You Are Fully Seen & Fully Loved

Sermon for December 29, 2024

It is the last Sunday of 2024. We are at the dusk of this year and nearly at the dawn of 2025.

Let me ask you… How has 2024 been for you? What’s one word that you might use to describe how you are doing and where you are at the end of 2024.

In a moment we are going to dive into the Scripture passage that ________ read, but I thought I would start with a little bit of personal testimony about some recent events.

If I had to find one word to describe how I’m doing at the end of 2024, I would probably use the word invigorated.

That’s because, at one point back in 2023, I had been thinking about wrapping things up at the Mission.

Not retiring from ministry per se, but after many years here (I started here in 1985), perhaps it was time for me to move on.

And so that was at the very least in the back of my mind when my wife and I decided to move to Frankford, which is about two hours east of Toronto, just north of Trenton Ontario.

I had vaguely been thinking of the fall of 2025 as the time that I might bring my time here to an end.

But then, God spoke. Do you have many of those experiences? You’re working on a plan, you’re thinking about your future, you’re doing your level best to make good plans for the future, and then God speaks. And he stops you in your tracks.

Well, as I mentioned to a few of you, that is what has happened to me.

When I came to the mission in 1985, it was to have some experience in Mission life for a few months, on my way to serve as a missionary in Africa, namely in Liberia and the Ivory Coast.

That was my plan, but then God spoke. He spoke through people, he spoke through the people that I never imagined he would speak through, and he said “stay“.

“This is where you are to serve Me. This community is My community, and you are to love and serve My community”.

I didn’t really like that at the time. Sometimes when God speaks, it is not what you want to hear.

But over the summer of 1985 and then the fall of that same year, I came to accept that this was my new thing…

To serve in Toronto, still as a missionary in some capacity, but to serve here, in the city that I grew up in.

So it was not my call to come to the Mission. I had other plans, but God had his plans and purposes for my life.

Skipping an awful lot of details, including the fact that I met the woman who would become my wife, Barbara, in 1986 while serving on the summer team in our Evergreen location,

for many years, decades actually, when I have had opportunity or invitations to serve elsewhere, and when that had some definite appeal to it, it never took more than 90 seconds of prayer to have a clear sense that I was to say no to those opportunities.

The thought in my head was: “why would God be calling me to go to some other place in Ontario or in Canada to love and serve some other group of people, when he has brought me to this place to love and serve people?“

The only reason might be better pay or more future opportunities. And so the impractical way that my brain works, that never struck me as having any merit.

So although I might have been tempted, my clear sense when given those opportunities was that God was still calling me to be here at the Mission.

Then more recently after thinking for some time that I might be, as I said, wrapping up at the end of 2025, I received, through numerous sources…

That is always how God speaks…Through a multiplicity of voices and influences…

What I received was this simple idea: it’s not my call. It’s not up to me. It’s up to God.

I shared this with my wife, and although she like me had been open to the idea of me leaving at the end of 2025,

she then fully supported my decision to stay, to let it be “not my call“, but rather God’s call and timing whenever it may be that I would finish up here.

So, for better for worse, I plan to be around until God makes it clear that he wants me to serve elsewhere in some capacity. In my mind that could be many years.

I have no idea. That’s a little bit of my recent testimony. So in short, I’m not going anywhere.