The Culture of Hope Founded on Faith
Holy Spirit Calling
Friends of mine celebrated their fifty-eighth wedding anniversary this week. They have been missionaries their entire life together. They served in France for a number of years working with a variety of evangelistic efforts alongside local churches, including literature distribution, special evangelistic events, and a Christian Coffee House. After that, they lived in the United States and worked as administrative personnel for a global missionary organization for more than a decade. Then they spent some years in England ministering to refugees and other new immigrants in their area. When they “retired” they moved to a senior community in Florida where, now in their eighties, they participate in pastoral/evangelistic activities in their neighborhood and Emmaus Bible Course response for prisoners. Everywhere they have lived, they have ministered to whoever God placed in their path.
Like my friends whose gifts of the Holy Spirit – administration, evangelism, and encouragement – have not changed over the years, the expression of each of our gifts of the Holy Spirit modifies with age. The Apostle Paul’s ministry is a good example. After traveling around Judea to preach the Gospel for some years, Paul took three missionary journeys primarily by foot, animal-drawn carts, and sometimes by boat in the low-tech era of the first century. There and back in thousands of miles without the benefit of jet engines or air conditioned vehicles, he traveled between his early forties and mid-fifties.
In Ephesus he prophesied a change of ministry, his acceptance of God’s will for him, and that he would not see the people there again (Acts 20:15-38), a prediction that was confirmed by Agabus in Acts 21:11-14: “And when he was come unto us, he took Paul’s belt, and bound his own hands and feet, and said, ‘Thus says the Holy Ghost, So shall the Jews at Jerusalem bind the man that owns this belt, and shall deliver him into the hands of the Gentiles.’ And when we heard these things, both we, and they of that place, besought him not to go up to Jerusalem. Then Paul answered, ‘What mean ye to weep and to break mine heart? For I am ready not to be bound only, but also to die at Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus.’ And when he would not be persuaded, we ceased, saying, ‘The will of the Lord be done.’”
Not long after his arrival back in Jerusalem Paul was arrested and, preaching the gospel to whoever the Lord placed in his path on the journey, he was eventually sent to Rome for trial where he was free to continue preaching the Gospel in the house in which he lived under house arrest. He was no longer called to missionary journeys, per se, but to “…preaching the kingdom of God, and teaching those things which concern the Lord Jesus Christ, with all confidence, no man forbidding him” (Acts 28:31). Enabled and led by the Holy Spirit, Paul continued to exercise the gifts of the Holy Spirit in him even though his standing as a prisoner of Rome prohibited more journeys. God brought to Paul the people who were ready to hear the message of the cross.
The CMML (Christian Missions in Many Lands) Missionary Prayer Handbook designates missionaries who have retired as “Refocused”. It is an apt moniker for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to continue the form of evangelism they were called to in their youth. I have yet to meet a missionary, or, for that matter, a true Servant of Jesus who maybe never went overseas as a missionary, who considers their latter years as wasted time because the ministry of their youth is no longer possible for them. Sometimes we resist for a while God’s call to a new form of expressing His Holy Spirit’s leading in our lives as we age when instead, like Paul, we need to say “But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy, and the ministry, which I have received of the Lord Jesus, to testify the gospel of the grace of God” (Acts 20:24).
