Perspectives

My church is offering the Perspectives course this semester and I am so excited to be taking it and exploring more about God’s heart for missions! This is a 15-week course designed to help believers from all different backgrounds to look at the world the way that Christ does, and study the historical and cultural perspectives of missions as well as what God is doing today around the world.

There is a lot of reading for this course! It’s all good stuff, but it takes a lot of time to read and digest what all God is saying through the different articles. Here are a few quotes that stuck out to me from the reading for this week, which all had to do with the theme “The Living God is a Missionary God”.

From the article “Israel’s Missionary Call” by Walter Kaiser
“Israel was to be God’s missionary to the world- and so are we by virtue of our identity as Abraham’s spiritual descendants”.

One of the major points of the readings for this week had to do with God’s pronouncement of blessing on Abraham in Genesis 12. The blessing of God was fulfilled immediately in Isaac and his descendants, and then the intermediate fulfillment came with the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus. The ultimate fulfillment will come when Christ returns and the great multitude praises God for eternity.

From the article “Blessing as Transformation” by Sarita Gallagher and Steven Hawthorne
“To be God’s blessing among all the peoples will require our utmost effort somehow blended with the exertion of God’s miraculous, life-giving power.”

We are a part of the blessing and promise God made to Abraham. Abraham’s promise was that he would be the father of many nations, and this was both in the sense of children and grandchildren and so on, but also in the sense that Christians one day would be counted as part of the family of Abraham. We have the responsibility to share the good news of Christ as we grow the family of God.

Those are just a couple of thoughts from this last week’s reading. Tonight is our first actual class session, and we will have a guy from the Traveling Team come and share. It should be excellent!