Status Updates From The Insider

Are you looking for your calling, wondering what God wants you to do? Paul is saying, open your eyes and look! You're surrounded! …Some of your relationships are good, some are bad, but they all have potential for new meaning now that you're a citizen of the kingdom of God. Live out that citizenship —"hold out the word of life" within this unique world of yours! That's what it means to be an insider!

The gospel is not a magic wand that makes our sins and vices disappear from one day to the next. It delivers us, a step at a time, as we walk with the Holy Spirit.

We somehow find the idea of dropping everything to follow Jesus more romantic than that of our taking him back home with us. But as a rule, we are called to follow him back into our own communities.

It's not our religious activities we want people to see; it's the grace and mercy that comes from God's love that needs to show.

• purposefully investing deeply in a few individuals, with the expectation that God will, in time, multiply that investment.

• intentionally discipling our children; giving priority to passing on to them the spiritual legacy we have received, with the vision that they, too, will embrace their calling to do the same. This is the greatest gift a parent can give a child. It is the gift of life and hope.

we are —an insider to a limited but boundary-less circle. It is understanding that there is no limit to
where the fruit of our life could lead over the generations.

To lay foundations for new generations takes time. Too much time, you say? It may seem so at first, but in the end a life purposetully lived with a vision for generations can outstrip everything else. Its influence continues long after our life comes to an end! Because such a ministry follows the lines of social and family relationships, the impact, over time, tends to expand into new circles rather than run out.

For years I read the Bible in the first person singular. Whenever it said "you," I took it to mean "me." Then I learned Portuguese. In Portuguese, there is both a plural and a singular form for the pronoun "you," I discovered that most of my lavorite passages — that i had understood to be talking about me-were in the plural, talking about us, together!

I had gotten the idea that these generations needed to be mine…to validate my own fruitfulness…to be able to point to certain people and claim them as my spiritual generations. I was ignoring a primary truth concerning the body of Christ…No single part can accomplish anything by itself. Growth occurs as "each part does its work." Such individualism is barren because it seeks its own glory.

Their parents have done the hard work of discovering how to go from godless to godly patterns for living. And they took pains to pass what they were learning on to their daughters. These girls grew up beneficiaries of the healing their parents struggled to gain.
They are beginning just about where their parents will leave off.

I've watched people who seem to spend their lives attempting to reproduce the results of the first chapters of the book of Acts. When they fail, they think something is wrong either with themselves or with someone else. Even the apostle Paul never saw a duplication of that first response in Jerusalem!

[On the beginning of the church in Acts growing quickly] It was harvest time for a crop that had been almost two thousand years in the ripening-from the time of Abraham to Jesus himself…
On one occasion Jesus told his disciples, "I sent you to reap what you have not worked for…They were to reap what the patriarchs and the prophets had sown.

Jesus was praying for the twelve men he was preparing to send into all the world as apostles or "sent ones." In this prayer, Jesus also revealed what he had in mind for those men in the future…
They were his replacements!

IMAGINE THE CHALLENGE of the task Jesus faced! He came to be the Lamb of God. To accomplish this he had to live a life that revealed the Father to everyone who saw him…in such a way that every generation from his until ours, and beyond, would have the news of it...
How would you have tackled this challenge in communication?
Jesus began by inviting a few people to follow him.

There in Bethlehem, Ruth married Boaz, a man of impeccable char-acter. They named their son Obed. He was the father of Jesse, who was David's father. It took three generations of godly living to lay the foundations upon which David lived his life. Thus, he had a head start in the lomation of his faith and character. He would need it!

By our standards, the ways of the kingdom seem so weak, so insignificant, so unworthy of the bother. The kingdom is in the small voice, in the unobtrusive act. Yet it cannot be shaken! We cannot market it, yet it advances forcibly. We cannot build it; we can only receive it.

Educated pagans would have dismissed the notion that the gods care how we treat one another. They would have found that absurd. Classical philosophers of the day
"regarded… mercy involves providing unearned help or relief, it was contrary to justice. Pity was "a defect of character unworthy of the wise and excusable only in those who have not yet grown up."

"How did a tiny and obscure messianic movement from the edge of the Roman empire dislodge classical paganism and become the dominant faith of Western civilization in a few centuries?"…expansion resulted from the Christians' belief that God loved them. "If," they reasoned, "God loves humanity, Christians may not please God unless they love one another."

Such a community [of kingdom citizens loving their lives together, actually loving one another] makes a persuasive statement to an onlooking world that the kingdom, indeed, is among them. The message of the kingdom is amplified as its citizens live out their unique calling in community. As they do, the kingdom grows.

But we know the kingdom is among us whenever we see people, motivated by Christ's rule in their hearts, showing mercy instead of judgment, speaking the truth instead of spinning it, giving grace instead of seeking revenge, serving people instead of using them.

People with needs surround us. We are so accustomed to seeing such things that we accept as normal the resentment, anger, and absorption with self that usually characterize people's responses.