You are a missionary.
If you have surrendered your life to Christ and if you are now actively
following Jesus, you are a missionary. This book is intended to help you to
understand what it means to be a missionary and how to have an impact on the
people around you for Christ. This is not a book about how to change the world.
It’s about changing your world so that God, through you, might introduce
Himself to a few of the people around you.
To think of yourself
as a missionary is to realize that you have a mission. Every single day of your
life, wherever you are, wherever you go, you are on a mission.
This book is intended
to shed some much needed light on what it means to live this way without being
false. The important thing to remember is that you are not selling anything.
The Gospel is not for sale. You are not a salesman. You don’t need to memorize
a pitch. You will not track your success on a chart. You will not have to
pretend to be someone else.
The truth is that God
has made you exactly who you are. You have talents and abilities that are
uniquely your own. You have interests and hobbies.
You have friends and co-workers. You
have interaction with all kinds of people every single day. Where do you work?
Where do you live? That is your mission field. Who are your neighbors? Who are
your co-workers? That is your mission field. What do you enjoy doing? Who has
God made you to be?
That is all you need to worry about.
Wherever you are, whatever you are doing, wherever you are going, that is
exactly where your personal mission takes place.
As I’ve attempted to live out my own
personal calling to be a missionary where I live, I am realizing that essentially
I am simply called to relate to other human beings as a human being. I am
called to love people, wherever I am and whoever is in my path. That is my
mission.
Conversion is not in my job
description. It’s not in yours either. The main thing that Jesus commanded his
followers to do was to love people, to serve people and to communicate the good
news of the Kingdom of God to anyone we meet along the way. Conversion is
entirely God’s job, not ours. This means we are free to surrender ourselves to His
perfect plan and focus on being the people of God every single day of our
lives. This is far from easy, but God promises to help us along the way.
The most important thing to remember
is that God loves people far more than you or I do. He will help us to love
them as He does, if we will daily surrender ourselves to His perfect will.
All we have to do is to say “Yes” to
God and begin to learn from Jesus what it means to love people as He does. Are
you ready to be a missionary? Too late, you already are. You’re on the mission
field now. You’re sending messages every day. People are watching your life
whether you realize it or not. Now let’s discover how to be the missionaries
God intended us to be.
