Everybody has a “thing”. Something they give their lives to. We can give our lives to the pursuit of pleasure, wealth, possessions, knowledge, popularity, fame, status, all sorts of things. The list goes on and on. Even Jesus had a “thing”… His single, overriding thing was finding people living far apart from God.

“For the Son of Man came to find and restore the lost.” (Luke 19:10)

He literally went out of his way – leaving the comfort of heaven to come to earth – in order to find and restore spiritually lost people facing an eternity separated from God’s loving presence and grace. He loved to tell stories that spotlighted how important finding the lost was to him… the shepherd leaving his flock in order to find the one stray, the wayward son who returns home, and the one about the woman who scours her home with a fine tooth comb in search of a lost coin. And there was always a party at the end to underscore the occasion. These were all stories about him and about his thing.

Just before he went back to the Father, Jesus gave his followers his Great Commission (Matthew 20:18-20), making his thing the church’s thing, his mission our mission. I would paraphrase this way: “Give yourself to finding people. Point them to me. Share your God-stories with them. Show them how to connect with me and pass along how I taught you to live. Invite them into my community.”

What kind of people are good at pointing others to Christ? They are people that are motivated by a fascination with Jesus. As Bill Hybels puts it, they are people that have “landed on the belief that the God they know is worth knowing.” They’re convinced that there’s absolutely no downside to Jesus at all. None whatsoever! He’s only good! They’re certain that’s it’s in a person’s best interests to get to know him and to follow him. They honestly believe that every person would live a way better life if God’s love, grace and redemption were operating in their lives because that’s what they themselves are experiencing.

Jesus believed this about himself. He said… I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of. (John 10:10)

His first followers believed this too. John wrote… These are written down so you will believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and in the act of believing, have real and eternal life in the way he personally revealed it. (John 20:31)

They considered sharing Jesus the greatest thing they could do for someone so they gave themselves to pointing other people to him. It became their “thing”. And it’s been that way ever since… Jesus followers sharing their faith, actually believing that their loved ones, friends, coworkers, neighbors would be better off if they knew Jesus and were on the receiving end of his loving care.

My prayer is that here at the NBV we get real good at sharing Jesus wherever the opportunity arises, whenever the Spirit prompts us. My prayer is that you get to experience the unmatched – the nothing like it in the world - joy and satisfaction of bestowing the greatest gift in this life on another person… an introduction to Jesus Christ himself.

Doing His thing,
Mike T