Mere Missions

34 • M ere M issions : M oving F orward to M ultiply

There were gang members hanging out, drug deals going down, prostitutes on the corner. I had “crossed-over” into a world that was completely different from the world I grew up in. In the midst of my culture shock, a six-year-old African American boy in cut off shorts, no shirt, no shoes, and nappy hair, came running across a trash studded dirt field and jumped into my arms with the biggest grin imaginable. I began to toss him in the air, laughing, and feeling a bit more comfortable. At one point, this little boy, whose name I don’t remember, looked into my eyes and said, “I can’t wait till Jesus takes me up in the air like that.” A new awakening seized me. Someone entered his “world” of gangs, drugs, violence and, what seemed to be hopelessness, and spoke a simple eternal truth that Jesus is Lord and His Kingdom is real and beyond this world. Anyone can enter the narrow gate by faith. This little boy believed and entered. He saw the Kingdom of God. The same Lord who called me to communities of poverty to represent Him and His Kingdom was the same Lord who called this little boy to what was, “really real.” It was the “really real” that the Apostle Paul reminded the Corinthian believers when he wrote, “For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Cor. 4.17-18).

Content 1: Missions Plank: Jesus Is Lord

The Lordship of Jesus Christ is the summa cum laude of all things visible and invisible, that is, “in heaven and on earth and under the earth”

(Phil. 2.9-11). All those in the heavenly realm, the angelic forces of God Almighty, confess Jesus as the “Lord our God the Almighty