BULLETIN ARTICLE – 8 July 2018
Recently from 21-23 June 2018, I attended the Go Forth National Missions Conference 2018 at the ACS Barker Road Campus. They started the 3 day Conference each day with singing and Bible Studies before the plenaries and workshops on missions. We needed to understand who God is and what he has done, before we could do the task he has planned for us. It is of course a joy to see almost 3000 people, some from distant countries, come together to worship God through praise songs and learning from the Bible.
In his book Let the Nations Be Glad, John Piper states: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exist because worship doesn’t. Worship is ultimate.” One interesting teaching to note from Acts 13 is that before the Holy Spirit asked the church in Antioch, Syria, to set apart Barnabas and Saul for special missionary work, the Church was actually “worshipping the Lord and fasting”. As they worshipped as a church, God gave them his mission heartbeat – the Church was to reach out to others outside Antioch with the gospel of the resurrected Jesus. This sparked off an over “seas” mission as Saul (Greek name Paul) and Barnabas set sail from Seleucia to the island of Cyprus.
As we worship and realise how awesome God is, we are changed. We no longer focus on ourselves but we see from God’s perspective and we understand his mission heartbeat. We cannot help but reach out to the world he is concerned for – “God so loved the world “. We see this pattern also in Isaiah 6. The prophet Isaiah, in the year that King Uzziah died, “saw the Lord, high and exalted, seated on a throne”. In the presence of a Holy God, Isaiah realised the extent of his sin. God’s question to him was “Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?” (Isa 6:8). Just as we saw in Acts 13 the work the Holy Spirit set for the church in Antioch, so we see in Isaiah 6, the Lord’s commission for Isaiah to go to a rebellious people with a message from God. Isaiah’s message was of judgement but also of comfort and hope of restoration. Likewise, the message declared by Paul and Barnabas brought judgement – in the case of the Jew, Elymas the Sorcerer, and hope and restoration to the Roman proconsul Sergius Paulus.
As we come to God in worship, do we also catch His mission heartbeat? What message does he give you today? Are we sharing his message of judgement and hope of restoration? The mission task for us is not yet complete. This was evidenced at the Go Forth National Mission Conference by the many booths set up by the different sending missions agencies that encourage people to the mission work, both here and abroad. All of us are needed to be bright lights in our spheres of influence – at work, at school and at play. Let us pray for the “Lord of the harvest” to give us his mission heartbeat as we worship him in BKC today.
