MESSAGE BEARER MEMO

By Ryan Shaw

These bi-weekly memos are to provide encouragement, exhortation, and spiritual nourishment in the lives of those who have signed the Message Bearer Creed as you prepare to serve the Lord globally, and are influencing your peers with this vision.

Taking Jesus’ Yoke for Global Harvest

Have you ever asked yourself the question, “Why haven’t we been able to reach the world for the sake of Jesus Christ yet?” With all the time, energies, and financial resources of 2000 years of church history this task is still uncompleted. It is documented that the Coca-cola company has gone into more unreached places today then the church of Jesus Christ has. What is behind such a shortcoming today?

Serving In Our Own Strength

Obviously there is a multiplicity of answers and I would never try to minimize this complex reality to a single issue. But I am convinced from the Scriptures and from my experience that one rather large looming issue facing the body of Christ is that we’ve tried to fulfill the Great Commission in our own strength. I sometimes marvel at the range of new large-scale strategies, high-tech resources, or cutting edge means that are proposed by various denominations or streams today as the latest tool for reaching the world. We need strategies which the Holy Spirit gives us and new resources to communicate the message effectively. However, if these are what we are placing our hope upon for seeing the world reached, I believe we are in error.

We’ve tried tirelessly to work harder and faster for the sake of the lost around the world. Again, this is not a bad thing in itself, but we are misguided if we think our own efficiency and good intentions will win the unreached to Jesus. As a result we have many in the church who are burned out, cynical, and skeptical about the possibility of fulfilling the Great Commission. They have pursued these ends with their whole heart and with noble motives, but have come up short. I am convinced that Jesus has a better, more effective, and all around easier way that He is waiting on us to fully buy into and receive, instead of continuing along doing His work in our way.

Is God Really Our Promise Keeper?

God’s promise throughout Scripture is with a view towards global harvest and every person that is alive today having the opportunity to respond to His ravished love and offer of new life in a culturally relevant way. When someone who is trustworthy makes us a promise we usually believe that they will make good on that promise. Do we trust God as the ultimate promise-keeper? His promise was never intended to be met through any way other then through the witness of His ambassadors, you and me. God has promised something and we are the ones He uses to accomplish this promise. Thus it makes incredible sense to look to His hand to give us everything we could possibly need to fulfill His own promise.

God – The Ultimate Giver

James 1:17 celebrates, “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning.” The very essence of the nature of God is that He is a tremendous giver. The most generous giver the planet has ever seen. This is the core of who He is. He demonstrated this to the highest degree imaginable through giving His own Son Jesus to die in the place of all humanity as the only adequate sacrifice for sin. Colossians tells us that Jesus is the express image of the invisible God (Colossians 1:15). Everything we see in the character and nature of Jesus, we can ascribe in personality and character traits to the Father. Consider the most generous person you know and God the father exceeds their generosity one hundred times. As a result of this, we can believe that He will give us all we need and so much more to adequately fulfill this promise of global harvest, which He has given to us in the first place (not the other way around). Anyone who is His child can come to Him expecting, and in faith anticipating, that they will receive all that they need to effectively be used by His hand to serve and bring forth mountains of fruit in His global harvest.

Love Because of God’s Love

It is a similar concept to the right understanding of God’s love. We know that we love Him only because He first loved us. He has shed His love abroad in our hearts. It takes God, who first initiates with us, to love God. The only way that each of us stand as a person who loves God is because He first poured His love upon us and overwhelmed us with the truth of His unconditional love toward us. As a response we begin to grow in love for this wonderful God who would love us in such a remarkable way.

Receiving His Impartation

Similarly, as we look to respond to God’s passion for the nations, we can only do so by first receiving from His hand a deep love for the world. As we receive this love, we can trust him to equip us by His Spirit with those things that will be useful in our particular situations and according to our particular calling in His harvest. We can do this without fret, worry, or striving because nothing of any spiritual value will be accomplished in the first place unless God deposits, equips, and imparts the necessary spiritual items within us to use for His purpose. This should bring us incredible freedom to be able to simply rest and trust in His ability to accomplish His promise through us, not on our own ability to do anything for Him. This is God’s work and must be done in God’s way and that way is to get us into the place of resting in Him, positioning ourselves to receive of His good gifts, receiving them and then faithfully moving out to steward and use them well in His harvest.

Jesus’ Way – Taking Up His Yoke

Matthew 11:28-30 unveils a bit of this for us as Jesus declares to the crowds, “Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” What is Jesus getting at in this Scripture? I believe it is two fold. At the core it seems that He is advocating a life of supernatural rest that He alone unleashes upon the heart of one who comes before Him and completely gives himself unto Him. He is calling us out of the striving, clawing, competing, fretting, worrying, endless strategizing, and subsequent bondage and into the place of serving Him from a posture of spiritual rest and contentment. We might still work as hard as we did before, but our perspective and means of doing our work has dramatically shifted. No longer do we work from a heroic motive of accomplishing something great for God, but from a place of allowing Him to dictate the specifics of the work and to give us everything we need spiritually to be fruitful in the work.

This place of taking His yoke of rest does not mean ceasing to work, but it does mean ceasing to strive. For when Jesus’ yoke is upon us, the hardest task seems truly easy. Why? Because He will never call us to do something that He doesn’t empower us to finish effectively. Why fret then? If His plan for us is huge, then He will provide everything we need to see the huge plan brought to pass. Most of us sense a call of God and begin to worry, fret, and stress about various elements of it, trying to figure out how we will do this in the natural realm. All the while, Jesus is waiting for us to surrender this yoke of self that we’ve put on and which is weighing us down, and take up His yoke of trusting Him to give us all we need - same work, same degree of difficulty, but a totally different posture before the Lord. It is resting in His yoke with the knowledge that in ourselves we can produce nothing of lasting spiritual fruit. It is resting with the expectancy that He will download upon us all that is needed to see global harvest accomplished in our generation.

Following the Lamb

Secondly, Jesus is showing us in this Scripture a model of the nature He would have us live with in the nations. That of a gentle and meek person. Jesus displayed the greatest gentleness that was ever seen in a human being. He was completely at ease and equally gentle with everyone He encountered. God is calling us to embrace this gentleness as well. It is not accidental or somehow arbitrary that Jesus is symbolized as a lamb in the gospels. A lamb is gentle, lowly in rank, tender, and this is the model God would have us follow. 1 John 2:6 calls us to a high standard when it states, “He who says he abides in Him ought himself to walk just as He walked.” He is meek and we must receive from His hand the spiritual help to similarly walk in this meekness. This is not weakness, however. The champion of the world, the King of Kings, the all-powerful creator of the universe chose, out of the countless examples He could have used, to describe Himself as a lamb. What a powerful statement He made by doing so!

Prayer: Lord Jesus, I confess to you my attempts at trying to accomplish your call upon my life in my own human strength. You never intended this to be so. I need you and your yoke desperately. Holy Spirit, I ask for your help and power to enable me to turn from my own strategies, strivings, and attempts to serve you and posture myself to receive from the heart of Jesus all I need to fulfill your mandate upon my life. You are the only one who can bring this to pass. I take up your yoke which is easy and your burden which is light as I seek to serve you most effectively. Use my life to bring forth massive amounts of fruit Lord. You are the promise keeper and I affirm that you will give me every spiritual need that I have to do the role you’ve ordained me to be in from the foundations of the earth!”