What is your mission in life?

Do you have one? Have you ever thought about your daily life in terms of what GOD wants you to do?

Christians typically don’t think of our day to day life in terms of mission, but rather we ‘send missionaries’ away to other places to ‘spread the Gospel.’

The Apostle Paul addresses the mission of Jesus Christ in his opening advice to the church:

1 Timothy 1:15 The saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, of whom I am the foremost.

Jesus Christ has a mission to save sinners. Our Lord paid the price for our sin. He continues to save us from the penalty of sin and death. Paul confesses his own sin, as should we.

Jesus had a mission to accomplish in His three-year ministry which He continues to accomplish through those accepted by God as part of His body, the church.

What is the mission of our church?

Many churches and most Christians will take some approach to mission to accomplish the sending out of missionaries (as Jesus sent out His Apostles).

We support or hire missionaries to accomplish the mission of Christ, rather than approaching our own lives as being one sent as an ambassador from God into this perishing world in the Name of Christ Jesus to save sinners.

The church of this century has corporately fallen into a worldly check-list of ‘christian’ things that we do through others for others in the Name of Christ.

A brief look at our corporate church websites will include visions and missions not unlike a Fortune 500 focus constructed with a secular and worldly-relevant appeal. I do not condemn us for laying a groundwork for the important business Christ has given us to accomplish, yet even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing.  [2 Corinthians 4:3]

Sending missionaries makes our church feel good. We ourselves seem to have no mission for Christ in our daily life beyond the doors of a building we call our ‘church.’ (We contribute to missions as a small portion of our meager offering.)

How easy it is as a church or as a Christian for us to either get caught up in goals of our ‘mission’ or to ignore them entirely.

What is my mission as a member of Christ’s church?

If we approach our typical intention to a mission individually we might take a systematic approach. Our local body of believers may only make the connection to mission as we understand it’s meaning from the Latin root: Mid 16th century (denoting the sending of the Holy Spirit into the world): from Latin missio(n-), from mittere ‘send’.

Mark 16:15-16 “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned.

Perhaps as Christians it is time for us to take another look at mission more in terms of the reason Christ Jesus has already sent us into the world to live as ambassadors of Heaven to a fallen world. Perhaps the time of our return should be taken with more of the daily intentional seriousness of the Apostles.

The Letter of Paul to the church at Philippi

^3:14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. ¹⁵ Let those of us who are mature think this way, and if in anything you think otherwise, God will reveal that also to you. ¹⁶ Only let us hold true to what we have attained.

Do we press on toward this goal of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus in the same way that the Apostles remained so focused on God’s ambassadorial mission for our daily lives… until we are called upward to the time and place we will receive our resurrected eternal bodies?

If a ‘christian’ is to have a Christ-like mission, shouldn’t we look to Christ Jesus as our example for our day to day life?

Is your life a mission for Christ?

Do you have any thought at all of how God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit would use you in the lives of others?

To be continued…