I had been given hints of one sort or another over my upbringing.
There were the rare occasions when my dad and/or Mum would be out giving leaflets explaining the church and the gospel. I have no recollection of going out with them during that, preferring the warmth and comfort of my home than being outside talking to complete strangers. Even after I got baptised, I never felt the urge to have to ‘share my faith’ with anyone. I could go on believing what I believed and that would just be a private arrangement.
By the time my faith underwent serious challenges at university, I was more open to a better way of thinking about sharing the gospel with others. Indeed by the end of the last decade of the last millennia I was volunteering to be part of evangelism teams committed to praying for and going out to conduct evangelism in the community directly around the church building.
This broadened as I left London to go up to Stoke. The deal went from just giving someone a leaflet and wondering if they wanted to pray a prayer, to being more actively involved in community efforts and church action to share the love of God with our locality. Genuine social action that looked to meet the needs of those around us for the sake of Christ.
All through this steady transformation of concern from my own naval to a world in need of Christ there were significant moments that nudged me beyond my ‘comfort zone’ to the ‘Christ zone’ of where the reality of the gospel needed to be proclaimed and demonstrated.
One key moment was in 2006. Being in between jobs (aka unemployed) I learnt humility by finding joy, purpose and diligence in mundane agency jobs doing things that I would have previously felt were ‘beneath me’ but recognising that this attitude was as godly as Satan. At that time God invited me to go back to a place that I had previously scorned – that place being the North Staffs YMCA. God sent the invitation through a series of prayer meetings where he burdened my heart with the needs of those who were harassed and helpless – just like we saw yesterday. It’s not like that everywhere in Stoke-on-Trent, but the customers/residents of the YMCA would definitely have fallen in that category.
So after reading Matthew 9:35-38, we come across Matthew 10 and it’s as though the very prayer the disciples were told to pray would be answered by being the answer themselves. That’s why it is very important to be prepared when you pray to be obedient to the will of God for your life that you are aware of what that will cost. My burdened heart in like manner lead me to accept being a part of the solution to the prayers I had been praying. The opportunity opened to be a Christian Spiritual Development Worker at the North Staffs YMCA and I could contribute to those that I had once scorned being recipients and partakers in the glorious good news that had set me free from my stupidity as well as my slavery to sin.
Reading Matthew 10 reminds me a great deal of how this and the preceding few verses was the spiritual nudge I needed to be passionate about the things God is passionate about. The simple and focussed way in which Jesus commands His disciples in their first mission says a lot about what was important to Him.
The call to go out simply – not requiring payment for the proclaiming and demonstration of the Kingdom that was near, but to live off the provisions of God smacks against the often blunt business-like way in which the gospel is propagated these days in some places.
What continues to be prominent in Jesus commissioning is again the inevitable nature of rejection in sharing this Kingdom message. The level of division it will cause even in households just for a safe life. In as much as I wasn’t hunted down or betrayed whilst working at the YMCA, it was interesting to note the many areas of opposition to what the mission was during my time there both from within and without the community of believers.
From the smile in the face and the sneer behind the back to the blatant and open rejection of all that was being looked at in this issue. It was a very telling episode in my life and one that continues to inform me that whether you have that kind of title or not, as long as you pursue Christ and His mission on earth it is both the most thrilling and rewarding pursuit in life and the most challenging and debilitating.
Yet in our own areas through His call on our lives, that same call to proclaim and demonstrate His Kingdom in action remains. As followers of Jesus, there really is no choice but to join in the mission of seeing people healed and delivered, those who were once rejected and neglected in society embraced by the loving community of God. Doing so not out of worldly gain, but out of the joyful knowledge that He has freely given of Himself for us to freely give of ourselves or more accurately to give what we have been given. As Keith Green so passionately put it, Jesus commands us in our communities, workplaces, families to go.
For His Name’s Sake
Shalom
dmcd
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