Hello ICC Family!
“God… wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth. For there is one God and one mediator between God and mankind, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all people.”
1 Timothy 2:3-6
What a beautiful, chilly fall day! For some reason it is bringing back a lot of memories for me. Chilly Halloween hayrides as a kid. Attending football games at Kansas State University (and watching them lose.) Allergy attacks after raking mountains of dusty leaves. Walking my daughters to kindergarten in China and stomping on crackly leaves. Even just last year – going up to a place called Bald Rock north of Greenville and getting a panoramic view of the leaves changing color. A day like this… when the change of seasons is so clearly evident, accompanied by such bright and distinctive impacts on your senses of sight, smell, and touch, can trigger a lot of memories and feelings.
And typically, we get to experience these seasonal changes regularly – they automatically occur every year, and that dependability is reassuring and even comforting. But of course, the seasons are not the same everywhere. We lived in Thailand for 10 years, where we didn’t really have a winter, so there wasn’t an autumn either. No leaves falling. No football. No crisp chill in the air. It made me feel out of sync the whole time we lived there, even though it was our home.
One of the things that should be automatic for us as Christians is something that we have talked about all year and Pastor Jimmy mentioned in his sermon last Sunday. That is that believers should be all about telling others about Christ. When we have recognized Jesus and know how valuable the kingdom is… we should be so changed that we cannot help but tell others. Just like Abraham in Genesis 12, we have been blessed so that we can be a blessing. And we want to tell everyone – from those in our family and the people we see and work with every day, to those that speak another language on the other side of the world. The Great Commission applies to all believers and calls us to reach all peoples. So, talking about and doing missions should be regular, automatic, dependable and comforting to us. And when we are not talking about it and praying for it and doing it… it should feel as strange to us as a year without seasons! We should feel out of sync!
In order to encourage and challenge our thinking about missions, we are going to take the next four weeks to work through the book of Jonah. There are some that say Jonah was the greatest missionary that ever lived. Yet others would say he was one of the worst. And then I am sure there a lot of people that have no idea what Jonah has to do with missions, because they only think of him in regards to the story of the whale. We are going to get to the bottom of those things, but even more importantly… in this story we are going to see the call of God very clearly – a call to enter and serve in the Kingdom and make it a part of our rhythms and seasons of life. I hope to see all of you there on Sunday!
Praying for you all!
Pastor Aaron
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