3.
It doesn't quite give much depth to the meaning and is quite simple really.
As we come to Christ and acceptance of Him as our Saviour and are reconciled to God through His Son as is stated in 2nd Corinthians "All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:
He gave us a ministry that of reconciliation .Does that not make us all missionaries?
It goes further... that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation. 20 We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. 21 God made him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Using the literal definition of missionary .. a person being sent on a mission...then I believe that we are called as He committed to us the message of reconciliation,Christ's ambassadors,making His appeal through us.
How is your life looking as an ambassador for Christ? Mine fails me many days and I refocus and move on and am guided to my faults from the Holy Spirit. Not in an accusatory you have done this but one of love and gudance to become closer to Him.
It is by His abundant Grace that I am allowed to be here and serving in Cambodia and it is by His Grace I am saved. On a good day I need a swimming pool full of grace and on a bad day an endless ocean. I thank God that He continues to use this broken vessel to further His Kingdom here on earth.
I want to leave you with this quote from Oswald Chambers it is from His devotional Utmost for the Highest from oct 26th and is titled What is a missionary ?the full text is here http://utmost.org/what-is-a-missionary/ but I would like to leave with this quote from the text.
"When looking back on the lives of men and women of God, the tendency is to say, “What wonderfully keen and intelligent wisdom they had, and how perfectly they understood all that God wanted!” But the keen and intelligent mind behind them was the mind of God, not human wisdom at all. We give credit to human wisdom when we should give credit to the divine guidance of God being exhibited through childlike people who were “foolish” enough to trust God’s wisdom and His supernatural equipment."
MY definition of missionary.... a fool for Christ
I pray that I can continue to be "foolish "enough to trust in Him in everything I do
I pray that our lives are missional in every moment of every day and our love instilled in us by Him overflows to those He brings into our lives
God bless kevin
"Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, "