Sent: One Spirit, One Mission, One Kingdom

In a previous post I wrote about how, as the Father sent Jesus, so Jesus has sent us: to be his agents, to do what he did, to join him in his rescue mission to the world. Death, the result of sin, had reigned in creation since Genesis 3. But now someone has risen from the dead, which means that the power of death has been overcome! In Jesus, the life of the new creation, where death shall be no more, has established a beachhead in the midst of the old creation! And when we follow Jesus, he sends us to do what he did: to live that life of the new creation, the Kingdom of God, in the midst of, and in direct contrast to, the old. In Acts chapter 2, at Pentecost, he gives us the Holy Spirit to enable his followers to do just that. Verses 42 through 47 of that chapter give the details of the immediate results of Pentecost, and it is a remarkable picture of people in fellowship, serving each other, and serving together. When 3000 people were added to their number that day, the result wan’t 3000 people each going off on their own and each building their own kingdom; it was 3000 Spirit-directed people devoting themselves to each other, providing for each other, and reaching out together into their communities with the new life of the new creation in such a way that the Lord added to their numbers daily people who were being saved. 

Now of course they didn’t always get it all right, as we find when we read Paul’s letters to the early churches. But I Corinthians 12 gives a picture of how the Spirit equips us to do what Jesus did: he gives us . . . each other, with all the manifold gifts each different person has been given. Which makes perfect sense, since I am not equipped to do all of the tasks that are necessary in the new creation. Certainly, there are contributions I can make. But put me in front of a classroom of first-graders? Neither I nor the students would last 15 minutes. Put me in charge of managing a large organization? Watch how quickly that organization would fail. Prepare a feast for a large gathering? Think Charlie Brown’s Thanksgiving. But God gives his Spirit to all of his people to equip them to do all of the myriad tasks necessary to establishing and ruling over his new creation. And so we all need each other, in the same way they eyes need the hands and vice-versa.
 

Even so, it is all too easy to imagine that God gives us the gift of his Spirit so that we can establish our own kingdom, in competition with everyone else’s kingdom. Maybe that’s why I Corinthians 12 leads directly into the more excellent way of I Corinthians 13. When God sends us to do what Christ did and gives us his Spirit to enable us, overarching and holding us all together is love, God’s love, one of the central hallmarks of his kingdom. Without love, we are just a bunch of people playing the old-creation game of establishing our own kingdoms. When instead we pray, “Your Kingdom come on earth as in Heaven,” we are praying not only that God sends us, but that he sends us together, bound to each other in love, to work for His Kingdom.