Anchors or Sails?

I know I’m probably not documenting this correctly, but I want to share a quote with you from a book by Erwin McManus called “An Unstoppable Force.” Read the quote then stay with me …

“Several years ago my wife, Kim talked me into going to The Price is Right. I’m really not a big fan of the show, but I’m a great fan of my wife, so I went. We stood in line to get tickets to stand in line to get into the show. This was an all-day affair. If I’d had to stand in line for thirty minutes, I’d have been irritated, but this was close to five hours.

Several hours into the process, we were sitting next to a family from the former Soviet Union. You can only go so long without talking to the people next to you, so we finally stuck up a conversation. The person next to me described her journey as an extraordinary opportunity to come from a place like Uzbekistan and be in Los Angeles. As I talked with her about her spiritual background, I led into sharing with her about the saving grace of Jesus Christ.

She asked the question that so many have asked, “How can I believe in a God who only comes to people in America and not to people around the world? What about the person in India or China who has never heard?” I looked at her and asked if she felt that God loved her more than He loved the individual in India that she was concerned about, and she said, “No, that’s the whole point.”

Then I summarized for her what was so obvious for me in that moment. God had brought me from El Salvador via Miami, to throughout the East Coast, to be sitting in Los Angeles in line at The Price is Right to see a show that I didn’t even want to go to. And here she was from the former Soviet Union, having lived in a small town in a nation-state whose name I could not pronounce. If God could bring me from one part of the world and her from another part of the world and move us to the exact same place at the exact same moment so that she could learn that Jesus Christ died for her, didn’t she think that God was both creative and powerful enough to bring life to everyone who would cry out to Him? There in line at The Price is Right, her heart softened and she turned her life over to Jesus Christ.

Now watch the lesson we can learn here…

The world looks different when you understand yourself to be a child of the wind. You realize that when your sail is up, God’s wind blows you to places you never imagined, at just the right moment for someone else. The apostolic ethos (an actual cultural environment driven by the NT mission of reaching others) is an environment in which all of God’s people are guided by the wind. If all are not apostles, at least all are together on the apostolic mission. At Mosaic (his church) we say it like this: Mission is why the church exists.”

So many times we talk about being anchored and I agree that God’s Word is our foundational anchor. So, I’m not addressing that. I am, however, addressing the fact that life becomes an anchor. Have you evaluated much of what you do and what your family takes part in? I haven’t done enough of that. The trappings, not necessarily bad things, of this world weigh us down. Especially when they keep us from having the time, finances, or insight to be in tune with God and His desires for us.

We need to raise our sails! Allow the Spirit to carry us and lead us into what God has us here for! Would we have been looking for an opportunity to share Jesus with that lady in line or would we have missed the moment? Fresh wind in our sails is freeing. Much more so than dragging around an anchor!

Be free in Christ!

“For if we live by the Spirit, let us also walk by the Spirit,” Galatians 5:25.

¹¹Command and teach these things. ¹² Let no one despise you for your youth, but set the believers an example in speech, in conduct, in love, in faith, in purity. ¹³Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to exhortation, to teaching. ¹⁴Do not neglect the gift you have, which was given you by prophecy when the council of elders laid their hands on you.¹⁵Practice these things, immerse yourself in them, so that all may see your progress. ¹⁶ Keep a close watch on yourself and on the teaching. Persist in this, for by so doing you will save both yourself and your hearers.

1 Tim. 4:11-16

This entry was posted on February 23, 2010 at February 23, 2010 and is filed under Devotion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.