Missio Dei: WK1 - MON
GOD IS A SENDING GOD
DAY 1 - THE MISSION THAT STARTED BEFORE YOU
John 3:16-17 (NLT) “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.”
We had been visiting the Crosswalk community in Jakarta and were heading home via Singapore when we got a call from the airline on the way to the airport. Our flight was delayed. We were not going to make the connection. They had tried to get us on an earlier departure but we were too far out. There was nothing to be done. By the time we landed in Singapore, the LAX flight had already left, and we stepped off the plane already running through the calculations in our heads: the queue at the transfer desk, the wait, the negotiation, the overnight hotel arranged on someone else’s timeline in a city we hadn’t planned to sleep in.
Two airline employees were standing at the gate as we walked off the jet bridge, holding a packet with our names on it. Inside was everything: a new routing, a hotel voucher for the night, a meal voucher, a taxi card, a printed card with instructions for every step from that moment until we boarded the next morning. The driver at the rank already had our destination. The hotel was expecting us. The room was ready. Every detail of the situation we had been dreading had already been worked through by people we had never met, before we had even landed. We walked off that plane steeling ourselves for a problem that had, without our knowledge, already been solved.
That is what you find when you actually step into mission. You arrive with your plans and your contingencies, ready to bring God somewhere, and you discover he was already there, already working, already further into the situation than you had imagined. You sit with someone far from faith and realize, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, that he has been pursuing them for years. The work was in progress before you showed up.
This is what John 3:16 is actually saying beneath its familiarity. Before any church existed, before any of us decided to follow Jesus, God was already sending. The mission originates in his nature and flows from his love. Missio Dei, the Mission of God, is the theological name for this reality: the mission belongs to God before it belongs to us. We do not launch it. We join something already underway, invited into a story that was moving long before we arrived, by a God who, for reasons that ought to stagger us, wanted us in it.
DAY 1 - THE MISSION THAT STARTED BEFORE YOU
John 3:16-17 (NLT) “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life. God sent his Son into the world not to judge the world, but to save the world through him.”
We had been visiting the Crosswalk community in Jakarta and were heading home via Singapore when we got a call from the airline on the way to the airport. Our flight was delayed. We were not going to make the connection. They had tried to get us on an earlier departure but we were too far out. There was nothing to be done. By the time we landed in Singapore, the LAX flight had already left, and we stepped off the plane already running through the calculations in our heads: the queue at the transfer desk, the wait, the negotiation, the overnight hotel arranged on someone else’s timeline in a city we hadn’t planned to sleep in.
Two airline employees were standing at the gate as we walked off the jet bridge, holding a packet with our names on it. Inside was everything: a new routing, a hotel voucher for the night, a meal voucher, a taxi card, a printed card with instructions for every step from that moment until we boarded the next morning. The driver at the rank already had our destination. The hotel was expecting us. The room was ready. Every detail of the situation we had been dreading had already been worked through by people we had never met, before we had even landed. We walked off that plane steeling ourselves for a problem that had, without our knowledge, already been solved.
That is what you find when you actually step into mission. You arrive with your plans and your contingencies, ready to bring God somewhere, and you discover he was already there, already working, already further into the situation than you had imagined. You sit with someone far from faith and realize, somewhere in the middle of the conversation, that he has been pursuing them for years. The work was in progress before you showed up.
This is what John 3:16 is actually saying beneath its familiarity. Before any church existed, before any of us decided to follow Jesus, God was already sending. The mission originates in his nature and flows from his love. Missio Dei, the Mission of God, is the theological name for this reality: the mission belongs to God before it belongs to us. We do not launch it. We join something already underway, invited into a story that was moving long before we arrived, by a God who, for reasons that ought to stagger us, wanted us in it.
- Where have you experienced God already at work before you arrived?
- What would change if you truly believed the mission belongs to God before it belongs to you?
- Who in your life might God already be pursuing right now?
Lovewell,
Pastor Andreas Beccai - Crosswalk Redlands
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