celebrating an unexpected anniversary

On this day in 2006, I packed every inch of my Ford Escort with belongings and drove nine hours from home. Just a day earlier, I had been a youth pastor and a standing member of district youth and camp boards. The church that employed me threw a going away party and sent me with a blessing. There were no hard feelings in my departure -- they wanted me to stay. But I had a growing discontent that needed scratched.

Five years later, I confess how little I knew then. As I walked away from that last traditional church, my ambition was finding the generation that had left. I never asked God to call me into a reformation work. If my twenties taught me one overriding theme about God, it’s this: He will work beyond my motivations and expectations to place me exactly where He wants me. And there is no such thing as coincidence.

From playing dominoes with ex-cons, to caring for drunk co-workers, to understanding the origins and pain of homosexuality, my year in Kansas City was a lesson in reality. This reality has real wounds, real pain, and real iniquity. It does not pretend to be squeaky clean or hide itself behind its Sunday bests. Reality is a mass of broken people headed straight to an eternity without their Creator.

My ministry background sheltered me from this reality. I had done my best to equip my teenagers for this world within our walls, but by asking them to meet me in retreat, I was part of the problem. They were good kids, and I’m pleased to say that nearly all of them still love the Lord. But I prepared them for common living and nobody faulted me for it.

So while I left harboring aspirations to begin the next great twenty-something ministry, it didn’t take long to realize that my people wouldn’t be interested. They had all participated in the show. They needed to know the Man.

Fast-forward through God messing up my agenda with prophetic words, spiritual freedom, power encounters, and a bajillion calls to obedience. Pass through His healing hands in Missouri, Wyoming, and back home in Indiana. A lot has transpired in these five years, but I’d rather dwell on the transformation than the events that led me there. Don’t get me wrong: I enjoy sharing the events, and my testimony must bear witness of these divine meetings with God. But nostalgia doesn’t serve me while I’m uncomfortably being asked to wait -- I feel far too removed from those encounters. For encouragement, I must turn to the fruit that remains. And these are the results of my time at His feet:

• I no longer have the right to be offended. Talk about a work of the Spirit. To take offense to one’s actions, it requires me to consider myself the object of their contempt. But now that I belong to God and serve as His vessel, there are no words or actions that offend me. I see every irreverent act as a product of a life without Christ. If I can only serve righteously with the presence of His Spirit, how can I expect the lost to live according to the truth in their flesh? Rather, by the very nature of being light, their darkness is exposed without my offense. And if the offense is against God rather than myself, I think He knows how to defend Himself without my help.
• I no longer have the right to be frustrated. Frustration is caused by expectation. When I expect certain results in my ministry, I open myself up to the weight of frustration. God intends me to place my unseen hope in Him and not in the fulfillment of my own plan. When He offers His promises, I can take them to the bank. When I fill in the blanks for their fulfillment, I am certain to face frustration.
• I have learned to love from the overflow. How easily we operate according to the lie that we can love apart from Him! And I will tell you, I never knew how to love my fellow man until I knew the love that surpasses knowledge. When my love runs short, it is always because I have disconnected myself from the Source. When I am apart from God, my “love” is selfish, vain, and jealous. When I am walking in the Spirit, my love is concerned solely with the spiritual well-being of its recipient, even at the cost of our own relationship.
• I have learned how the Body was meant to operate. I have been among a brotherhood whose spiritual gifts were not just recognized, but trusted and utilized. This has certainly been the hardest part of moving back to Indiana. When I interact with others that have left the church, they openly desire this functionality, but I have only seen or experienced it in St. Louis. While I would love to fly people across the country to this one location, God wants the local expressions of His Bride to toddle in spiritual gifts, so that they can learn to trust and depend on the people they do ministry with every day. The only testimony and encouragement I can give is that it is possible, and God wants it. We’ve grown so accustomed to the corruption of the church that I hear people writing phrases like, “Well, the church will always be broken because it’s made of broken people, so we need to be satisfied and make due with what we have.” This is a lie. Christ desires His Bride to be presented as a holy assembly without blemish, but this requires us to meet with those faithful to living for Him, rather than offering a thousand levels of commitment to fill our assembly. There is the Gospel of Truth and there is disobedience. We need to stop creating third and fourth options and calling them Christ. Does this mean that the people within the church will be perfect? No. But the work of consecration should be present in each member of the Body, and through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, His Bride will not allow the corruption of a few to corrupt the whole.
• I have learned of the power and authority we have in Christ Let me be blunt for a moment: if you are living your Christian walk without the authority of Christ, you are doing little more than “playing house” with spiritual theories. We must come to the place where we realize that we have a real enemy, and the strength we have been given to fight is the power of His blood. God does not intend for us to retreat at the sight of demonic confrontation, nor are we expected to defend against the enemy through our own lacking will power. The one offensive weapon He has given us is the living Word, because it is His Truth that tears down the lies, strongholds, and principalities of the enemy. Though Satan and his minions know the law that brings judgment upon mankind, they cannot comprehend the work of God’s grace and the power of His Son’s blood. These are spiritual truths that cannot be grasped by those subject to the judgment of the Law, in which Satan is included. God is not one side of a two-sided spiritual coin -- there is no yin and yang according to the powers of righteousness and evil. All things are subject to Him, and our enemy knows this. He has granted us this power that we may also subject darkness to the authority of His light. If we do not engage in the spiritual world in this way, we may hold the deposit of salvation, but we are allowing the enemy to control us according to his deceptions even though he knows the real score. Do not be rendered useless by the thorns of Satan’s lies, for God has given us the privilege of knowing Him personally and intimately -- ultimately, that we might become holy vessels.

