Missio Dei: WK1 - THU
THE MOMENT BEFORE THE SENDING
Isaiah 6:1, 8 (NLT) “It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple... Then I heard the Lord asking, ‘Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”
Isaiah’s commissioning is one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Scripture. A throne room. Seraphim calling out in voices that shake the foundations. Smoke. A man undone by the sight of holiness, certain he is finished. Then a coal, a touch, forgiveness declared. And a question: Whom shall I send? Isaiah says: here I am. Send me. Not because he feels ready. Because he has been met by something so much larger than his inadequacy that his objections have nowhere left to stand.
Rosa Parks is usually told as a story about a single courageous act: a woman on a bus who refused to move. But that framing flattens something important. She was a seamstress who spent years doing quiet, unglamorous civil rights work long before that December evening in 1955. She had attended the Highlander Folk School, where she had been trained and had sat in rooms with other organizers thinking seriously about how change happens. She had watched others resist and had carried those moments inside her. By the time she took that seat and kept it, she was not acting on impulse. She was acting out of everything she had accumulated over years of slow, patient formation. What changed on that bus was not that her courage suddenly appeared. It was that the weight of everything she believed finally tipped past the weight of what she feared. That is a different thing entirely from boldness. It is something more durable.
That is what the throne room does to a person. It does not remove the fear. It just makes something else more important. Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The sequence matters: holiness, then undoing, then forgiveness, then commissioning.
Unfortunately most of us approach mission the wrong way around. We ask whether we are qualified. We wait for a feeling of readiness that never quite solidifies. But Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The coal that touched his lips was God’s grace. God is not asking you if you are ready. He is asking whom he should send. The question is already echoing in the room where you are sitting.
Isaiah 6:1, 8 (NLT) “It was in the year King Uzziah died that I saw the Lord. He was sitting on a lofty throne, and the train of his robe filled the Temple... Then I heard the Lord asking, ‘Whom should I send as a messenger to this people? Who will go for us?’ I said, ‘Here I am. Send me.’”
Isaiah’s commissioning is one of the most dramatic scenes in all of Scripture. A throne room. Seraphim calling out in voices that shake the foundations. Smoke. A man undone by the sight of holiness, certain he is finished. Then a coal, a touch, forgiveness declared. And a question: Whom shall I send? Isaiah says: here I am. Send me. Not because he feels ready. Because he has been met by something so much larger than his inadequacy that his objections have nowhere left to stand.
Rosa Parks is usually told as a story about a single courageous act: a woman on a bus who refused to move. But that framing flattens something important. She was a seamstress who spent years doing quiet, unglamorous civil rights work long before that December evening in 1955. She had attended the Highlander Folk School, where she had been trained and had sat in rooms with other organizers thinking seriously about how change happens. She had watched others resist and had carried those moments inside her. By the time she took that seat and kept it, she was not acting on impulse. She was acting out of everything she had accumulated over years of slow, patient formation. What changed on that bus was not that her courage suddenly appeared. It was that the weight of everything she believed finally tipped past the weight of what she feared. That is a different thing entirely from boldness. It is something more durable.
That is what the throne room does to a person. It does not remove the fear. It just makes something else more important. Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The sequence matters: holiness, then undoing, then forgiveness, then commissioning.
Unfortunately most of us approach mission the wrong way around. We ask whether we are qualified. We wait for a feeling of readiness that never quite solidifies. But Isaiah does not volunteer from confidence. He volunteers from encounter. The coal that touched his lips was God’s grace. God is not asking you if you are ready. He is asking whom he should send. The question is already echoing in the room where you are sitting.
- What fears or feelings of inadequacy keep you from saying “Here I am, send me”?
- How has grace shaped your willingness to serve others?
- What might God be asking you to step toward, even before you feel ready?
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