I leave to Go on a Mission today
By David Alan BlackThe Covenant News ~ March 01, 2008
If I ask myself what I desire more than anything else on earth, it is this: to feel that I am nothing, know nothing, can do nothing apart from my Savior – and to know, in addition, the joy that the angels must feel when they see a sinner come to repentance.
How ashamed I am of my sense of contempt for prideful, smug, self-centered, comfort-prone Christians when I am the chief of sinners in this regard. Books, lectures, sermons – these are nothing when compared to the salvation of the lost. Any sacrifice is worth achieving it. I am just beginning to understand the value of suffering – its power to free and purge.
I am learning how to go the way of the cross, as the Jim Elliotts before me have done. Only let the cross conquer! – let it issue in a kenosis, an emptying that assumes the form of a lowly servant, that repudiates a life of ease and self-aggrandizement, that proves that the Christian faith is genuine.
And by “the faith” I do not mean modern success-driven evangelicalism, which is our unofficial civic “religion,” nor do I mean the new statist exegesis of Scripture that appeals to the Old Testament political arrangements as normative for the modern state.
Christianity is not about running the world. It is about the out-working of God’s power in one’s life. It is about reflecting the love of Christ by sacrificing self for the blessing of others. A Christian is a Christ-ian! Oh, Father, let me be a Christian!