Our church can be whatever we desire it to be. We are the facilitators of change, success and failure. True transformation and change comes because of God’s love, grace and power but it is our faith and obedience or lack thereof that either releases God’s transforming grace or quenches His Spirit.

 

The question is how bad do we want it? And why do we want it? Are we so caught up in the American dream and upward mobility that we assume the same things must be true for our church? Or is it because of jealousy? Or perhaps because we have allowed our feelings of personal worth to be tied to what others believe about us…

 

If however our desire for growth stems from a cry deep within our souls that we must be obedient to God, we must honor the Lord, we simply have to gain, propagate and share the compassion and love of Jesus Christ regardless of the tangible results then perhaps we are ready to begin changing our churches and truly making disciples.

 

I know that deep within me lies a yearning to be a part of something bigger: something really making a difference. Not just a few more faces on Sunday mornings, but something that changes the landscape of the culture around us: something that revolutionizes our communities, our families and our churches. I know that many times my motives become mixed. I know that I allow jealousy, pride and other false motives to begin to creep into my life, but the deepest seated, most powerful and unchanging force in why I do what I do lies in this desire to please God and radically change people’s lives now and forever.

 

My question however is: how? How do I change them? How to I find them? What do I say? What do I do? I grab book after book off the shelf…I ask minister after minister and person after person, and very few if any have been able to offer me the answer to my question. I am beginning to believe that the reason why they cannot answer it is because there are truly so few people making disciples that their stories are hard to find and even harder to pin down the how and what of their methods.

 

And to clarify before I go any further, I would like to say that I know that methods do not save: Jesus Christ saves. I also know that one of the primary reasons I am not effective in ministry, evangelism and disciple-making as I should be is because I do not tend to my own spiritual life as I should. My prayer life is hap-hazard and often filled with selfish requests; my hunger for the Word of God is sporadic, and my attention to other spiritual disciplines is often overshadowed by schedule, pursuit of personal pleasure or worry/doubt/lack of faith.

Having said all this, I would still like to assert that I want to be a fisher of men, not a keeper of the aquarium. I want to be a disciple-maker not a church CEO. And I need help to know how. I wonder if I could begin to take this questioning of mine to a deeper level? What if I shifted my thinking from questioning, pondering, discussing and yes, even doubting to searching, inquiring and discovering? Perhaps my pursuit has been too lackadaisical, and too intellectual. Maybe if I shifted to a quest. A mission. A pursuit even. What if I had a personal quest to see what would happen if I focused all my outward attentions on disciple-making? I still don’t know what I am going to do, but perhaps the paragraphs that follow these will be an account of discovery and praise: seeing what God will do, as I ask, seek and knock: “Lord help me make disciples!”.

I wonder if you have noticed that God is on the move. He is lighting fires, changing lives and His Spirit is sweeping across the world with a force and fury wondrous to behold!

You may be asking yourself…”Where is this movement?”

And unfortunately many churches in North America are befuddled when they hear people speaking about God’s mighty movements. But this is not because it isn’t happening, but mostly because we aren’t getting on board with what God is doing!

In the church of the Nazarene around the world, we are seeing sometimes 500 or 1000 churches starting each year in various zones/districts. This is because of the Spirit of God wooing people to Him and believers being obedient to the calling and direction God is putting on their lives.

In America I believe that it is starting too. And we can choose to get on God’s side, or be left behind.

God is stirring in people’s hearts the desire to speak of His wondrous story to those who will listen. Not waiting for them to come to a church building or get comfortable in a seeker sensitive area. But just going in love and boldness and proclaiming: “The Kingdom of God is near, repent!”.

I pray that I will be a part of that which God is doing and that we can snatch from the very clutches of hell those who need God’s redemption and we can allow God’s Spirit to move within in us to such a degree that no one could deny that God is moving to seek and save the lost!

Remember God’s heart beat is….’none; all; none; all; thump; thump; none; all”:

God’s heartbeat is that none should perish but all would come to repentance and salvation.

How have you seen God working and moving in your midst?

Your mother always told you to leave something better than you found it.

Furthermore, don’t we all want others to have a better life because they know us?

But how is someone else’s life actually better because they know you? How is our city better because you live here? Really we each only have three options. We can affect others lives for the better, affect them for the worse or have no impact whatsoever. If we have no impact it is because we are disconnected. If we have any connection at all we will have some impact, either for better or worse.

Is the way you are living your life impacting others for the better or for worse? When you die will your family and friends, city and world be better because you were there? If not, why not?

 

God has created us with His perfect intentions. He has reasons. They flow out of who He is. His character/His heart. Somehow they include us. Because of His love. Because of the communal nature of who He is and who invites us to be.

Along the way we have lost our way. We have been sidetracked. Blinded. Distracted. We have believed a lie. In actuality many lies.

When God sets us free it is by the truth. It is by the very nature of who He is. And it is for the purpose of fulfilling His purposes for creation and for each of us individually. And therefore the freedom that He has for us is in regard to whatever is defeating us.

It is in the very areas of our weakness that Satan will attempt to find a foothold and pull us down, and in those same areas, God wants to set us free.

His Word tells us that we are a slave to whatever has mastered us and so therefore God wants to give us freedom through His power to overcome anything that has mastered us.

And the freedom that God gives only comes through surrender and submission. To be free is to choose lordship. His Lordship. Because amazingly the Lordship of Christ in our lives is the definition of true and complete freedom because it gives life and peace, power and purpose.