Radical

I'm reading the book Radical by David Platt and I came across this today. It's a lady sharing about her experience in Guatemala (of all places!).

"I made the decision to go to Guatemala after seeing in God's Word that He commands us to go and make disciples of all nations. I was going ot of obedience, not because I had a heart for missions or a passion for the people of Guatemala. I want you to understand that I'm a wife, mother, and part-time psychologist--I'm not a missionary, and I'm certainly not a preacher. I was just being minimally obedient to what I believed God's Word tells all of us to do. Praise God He isn't minimally faithful and doesn't minimally bless us."

This weirdly relates to me. Although...I usually consider myself to have at least some kind of a heart for missious, this is kind of my reasoning behind spending my summer in Guatemala. I almost get...frustrated? or maybe that's not the right word...but something along that line, when people are so shocked that I'm going to spend TWO MONTHS in another country. I almost tell them...C'mon...two months? You're impressed by two months? That's not even a third of a year. Granted, a lot of things can happen in two months, and the thought of being somewhere so unknown is scary, I'll admit it. I just strongly feel that this is something I should just do...out of obedience. The fact that spending a summer serving another nation is unusual...makes me sad. I wish that we, as the body of Christ, were more moved to make His glory known throughout the nations.

I'm by no means perfect. I mean, it's taken about 19 years for me to realize and start to understand how important this is. God created us for the purpose of glorifying Him. His salvation is the gift that He gives us to allow us to better serve that purpose. We talk a lot about God's grace, which is wonderful, but if we don't also talk about His glory in the same amount, I think that we are not going to have a balanced idea of who God is. God commands us to spread His glory to all the nations. Something that I have recently been made aware of is that this is more than a calling. It's an actual command. How many times do we ignore this?

My prayer is that we can join together and obey this command. Let us place a high importance on making much of God, instead of making much of ourselves.