The Sleeping Giant Series

God wants to empower us to impact the world for Him so that it reflects His Kingdom.

The problem is we tend to look at our community and complain about how terrible it has gotten, more drug and alcohol problems, more broken marriages, undisciplined children, houses not being cared for, people far from God. But it is our responsibility for expanding the kingdom through the power of God’s Holy Spirit.

How do we do this? Ask yourself, what burden has God placed on your heart? What is wrong in our community or our world that doesn’t reflect God’s heavenly kingdom? Whatever unsettles you is God’s invitation to join him in his kingdom work. Is it the environment? Perhaps you have a passion and desire to help care for it. Perhaps the desire of your heart is to help hurting people find healing. God’s invitation may be through the medical realm, or by praying for healing for others. Some may have a heavy burden for those who go without food in our community or around the world, or maybe you feel strongly about those who have disease like AIDS and malaria which is killing over a million people each year (Circuit Rider, July/August 2007, ). Others feel for the children in our community and want them to experience love which they may not get at home. Each one of these is very important to God, when we participate in these ways we are an extension of God’s hand into the world to make it look more like God’s kingdom.

For Martin Luther King Jr. racial injustice was his burden, and he had a dream for all people regardless of gender or color living in peace together. For Mother Theresa it was the sick, the overlooked, the marginalized of society. She got down into the worst of the worst to be God’s expression of love to the poorest in India. Jimmy Carter had a desire to see every person have a home and so he joined Habitat for Humanity and put all of his heart into it. Billy Graham had a passion for people to know Jesus and live forever with him. What burden has God placed on your heart? What is it in our community or world situation that doesn’t reflect heaven? That’s your invitation. Some people are looking for a bright flashing sign in the sky which says go this way or do this? But God’s invitation usually comes through a burden on your heart.

However we need to remember that the centrally most important part of God’s kingdom is for every person to be in a saving relationship with God through Jesus Christ. Our service or whatever burden God gives us becomes an extension of helping others know God. It is good to build the kingdom by helping the environment, or healing ministry, or feeding hungry people because we are making earth reflect heaven, but according to the Bible the most important goal for us should always be people coming to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ and following him. Because we won’t be on this earth forever, at least not the way it is now.

What burden in our world has God placed on your heart, how will you respond to it, and how can you use it to help bring people to Him. Because one day Jesus will come back and he will gather the elect, those who are written in the Lamb’s book of Life.