Excerpt – A Bunch Of Fair Questions

The following is an excerpt from Thrive Year 1 Quarter 1 Workbook.   For a free digital copy of our Leadership Manual, send us an email.

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It’s probably fair to say you come with a bunch of questions, and rightly so.  Some of these we will answer right now.  Others will be answered with time.  The first question you might ask is, “What are we doing?”  The answer is quite simple.  You are choosing to follow Jesus by engaging Missio Dei, or the Mission of God.  Since the fall of humanity, God has been actively working to restore His creation to wholeness.  The perfect reflection of this wholeness looked like Jesus.  It was a call to restoration and maturity as human beings.  It meant facing our brokenness with courage and resolve so that each of us could rewrite our own story.   Missio Dei invites us to engage this restoration and discover what the best of humanity looks like.  It calls us to embrace love because this is what we are designed for.  And as we experience this restoration, we then have something to take to our neighbor.  It’s not someone else’s story or good news.  It’s ours.

But to get to love, we have to first connect to the One who loves, our Heavenly Father.  Missio Dei seeks to restore the relationship between God and humanity and bring people out of oppression and into wholeness.  Jesus first announced his ministry with a quote from the prophet Isaiah, and it served well to help clarify the mission.  He said:

“The Spirit of the lord God is upon me.  For he has anointed me to bring the good news to the afflicted.  He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives, sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim a year of favor from the Lord.” (Luke 4:18-19)

This is a mission statement.  Missio Dei is first about bringing people out of suffering and into relationship and restoration.  But it begins with an assumption, that we are broken and need restoration.  As we read the story, we will find out how and why this is true.  And we will find out why our own bodies attempt to protect against and even ignore this brokenness.  We’ll learn what drives humanity to break itself through a well meaning but failed search for validation.  We’ll also learn how to restore our own hearts by participating in His mission of restoration.

Jesus was actively working to restore all of God’s creation, first by restoring access to God and then giving us a clear image of the Father.  He showed us what love looked like and what it meant to live in a deeply connected relationship with the Father and empowered and led by the Holy Spirit.  This is a relationship developed over time and established on trust.  It calls us into maturity, finding its fullest expression in love.  And the sad reality is that love never chooses to control.  We don’t have to participate in his mission.  We can choose to walk away, hoping that our best is good enough.  But we’re assuming you want more than good enough.  We’re assuming that you really do want to know the real reason Jesus came.

Another question that often follows is, “Why would I want to follow Jesus?”  It doesn’t take a scholar to realize that Jesus died, painfully.  His journey was not easy.  The cost was extremely high.  “Why would I want to follow that?”  Fair question.  But it is also fair to say that in the process he transformed the world.  He lived a life bigger than just himself.  He lived a life that people talk about and read about and want to follow for over 2,000 years.  He was the perfect reflection of what we were designed to become.  And in doing so he invited people to follow him so that each participant could become the fullest reflection of his/her design.

Is this costly?  Sure.  But what is the real cost when we answer his call to take up our cross?  If you really think about it, the cost is our brokenness.  The cost is the worst of what we have become as we live outside His Kingdom.  The cost is the plastic, fake self that we create to protect our hearts.  It’s the wounds that keep us locked in a state of fear and confusion, loneliness and ego.  It’s our fragile way of living that hides us from adventure and mystery; cutting us off from the abundance that Jesus was promising us.  The cost is our boredom and restlessness, our oppression and angst as we show up in church wondering what this is all really about anyway.  These are things that can only be let go at the cross.  Otherwise we have no place to put them.

This process, or journey as some call it, is not easy but it is worth it.  You may be questioning that right now and rightly so.  We can’t know what we’ve never experienced.  But historically those who chose to follow Jesus willingly gave up their lives for others.  They lived in such a way that astounded those around them.  Why?  Consider the possibility that they discovered something deeper about the way of Jesus.  They discovered that love was the fullest expression of who they were as humans.  They saw the value and dignity of each person in all of humanity, even their enemies.  They understood and embraced the idea that we were worth it to God.   In fact he went so far as to give His son’s life to prove it.  But the only way to discover if this is true or not is to choose to follow, to engage His mission.

So the next question you might ask is, “So, how do we really engage Missio Dei?”  What did Jesus really call us into?  Over this first quarter we will be taking a look at the mission and what it looks like as you begin your journey.   Think of it as something like an orientation to the mission. Jesus was inviting us to follow him into His Father’s mission to restore ALL of creation, including each person in this group.  He was actively working to restore the divide between God and His creation.  And in doing so, we gained access to the Father we never really knew we had.  We gained His Spirit, which transforms us from the inside out.  And we gained the possibility of becoming the whole person we were designed to be.

Understand that this restoration process takes time.  Real change happens through consistency.  It takes a community working together, watching out for each other, protecting each other, and loving each other.  It takes courage and perseverance to face our brokenness and remove our selves from oppression.  It takes a willingness to relearn something we always thought we knew, maturity.

In this journey you will discover what it means to be loved and to love.  You will learn what it means to restore your own dignity and the dignity of those around you.  You will learn what it means to redeem a broken and hurting world. You will love, laugh, cry, stretch, grow and look inward, outward, upward and onward.  You will spend intentional time focusing on trust, reflection, relationships, being real, discovering what it means to be a child of God and to love deeply, all in the context of what we call “communitas”, which we’ll learn more about next week.

Another fair question you are probably asking is, “How long do we do this?”  This journey together lasts up to three years but the mission lasts a lifetime.   Three years may seem like a long time in the beginning but for some reason Jesus gave us this example.  We’re sticking to it.   But what if Jesus realized that we needed that long to process the mission and learn what it means to restore and reconcile?  What if He understood that it takes time to rewrite the story of how we see the world?  We invite you to find out.

We also recognize that making a three-year commitment seems daunting.  But actually we are only committing to a three-month quarter at a time.   Each quarter last eleven weeks with a two-week break in between.

The last fair question you may be asking is that, “This doesn’t look like what I’m used to.  Can we really do this?” The answer is a resounding yes.  In fact, what you are doing looks more like the first century church than you may know.  Historically the first century Christians met in houses and took a risk to discover what it meant to practice love.  We need these types of communities in our lives, the ones that encourage us to better things.  As you begin to participate with Him, everything changes.  As you begin to align your heart to what He has for you, the Holy Spirit begins to change you from the inside.  Anything becomes possible in His kingdom, and restoration of your soul is at the top of his list.   Why?  Because you are worth it to Him.  And don’t you forget that.  EVER.