When I first met my wife Alice, she had been a professional
artist for around 15 years. Many a day I have stood in the doorway to her
studio, amazed at the images that poured forth from her brushes. She would sit
there, eyes squinting down at the canvas, deftly adding brush strokes as she
happily created new life and redesigned the world with her paints.
Her paintings brought forth life and purpose, and always
seemed to be born out of a mixture of passionate determination and a longing
for beauty. Her brushes were more than artist’s instruments; they were tools
that willed her creations into being and made them into inspiring expressions
of life.
If you know an artist, you know what I’m talking about. You
know the willing of chaos into order; the transformation of nothingness into
beauty and the bringing forth of a dream that lives only within the mind’s eye.
There is often strangeness in the lives of artists, with a
cost to themselves and to those around them. My wife’s commitment to her art
came before everything. She was sold out to it.
This image of the willful, determined artist may not be too
far from the beautiful biblical image of divine mission. God is on mission to
repaint our world, to recreate out of the fallen chunks a new world. The image
of God’s first creation lies in ruins where beauty and goodness once stood. Our
world is not the world God intends, so we engage in mission.
Our mission, the work of joining God in what he is doing, is
our ultimate response to the study of the end-times. Christian mission born out
of a deep conviction of Christ’s return is mission with the power to change the
world and our own lives in the process. Mission
is not merely modifying the world in which we live.
Ours is not the work of pressing out the wrinkles of life,
of giving a nice little religious boost to the lives of those we seek to reach.
God’s mission is to make all things new. In pursuing this mission, we see the
radical commitment God makes to achieve his goal. God is determined, above all
else, to repaint the world and establish an everlasting kingdom of joy.
Ours is the privilege of joining with God in establishing
his reign where it is not present. It is an end-time work that brings the dream
of tomorrow into the nightmare of today. Our mission is about joining God in
making all things new.
Whenever we witness times of suffering and injustice, we are
reminded of the need for mission. Exploitation, abuse and neglect, death and
disease, destruction and displacement—the sufferings we witness in this world
cause us to dream of another one.
Suffering and injustice causes some people to lose faith, to
doubt the existence of a world other than this one. But others have confidence
in the reality of another, better world, and it motivates them to put their
lives on the line. It inspires great acts of bravery and heroism; it drives
them to give their all to reach for the dream. History is filled with the
stories of millions who hoped against hope for another world and who risked
their lives to establish justice in their pursuit of joy.
The dream of God includes us—our efforts, our passions and
our risks—to establish his dream where it is not. The dream of God is not
merely a future reality. It is a reality that we can taste, touch, feel and
live today if only we would reach for it together. Throughout the history of
the church, this has been the foundation of biblical mission.
A dream can literally change the world, as we see with the
dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We often use the concept of a dream to
refer to a wish, a desire or a hope. Real change, however, comes through
conviction, passion, power and action.
Jesus says that the Spirit’s work within him enables him to
proclaim the good news to the poor. The proclamation of God’s good news as we
see throughout the Bible revolves around the work of Christ, his death, his
resurrection, his rule and his return to judge the living and the dead.
However, what made the announcement of Christ so significant was the fact that
it was to the poor. The poor are at the heart of mission because their poverty
is an expression of evil, of brokenness; it is antithetical to the dream of
God.
In the announcement of the dream of God in Jesus’ first
public message, we see the end of time. We see God’s dream unleashed on a world
of pain and suffering. In this, we see the foundation for all missions, a dream
that is beyond justice, beyond salvation, beyond rescue. We see restoration and
flourishing. And in the end, we see the joy of the Lord.
--Russ Sharrock
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"You can't kill a Christian. You can only change his
address." --Pastor Duke Downs
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