God’s Mission
5 min read
19 We also have the prophetic message as something completely reliable, and you will do well to pay attention to it, as to a light shining in a dark place, until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts.
— 2 Peter 1:19
And we still have that same prophetic message today. But it is not just the Old Testament that Peter is talking about. He wrote, “And I will make every effort to see that after my departure you will always be able to remember these things” (verse 15). It is that effort that led to the writing of the Gospel of Mark and then the others.
The word of God is “completely reliable,” which means that we can completely depend on it to be true because we can completely depend on it as having come from God Himself. What else in this entire universe can we say that about?
But most Christians today don’t “pay attention to it” as if it is completely true. They take the parts that they like and the parts that they need to help them cope on any given day and then forget about the rest of it as if it was never written.
And that is why it so critically important to be constantly reminded (verses 12-13) about the core message of the Bible. The core message of Scripture is not so much about our salvation in Christ Jesus as it is about God’s mission in Christ Jesus.
God’s mission is: To fill the earth with His glory in Jesus’s name through God-fearing, God-honoring, God-worshiping, God-loving communities and families—the church.
Our salvation is the result of God’s mission—not vice versa. The difference is subtle, and so it becomes very easy for us to miss the point and lose our focus on the mission. And that’s the problem.
The number one problem with Christianity today is that Christians act as if God’s mission ends with “my” salvation. But all that does is promote the selfishness that led to the fall (Genesis 3).
It is not as difficult as the devil would make it out to be for us to regain our focus on God’s mission. Regaining our focus would require Christians to reorient and reprioritize our lives around God’s agenda rather than on our own. All the things that we do—education, career, relationships, vacations, leisure—we could continue to do them. But is it so impossible to reorient and reprioritize those things that we do already around God’s agenda rather than our own?
When God’s agenda becomes our agenda in all the things that we do anyway, that is where we will find the fullness of life (John 10:10), because we will find ourselves living in the kingdom of God.
Father, You are good. And You want what is best for us. And yet we always settle for less things—things that may be good but not the best. Open our eyes and our hearts to hear Your word and know Your love, so that we might live abundantly in Your kingdom. In Jesus’s name. Amen.