just like it happened in the Book of Acts, in Seleucia, Perga, Lystra, Attalia, Neapolis, and more.

Our mission is a tangible one. Be going, Jesus says — somewhere, some place — and make disciples of all nations (Matthew 28:18–20). And therefore, sooner or later, we must ask, “What where? What place?” If we’re commissioned to make disciples of all nations, where in the world, literally, do we start?

Limitation and Responsibility

This brings us to two complementing factors of our mission that we’re prone to overlook. It’s what authors Sparks, Soerens, and Friesen call “limitation and responsibility” — two realities that serve as anchors to our mission and help to clarify our focus.

On the one hand, limitation reminds us that one local church, or person, can’t reach everyone alone. There are limits to our particular abilities to make disciples of all nations because we are rooted in one place at a time. And the place in which we’re rooted happens to be wherever we are right now, or where God is sending us. Whether it is a neighborhood in the upper Midwest or a village in the hills of southeast Asia, the fact that we are somewhere — not everywhere — means that there are limits to our disciple making. If we choose to live, say, in Baghdad, we are effectively saying that Baghdad is the ground of our ministry, not Boston. There might be furloughs and travels, but we can only live one place at a time, and that place draws lines on what we’re able to do.

On the other hand, though, the lines drawn also add a responsibility on what we should do. Limitation reminds us that we can’t reach everyone, but responsibility reminds us that we should reach someone. And that someone, if we’re wondering, is most likely the person who lives and works nearby — even if that person is not an urban professional born after 1970. Responsibility leads us to take a step back and consider that God’s providence might determine more than our spouses and careers, that it might actually have something to do with the people who live, work, and recreate around us, with the place we call home, with those who need to hear us tell them about Jesus.

Here or There for Somebody

This is because place matters. And when we recover its importance, it will only boost our mission, not hinder it.

When we know that place matters, that all nations live on the ground somewhere, it keeps us from the nebulous goal of trying to reach everybody on our own, and most importantly, it hones our focus on reaching somebody. Whether that is in the northeast of America or among a tribe in West Africa, we are here or sending there, trying to reach somebody, until the day when somebody becomes everybody, and the whole earth is filled with those green highlights.