Are you Missions focused or Jesus focused?

I haven’t posted in what seems like a very long time but I aim to amend that right now…

At my base here in switzerland another school has just recently started called Justice dts and they are doing an intro to missions course this week. They pretty much from what I have heard that they are learning about the 10/40 window, unreached people groups and a bunch of other missions things. I am very attracted to a class like this because it is so focused on going and doing. I like going to places and helping people and making their general life condition better which might mean sacrificing personal comfort for myself but isn’t it worth it to help another human being that is experiencing difficulty?

I was walking with one of my friends and he was telling me about what the course is about and some stories from his life. He talked about when last year he was staffing the Justice dts and there was a staff retreat were there was a guest speaker from Russia (I think…) who talked about ywam and missions. He said that the pastor of the church he grew up in encouraged all the youth to go to a ywam school and learn about God and missions and then listen to what God had for them to do in their life. After a while though the pastor stopped recommending the school and his reason was that when he first started the youth would go and come back all excited about Jesus but now they just come back excited about missions.

One might wonder, what is wrong with being excited with missions? There is nothing wrong with being excited about missions but the problem lies not in being excited in missions but the focus on missions as opposed to Jesus. It is really easy to get obsessed with missions and how to do them and were to go but loose sight of why you are doing missions. We forget the person we are doing the missions for and forsake Him for the task. It is challenging to stayed focused on God at times but it really is essencial to anything and everything you want to do in life. The reality of life is that God exists and he desires not for us to do all these tasks for Him but to have a relationship with Him and be obedient to what He tells you to do. I have found that sometimes despite having a huge desire to do, do, do God sometimes asks us to not do, but be still in Him and obey that command. The spread of God’s name is not dependent on you or your neighbor, it is dependent on the obedience to what He is saying.

I have been very challenged this year with this because I am very much guilty of being missions focused and not Jesus focused. I wish to be doing something for Jesus all the time as if people will go to hell if I don’t do something, but the thing I have learned is that God is bigger than me, He is just, and as it says in 1 Timothy 2:3-4 “This is good, and it pleases God our Savior, who wants everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” Do you trust God enough to be obedient to Him know matter what He tells you to do? Do you trust God to stay true to His character? If not I would challenge you to really seek out God and wrestle with Him about why you don’t trust Him.

The main challenge of this is to really take time to sit with God and ask Him what you are to be doing. He might answer with missions, or school, or church planting, or pastoring or so many other things but the real task comes when you decide to be obedient to that or not. Do you want to do what you want to do more than you want to do what God wants you to do?