What does God want

All too often the question that we are not dealing with is "What does God want?"  When I asked this question in the context of what God wanted from me, I got my calling.  I was redirected from my personal course over a period of years.  I had planned to work for Bill Gates and make lots of money, but my plans were set aside when God had me move out of our home and into a trailer parked behind our church in Oak Harbor WA, and into Seminary at Fuller Theological Seminary's NW extension.

When we listen to God and obey the leading of His Holy Spirit, then we can find ourselves in places we could never have imagined.  For me, that was Ukraine.  After I finished my degree at Fuller, I thought that all I needed to do was to continue to serve in the church God had planted me in and one day I would get a church of my own.  But God changed my plans through a series of seemingly minor events.

We had friends in Ukraine who had gone over there from our home church to work with YWAM (Youth With A Mission) in Kyiv (Kiev).  They had repeatedly told us that we would love it over there, but I was not the least bit interested.  But God had a plan.  One of my spiritual heroes, Dick Addison, a former Baptist Missionary who had spent 20 years in The Congo, said that we needed to take a mission trip to Ukraine.  I was skeptical, but I prayed and was quickly answered by the Holy Spirit and encouraged to go.  I cannot say that I was keen on the idea, but if I was going to go I was going to be prepared even if I had a bad attitude.  The people in our missions team were very vocal about what they wanted.  They wanted to visit an orphanage, they wanted to visit a prison, they wanted to teach in the Ukrainian churches.  But my thought was, "What do the Ukrainians want us to do for them?"
As a result, we let the church we were going to partner with in Ukraine (who we were to come in contact with through our friends already living in Ukraine) make all the plans for outreach, orphanage visits etc.  Maybe our resources were greater than those of the Ukrainian church but the Ukrainian church had a better idea of what they needed than we did.

I was completely unprepared for what God was going to do in my heart

If you are interested, here is The Rest of The Story

What did I learn?
I learned that my expectations, as learned from my church and seminary experiences, do not necessarily line up with God's plans for me in His Church.

So we are back to the Key Question for this post.  What does God want?

• What does He want for our churches?
• What does He want for our Communities?
• What does He want for all humanity?
• What does He want from His people
• What does He want from His leaders in The Church?

So let me address these questions based on what I read in the Scriptures.

Let me jump in the middle here.  What does God want for all of humanity?  He wants them to come to know Him.  We can see a recurring theme running through the Bible where God reaches out to his people, repeatedly and repeatedly his people turn away from Him.  The Good News (a.k.a The Gospel) is God saying, "Hey I love you, trust in my Son, Jesus, and you can experience Me in the best possible way,  I don't guarantee that nothing bad will happen to you, but I promise to never leave nor forsake you."

So when I say all of humanity does it mean "ALL".  Yes, it means that God's Salvation is available to everyone, but not everyone will accept it.  They may be hindered by their own poor choices or they may have been rough-handled by someone(s) claiming to represent God.  They may not have heard the Good News because no one had made the effort to tell them.  They may be encumbered by a belief system or a culture that is antithetical to Christianity.  But God's Grace and Mercy are there for anyone who would call upon His Name. I think we can safely say that God's desire is for every man, woman, and child to hear the Good News of Jesus Christ repeatedly, in a manner they can understand.  And should they come to the Saving Knowledge of Jesus Christ, that they would find a church which prepares them to be obedient disciples of Jesus Christ.

So, What does God want for His People?  I think that comes in three parts.  First, He wants his people to live a life that Glorifies Him.  Jesus tells us that if we love Him then we will obey Him. Second, he wants us to live in unity with each other.  John tells us that if we don't love our brother or sister (in Christ) then we don't know God. And finally. I would say that what He wants for us is to carry out the Great commission; making disciples (those who obey and honor God with their lives) of the whole world.  As we are told in the Bible, "How can they know Him if no one has told them".  We need people who diligently make a point of telling their neighbors, their coworkers and if called, those in the far-flung corners of the globe about the Good News of Jesus Christ.  And if they cannot go to the far-flung corners of the earth, they should consider supporting those who are called to do so.

The Church is not a fortress where we hide from the world.  God's people, The Church, is an outpost and training center for invading the kingdom of darkness.  We are an invading force.  Our job is not to complain about the wrong in the world, our job is to right the wrong in the world, by being salt and light and loving the unlovable.  We can speak the truth in love but I don't see our job as reforming our government but rather redeeming/saving people from the clutches of Satan by loving people as Jesus' example taught us, going to where the sinners are not demanding that they come to us.  How this is articulated or carried out in your church is between you and God.

What God wants for His churches is for them to shift their focus from being inwardly focused only caring for themselves to being outwardly focused, seeing the world as the object of ministry and seeing themselves as God's instruments toward that end.  For that to happen we need to ask, "What does God from His leaders in the church?"

In light of Ephesians 4:11-15, I would say that the purpose of the leaders in the church would be preparing God's people to do the work of ministry (service).  A leader's job is not to just exercise their gifts, but to help the people of God, the Church, to discover their gifts so that they can be reaching out to each other and to those outside the walls of the church, going wherever The Master bids them go.

Our job as leaders in the church is to empower and release people into ministry rather than having them sit and listen week after week with little opportunity to become active participants in the sharing of and the work of the Gospel.  This may mean that you will have to release people in your church to serve in other churches, cities or countries.

I have been released twice.  The first time at my request and the Holy Spirit's leading which resulted in our going to Ukraine.  The second time I was released was from Meadows Fellowship of Las Vegas NV by Pastor Ron Flores and I was sent to help Blue Diamond Foursquare Church and Pastor Bill Dahlquist.  I think this is healthy.  In fact, recently, I was talking to Pastor Ron at a Foursquare Southwest function where he was sharing with me how many people he has sent out.  That, in part, is the picture I am hoping to paint.  A church that holds its resources open-handed and is trusting God to bring the increase as they practice what my former senior pastor at New Covenant Fellowship of Oak Harbor called the 1st rule of the Kingdom.  Which is, "Whatever God has given you, Give it away!" But I am a bit ahead of myself here.

So that last question I would like to pose in this post is "What does God want for your community?"  It still comes back to Every man, woman and child hearing the Good News of Jesus Christ in a way that they can understand so that that they can have an opportunity to accept this Good News.  But looking at communities, I might say that God wants to transform them.  If they are places where people and drugs are sold casually then God would want to see that community redeemed.  I think He would equally want to transform a community that glorifies wealth and materialism into a place that values people the same way Jesus does.  I would also expect that a church in a community would be looking to partner with the various public services that are there in that community like, schools, fire stations, hospitals, emergency services prisons and child services.  If true religion is taking care of the widows and orphans while not becoming polluted by the world's values, then we should be working to influence public services so as to Glorify God and to reach out to the brokenhearted and to see the captive set free.

Now that I have posed these questions and suggested my perspective, it is now your turn to ask yourself these questions in the light of your church and your community with the guidance of the Holy Spirit and your leadership team.  The "how" you will have to find for yourself.  The amount of resources out there for evangelism and discipleship is great and varied.  You will have to find something that works for your people and your church. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, you just need to get some wheels on your wagon.