Stay On Mission – 23rd July 2018

2. Seek Me and Live!
I began this short series with a comment that I would imagine many of us agree with: Staying on Mission is not the ‘easy’ way to live!
It is not easy because there are so many things that distract us from making Jesus and His mission our daily focus.
It is relatively easy to attend a church gathering on a frequent basis, even participate in or even lead church-based activities. What is more of a challenge for many, is to ‘be on mission with Jesus’ in the daily routine of our lives. The challenge is that this often results in us having what some refer to as ‘God Time’ and then the rest of our lives is filled with such things as ‘work time’ ‘family time’ and ‘me time’. While it is true that most of us have to spend time at work and want to spend time with family and in doing things that we enjoy, I wonder if this way of dividing up our time is either helpful or even biblical?
The people of God that Amos prophesied to certainly paid attention to attending religious meetings and performing religious rituals. The problem was that attendance at and participation in these things did not result in them being about the things that are important to God when they were away from the meetings.
This failure to live the life that they professed is seen in the words that God speaks through Amos in chapter 5 verse 4:
This is what the LORD says to Israel: “Seek me and live”.
God is not a part of our lives, He is our life. Of course, we still have to work, love, lead and serve our family and participate in leisure. The crux of the words of Amos is that God is in all of these things, He is in us and with us wherever we are and how we live in every part of our lives is intended to bring glory to Him.
This is not just an ‘Old Testament’ idea, Jesus said:
“Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it”. Matthew 16:24-25
Staying on Mission with Jesus requires that all of our life is given to Him, then- anything is possible!