Your Life As A Missionary

19 Jul

Your Life As A Missionary

When David Livingstone began his studies, he planned to go to China as a missionary. He was sent, instead, to Africa. Little did Jim Elliott know that his mission would involve his death, and the subsequent salvation of many Auca Indians as a result. We never know how God will use us or where our daily mission field will be.

In Romans 1:1, Paul declares that he is “a servant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated unto the gospel of Christ.” He further declares his desire to visit Rome to “preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also” (Rom. 1:15). When he finally made it to Rome, however, he was a prisoner, bound in chains. He spent his time in Rome as a prisoner, but with a certain amount of freedom, speaking the gospel to any within hearing distance including guards and magistrates.

Earlier in his missionary travels he had been hindered by the Holy Spirit from the provinces of Asia and Bithynia (Acts 16), and was diverted by a vision towards Macedonia with a clear mandate to preach the gospel there. On his way back to Jerusalem, he did make a brief visit to the synagogue at Ephesus. But it wasn’t until his third missionary journey that God allowed him to preach the gospel to the people in Asia Minor and to establish a number of churches there (Acts 19 and 20).

While all Christians are called to share the gospel of Jesus Christ (2 Tim. 4:1-5), we are not all called to go overseas to minister as missionaries. We are, all of us, missionaries in whatever venue God has chosen to put us. It is not just in our daily walk with the Lord that we are given opportunities to share the gospel with others. And it is not our choice when and by what means God gives us those opportunities. The new thing God brings into each of our lives with a disaster or devastating illness is, in part, a new mission field. We touch the lives of people in places and in ways no one else can. And so we share Christ through the way we live and are sometimes led to share the gospel in words as well. Your life, work, and family dynamic were uniquely assembled through personality, experience, and skill sets by God and meant for His glory, no matter what the hardship.