I want to invite you to be used by God in ways you might never imagine - or perhaps you have already experienced this.
I want to give you the opportunity to be empowered to develop your talents and gifts - some of which you might not know you have.
I want to cheer you on to new levels of Kingdom responsibility that will give us greater purpose and fuller hearts.
I want to encourage you to see how He can touch the lives of other human beings.
When the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes decided to determine his purpose in lie, he started by accumulating a vast sum, only to discover that it did not provide the meaning he had hoped for. Then he sought power, attained it and discovered that it too failed to satisfy.
Next came the scandalous pursuit of pleasure. Then fame and celebrity. Finally, at the end of all his efforts he uttered his famous words 'vanity, vanity, all is vanity, meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless.'
Or as another translation says, 'All of this is like chasing the wind.'
We - you and I - were not created to chase the wind.
We were created to join God on a mission. Some people think of God as hanging around beyond the edges of the universe somewhere listening to really good worship music.
The Bible sees is differently; it teaches that God is at work 24/7, all over the world, filling His followers with grace and mercy and love and power to reclaim and redeem and fix this broken planet.
And He calls us to roll up our sleeves and join Him with our talents, our lives, our time, our passion.
He wants His mission to become ours.
'If you are into chasing the wind,' he tells us, 'you can keep right on doing that. Or you can follow me and together we'll transform this hurting planet - with hurting, broken people.'
Teaming up with to change the world is what the church is called to do.
'History-makers' - that's what we are called to be. This desire to be a world changer is actually planted in the heart of every human being - and that desire comes directly from the heart of God.
We can suffocate that desire tin selfishness, silence it with the chatter of competing demands, bypass it on the fast track to personal achievement.
But it's still there…..
Whenever we wonder, if this is all that there is to life…
- we get nudges.
- whenever we feel restless and unsatisfied - desire whispers in our soul
- whenever we wonder what a life of real purpose would feel like, the desire calls us to something more.
Jesus made it very clear what God's idea of a transformed world would be like, first within the community of the church and then as the values of that community spread out into the world:
- when He said we should love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength and our neighbour as ourselves, He was calling us to trade a ritualised religion for a genuine, real, love relationship with God and to offer to others the same kind of attention, honour and compassion we give to ourselves.
- when Jesus was punctuating His teaching with concern for the poor, powerless and the oppressed He was describing a new value system.
- when He said, 'Take up your cross and follow me,' He was telling us in graphic terms that following Him would require sacrifice, hardship and death to something selfish inside of us.
- When he said, 'Go into all the world and preach the gospel, baptising in my name and telling people all that you have heard from me,' He was making it clear that His will for us includes the call to worldwide mission.
Our call to love our neighbour as ourselves includes our neighbour in Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Indonesia, as well as the one next door.
The life of transformation - everything from marriages, families, friendships, economic and political systems…
It lifts up the humble, humbles the proud and draws people together across racial, social and cultural divides.
Acts 13 v 35: 'And David served the purpose of God in his generation.'
David didn't waste time chasing the wind. He devoted himself to God's mission and died knowing that his one and only life had served its highest purpose.
These passages provide additional thougths on this subject
Ephesians
2 v 10: |
'For we are God's workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.' |
Ecclesiastes
3 v 1: |
'There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven.' |
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