Sought. Saved. Sent. | Theme for 2022
Most often reading text messages is a casual and cursory task. However, one stood out to me because it came from my assistant pastor, “I’m feeling like our theme for next year needs to have a very missions (put outward) oriented thrust. We have spent a couple of years building a building and stuck indoors with Covid, etc. We need to have something that forces our focus back on the harvest field with no apologies.”
After fifty years of walking with Christ, I recognize when the Holy Spirit is giving me any kind of nudge. It can be from a phone conversation, a personal encounter, a sporting event, or even a text message. What I read immediately resonated with me. Also, the realization that this will not happen on its own. There must be a clear-sounding word that emphasizes that our vision as Christians, and as a church, must be outward if there’s to be true spiritual health. Some of the consequences of Covid and its wake are an unhealthy isolation and a creeping me-focus. These repercussions are silent and subtle, but they surely happen.
So….
SOUGHT is God’s pursuing love, without which none of us would be saved. One of our songs “Redeemed” has lyric that is widespread in lots of Christian hymnologies, “He sought me out when I was lost – I’m redeemed.” If God sought you and I out, then it stands to reason that we don’t belong to ourselves but to Him. He is God and we are not.
SAVED. Jesus’s reason for coming was “to seek and to saved that which is lost.” Saved from what? Well for one, saved from sin, which always creates separation and a sense of lostness. Salvation may sound elementary, but without people being born-again, discipling them becomes nearly impossible. You run into an immediate problem that sin has disrupted moral autonomy. Until the status quo is changed it’s like I’ve often said, “It’s hard to live the Christian life without the Christian LIFE.”
SENT. The natural outgrowth of forgiveness is the realization that we are a “sent people.” Jesus said “go ye into all the world and preach the Gospel.” Your world, the world you inhabit, and the people you live and work with need to hear the Gospel message from a life fully devoted to the One who again and again invited people, “Follow Me.”