We're continuing our series on the 7 next words of Christ at Fruitvale Presbyterian Church.
Jesus tells his disciples to go into the world. Faith, following, being a disciple isn't about living behind closed or locked doors. It's about engaging your neighbors, leaving the familiar to experience the new, abandoning enslaving traditions to be transformed by the liberty of God's grace, about faith not as comfort but as adventure that leads to deeper waters and blessings. It's not about being served as much as it is about serving others. What great words for us as a community - both of faith and of humanity sharing our planet - on earth day.
But how do you know what God's wants you, or us, to do? I think we often get so freaked out by either the seemingly impossibleness of discerning God's will or the fear that we're going to be called like the prophets Jeremiah, Amos, Isaiah or Esther to do something totally radical. Or we think it's some impenetrable secret that only God knows and we're too ______ to ever glimpse. Maybe it doesn't have to be that hard! In fact I think it is so easy that we have no excuse to not be out in the world.
Frederick Buechner writes: “[God’s Will for you today, here and now] is found where our deep gladness and the world’s deep need meet -- something that not only makes you happy but that the world needs to have done.”
Basically we're called to go into the world, to do what God's Spirit has already put upon our hearts, the things we're passionate about that we also see as a need in and for the world, or context, in which we live. Here's a great online tool to discern where your passions and the needs of the world intersect. We have no excuse...I think that's what Jesus was saying to his disciples on the Mountain Top. Curious and ironic that Jesus gave this great commission, or invitation to discipleship at the top of a mountain from where there's nowhere else to go besides down and into the world.
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