My father’s favorite Bible story was found in Joshua 14. This was after the Israelites had crossed the Jordan and the tribes were receiving their inheritance. During this time, Caleb, the other spy who had delivered a positive message about the Promised Land, asked Joshua to give him the land Moses had promised him after he remained faithful to God. Some translations have Caleb saying, “Give me that mountain.” My dad loved that story.
The more I read the passage, the more interested I became. Moses tells Caleb he will inherit the land where his feet had tread. In other words, the prophecy about Caleb was that he would one day live on the land where he had already walked. The place Caleb would settle his family would be a place Caleb knew best. He had already been to the place God was sending him.
This got me thinking. What if, as Christ followers, we were already where God wanted us to be. We always assume our mission field will be on the other side of the world. Missions, by our definition, means getting on an airplane or at least driving a long way in a car. What if we’re wrong? What if our mission field is right where we tread our feet?
Most of the people who encountered Jesus didn’t join the disciples in following Him, they stayed home. One of the stories is almost heartbreaking. The Gerasene demoniac, known as the guy who lived in the tombs, cutting himself and screaming throughout the night, tried to get in the boat to follow Jesus. Jesus wouldn’t let him go with them, he told the now healed demoniac to go home and tell the people all about what God had done for him. Imagine that, Jesus told the man to go back to the very people who had mistreated him.
All of us know that the hardest place to be a Christian is at home. These people see us at our best and worst, they see us when we’re like Jesus and they see us when we are most unlike Jesus. For most of us, going somewhere else and starting over is the easiest way to be a missionary.
Most of us don’t get the call to go away, most of us are called to live where we are – to be the salt and light right in our home. Yet, for some reason, we always seem to think that if God is going to do something remarkable like build a great church, set up a child care center, build a hospital God is going to do that someplace far away. For some reason, God never does great things where we are.
What if it’s our own unbelief that doesn’t invite God to work in our communities and towns? What if God never does great things because we never ask him to do anything in the places where we live? Maybe we never ask Him the ways to love people at their point of need and through that introduce them to Christ. What would happen if we started prayer walks in our neighborhoods? What if we walked around our communities, downtowns and school campuses looking for places where God is already working? What if we found neighbors who were interested in a Bible study group and hosted our neighbors in our homes?
What if we volunteered to tutor in the neighborhood school and through that, found out about the challenges of the people who live in our communities? What if we talked to our local governmental leaders and simply asked, “What can we do to help?” What if every member of every church went to the end of their driveways, looked up and down their street and understood they were sent to be missionaries to their own neighbors?
You are a missionary sent to reach your community. Where are you going to start, who are you going to try to connect with? Keep your eyes wide open to what doors God is opening up.
Well, go ahead and get going. You and I are the missionaries to places we call home.
