If you are parent of young children, or if you’ve ever had young children, then you can probably picture this story. Imagine you’re doing yard work in the garden. Because you’re a loving parent and you want to teach your toddler good work ethic you invite him to “help” you with the yard work. Today’s job is to load up a wheelbarrow with dirt and leaves and then move it to another area of the garden. Your toddler is delighted to help and enthusiastically uses his shovel to help you load the wheelbarrow and he even manages to occasionally get a shovel full into the wheelbarrow (although most falls on the ground). You finally get the wheelbarrow topped up enough and it’s time to move it. And, of course, your child wants to help you move the wheelbarrow.
So you allow your toddler to stand between the handles and “lift” while you stand behind doing all of the actual lifting and then you awkwardly waddle along pushing the wheelbarrow through the garden. Your back and your legs are far more strained and you ended up doing about ten times more work, but your child feels like a hero and is so excited to have helped you with your work. You reward him with a ride inside of the wheelbarrow back through the garden and then you do it all over again.
Perhaps this is just a little bit what missions and ministry is like. Now, I’m sure this isn’t a perfect analogy because God does not weary and he is far stronger and more patient than you or I. Here’s the big surprise: God does not need us to accomplish his work!
He chooses to work through us and often in spite of us. God has chosen to work through me. He chooses to work through you. We don’t have to look very far in the Bible to witness God working through his creation to bring about the results he promised. In the previous post, we focused on the purpose of missions - that God would receive glory. One of the amazing ways God chooses to demonstrate his own glory is by working with broken and inadequate humans to accomplish his purposes. Broken people like me and like you. People like Abraham, Moses, Rahab, Ruth, David, the twelve disciples, and Paul.
A Great Paradox
As we look at the whole of scripture we see these two truths:
We have all become like one who is unclean, and all our righteous deeds are like a polluted garment.Isaiah 64:6
and
it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure. Philippians 2:13
The simultaneously sobering and soothing truth we find in the Bible is that God has good work for us to do, but that all of our best efforts merely amount to a pile of refuse before God’s holiness. And yet, God has plans to use us in his work despite our desperate inadequacy. In Ephesians, Paul reminds us that “we are [God’s] workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”1 God will accomplish his work with or without us. He graciously invites us to be part of his work because it pleases him to do so.
In Luke Jesus sends his followers out to prepare the towns he is about to visit with this admonition: “The harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest” (emphasis mine).2 And in John Jesus reminds his disciples that they are entering a harvest “to reap that for which [they] did not labor.”3 All the work was God’s.
We are broken. He is whole. And yet He chooses to work through us like that parent working in spite of their child in the garden. God does not need you. He does not need me. But he does choose to work through us. And he has not left us alone. He has left us his Spirit to as our helper to guide us in all truth.
So, while we should have a deep reverence and concern for the work God has called us to we must not become confused about whose work it is. And that should be a very liberating reminder for all of us - God is the one who works and we get to be along for the ride with our Dad!
Next time, we’ll look at how money plays a role in the work of missions. Hint: in the same way that God doesn’t need you or me, he doesn’t need money, either…
Soli Deo Gloria
Zach
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