God wants us to join him in his work of renewing peoples, places, and things. He wants Christians to renew their cultures to the honor and glory of God. God wants those he’s redeemed to work at transforming this broken world and all its broken structures—families, churches, governments, businesses—in a way that reflects an answer to the Lord’s Prayer: “Your king- dom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). We’re to fill every aspect of the earth with the knowledge of God, our creator and redeemer. We’ve been redeemed by God to become agents of renewal.
In redeeming us, God doesn’t simply rescue us from our sin; he also rescues us to do something—to develop the world around us to the glory of God. Therefore, when God saves us, we no longer have to settle for creating our own transitory meaning. How many of us spend our lives manufacturing our own reasons to live? Maybe it’s raising our kids well so they’ll turn out okay, and if they do, we’ll think our life was worthwhile. There’s so much talk about the need to leave a legacy. I’m not entirely sure what that means, but I don’t like it. My life is not about leaving a legacy that makes people remember Tullian Tchividjian. God’s mission for me and for all of us is so much bigger than that, which is liberating, because it means we don’t have to try to manufacture our own passing legacy.
When God saves us, he gives us a new reason to live that’s so much more significant than our fleeting legacies. We become part of an infinitely larger story than our personal history, larger even than the story of our family and nation. We no longer have to work for our own causes; instead we get to work for God’s universal cause. That’s a mission worth getting on board with!
God’s mission and the direction it’s going are so much bigger than our misconceptions. His mission is the one thing we can give our life to that will never be lacking in fulfillment and will never end.
- Tullian Tchividjian,
Surprised by Grace: God's Relentless Pursuit of Rebels
152, 153
3 comments:
do you have the author's permission to reproduce large portions of this text?
just curious
Not the author, but the publisher.
Intresting excerpt. Maybe this will be my next read. I just finished "Radical." Thank you.
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