Lie #3
Adapted, with copy right permission, from the book, The Insanity of Obedience by Nik Ripken
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The phone rang only minutes before midnight. Even though we were sitting right there waiting for this important call, my husband Troy and I allowed another ring before answering, an attempt to not appear as desperate as we felt. I went to reach for it and felt my stomach turn on second thought. What if it was the news we would rather not hear? What if the decision to send our family overseas had been a firm no?
The last six months had been a long journey of application to become missionaries with Cup of Cold Water Ministries. They had interviewed us several times and prayed over us culminating in this night when the final vote would take place.
“Hello,” Troy answered while I leaned in to listen to whatever CCWM Executive Director Dan Hennenfent was about to say.
“Congratulations, you are Cup of Cold Water Ministries’ newest missionaries.”
Both of us expressed our excitement and joy as Dan gave us the next steps we would need to take in order to finally go to where we felt God calling us to live. But soon, the joy turned to a heavy weight of responsibility as an understanding of what had just occurred began to sink it. We got down on our knees to pray but soon ended up on our faces in the living room in silence before the Lord.
My call to missions came at age 11 while I prayed at the altar along with many other summer camp attendees. The banner hanging overhead that night read, “Go, therefore, into all the world.” Growing up in a Christian home, I knew what the Great Commission was, but that night I accepted it as a personal call. I realized I was called to GO, and so at age 11, I began going.
Where?
Anywhere and everywhere.
As a young girl with the limitations of childhood, it was to my friends and family. For a couple of weeks one summer in my teens, it was to the people living in the Robert Taylor projects of Chicago. Another summer was to the people living in a garbage dump on the outskirts of Mexico City. At work it was to the busboy who claimed to be an Atheist yet was always up for a good discussion about God. As a young mother, it was to neighbors gathered in my own back yard who didn’t know Jesus, and now nearly twenty-five years after my call to GO, it was about to be the people living in a slum district of Mongolia.
I’m not saying I didn’t wonder where that call to GO would eventually take me, or that the geography wasn’t on my mind, it’s just that the where never became more important than the call itself which was to disciple people.
Nik Ripken writes about the effects of believing lie #3:
“This third lie is a subtle attempt to avoid personal responsibility. It sounds good at first: If God wants me to go, He can make that clear. But just beneath the surface is another thought: Absent of a special call from God, I have no personal responsibility for the unreached, wherever they happen to reside. ”
The obvious inbalance of where we are focusing our energies to obey the Great commision may have it’s roots right here in lie#3.
“If God wants me to go to the unreached he will give me a special call.”
Nik continues,
“We claim, rightly, that God’s command is vital. We claim, rightly, that God’s call is crucial. It is. But our conversations about the call should be focused on where we have been called rather than on if we have been called. Should I be in Jerusalem? Judea? Samaria? Should I be serving at the ends of the earth? Now that’s a conversation worth having! But have I been called? that question should be settled at the very beginning of our walk with Jesus. God’s Word is clear that we have, in fact, already been called. We have been called to a radical obedience.
“Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.””
“But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.””
I’m reminded of a man who sat in my office at CCWM in the Autumn of 2019, telling me about his call. As a college student, he was certain he was called to the Tibetan people. He began to have a huge passion for the people group which drove him to learn to speak the language, discovering as much as he could about the culture while he applied for his visa to go. But his visa was denied.
Feeling so defeated he recalled walking on his college campus crying out to the Lord, “Did I not hear you?” I thought you called me Tibet. Why can’t I get it in? That was when the Lord gently spoke to him,
“I did not call you to Tibet, I called you to Tibetan people.”
The young man began to look around and notice, for the first time the people group he was called to, were right there on campus. He didn’t have to leave the country to obey God’s call because it was never to A COUNTRY he was called to, it was to a people.
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