God's Mission 

Have you gotten the sense that contemporary Christian music and mainstream Christianity are hyper-focused on God’s love for the sinner? If you do a quick google search on today’s top Christian songs, the lyrics are riddled with a reminder of God’s unconditional divine sacrificial love—love that helps us overcome difficult situations and internal conflict. These messages have a proper time and place; however, there is another side to God’s love that needs to be addressed—the mission. Could it be that modern-day Christians have grown so accustomed to God’s love that it has stagnated their spiritual growth? Have we come to a point where God’s love is another miscellaneous tool for self-indulgence and improvement—another tactic to make us feel better? I can’t answer these questions for you, but I can answer them myself. Yes, to a certain degree, I have allocated God’s love to a therapeutic remedy to ease my guilt-ridden conscious. Why am I open about this? Because “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).

As Jesus was talking to Peter, He asked Him three times if he loved Him, and three times Peter said yes. What followed was a mission, “feed my sheep.” God’s love is not a therapeutic tactic of convenience; God’s love is the supernatural cure to a selfish heart that transforms us into Children of God, children with a mission. As children, we imitate our Father (Ephesians 5:1), and what is our Father’s business? “The reason the Son of God appeared was to destroy the devil’s work” (1 John 3:8). The mission is to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and in doing so, we destroy the devil’s work in the lives of those around us. What an amazing display of God’s love! There will be times when we need to be reminded of God’s love for us; that is a guarantee; however, we should never allow ourselves to believe that we are the only recipients of God’s love. People are dying to know what we know; scratch that, people are dying to know Who we know. Let us take the love that God has deposited into us and share it with a broken world.