I know how Satan would have me be discouraged by my current state of waiting. Many days, I look at my life -- my location, my job, my relationships, and my ministry -- and think to myself, “Wow, five years have passed and I’ve ended up in the same place, without my former friendships or credibility.” I gain this frustration when I evaluate my life according to my own expectations of how God should be moving and what I feel I deserve. The truth is, my life should be less about what I deserve and more about the God that desires my entire being. Since day one, God has gone through desperate measures to bring me into His fold. Regardless of my willingness to stray or hide behind my insecurity, He keeps tossing me back into the fight for souls, because He cannot be argued with about His anointing. I cannot say to God that I am not good enough. I cannot tell Him that I am a failure. My Creator looks at me with loving rebuke, and says, “You cannot tell Me how I would choose to use my lump of clay. And I choose you.”

In terms of eternity, those people who did the greatest things for God were the people who weren't trying to do anything at all. They were just simply being obedient. Those are the people God can use. And I want to be one of them. If God should use me, that would be great but if He doesn't there is a very interesting thing you can do. In the gospel of Mark or in any of the four gospels, you go through the gospels and you say, what people are absolutely essential to this story? So Mary is essential to the story because Mary had to give birth to Jesus. And you could say, well someone else could have. But let's say that if she wouldn't have done it then the story wouldn't have happened. So, you have God who chose to become flesh, you have Mary who gave Him flesh, you have Jesus who was God in the flesh or who was the child of Mary and God, you have Pontius Pilate who had, in an artificial sense, the power to kill Christ, you have Judas Iscariot who betrayed Christ and handed him over to the bad guys, you have whoever it was that nailed Him up to the cross. Out of those people that God used to accomplish His will in the gospel, only a couple of them were very nice people. Most of them were bad people. We all want to be useful to God. Well, its no big deal. God can use anybody. God used Nebuchadnezzar. God used Judas Iscariot. Its not a big deal to be used by God and the shocking thing in the book of Mark, and the reason why it is so shocking is because Mark is the briefest of all the gospels but he has these terrific little details and one of the little details is that it says, "and Jesus called to Him those that He wanted." And you realize that out of the twelve people that He wanted, only one was essential to His goal in coming to earth. The other eleven people were useless to Christ but they were wanted by Christ. And I kind of go, I would much rather have God want me than have God use me.

--Rich Mullins