The Dream of God and Missions

When I first met my wife Alice, she had been a professional artist for around 15 years. Many a day I have stood in the doorway to her studio, amazed at the images that poured forth from her brushes. She would sit there, eyes squinting down at the canvas, deftly adding brush strokes as she happily created new life and redesigned the world with her paints.  

Her paintings brought forth life and purpose, and always seemed to be born out of a mixture of passionate determination and a longing for beauty.  Her brushes were more than artist’s instruments; they were tools that willed her creations into being and made them into inspiring expressions of life.

If you know an artist, you know what I’m talking about.  You know the willing of chaos into order; the transformation of nothingness into beauty and the bringing forth of a dream that lives only within the mind’s eye.  There is often strangeness in the lives of artists, with a cost to themselves and to those around them.  My wife’s commitment to her art came before everything.  She was sold out to it.

This image of the willful, determined artist may not be too far from the beautiful biblical image of divine mission.  God is on mission to repaint our world, to recreate out of the fallen chunks a new world.  The image of God’s first creation lies in ruins where beauty and goodness once stood.  Our world is not the world God intends, so we engage in mission.

Our mission, the work of joining God in what he is doing, is our ultimate response to the study of the end-times.  Christian mission born out of a deep conviction of Christ’s return is mission with the power to change the world and our own lives in the process.  Mission is not merely modifying the world in which we live.

Ours is not the work of pressing out the wrinkles of life, of giving a nice little religious boost to the lives of those we seek to reach.  God’s mission is to make all things new.  In pursuing this mission, we see the radical commitment God makes to achieve His goal.  God is determined, above all else, to repaint the world and establish an everlasting kingdom of joy.

Ours is the privilege of joining with God in establishing His reign where it is not present.  It is an end-time work that brings the dream of tomorrow into the nightmare of today.  Our mission is about joining God in making all things new.

Whenever we witness times of suffering and injustice, we are reminded of the need for mission. Exploitation, abuse and neglect, death and disease, destruction and displacement—the sufferings we witness in this world cause us to dream of another one.

Suffering and injustice causes some people to lose faith, to doubt the existence of a world other than this one.  But others have confidence in the reality of another, better world, and it motivates them to put their lives on the line.  It inspires great acts of bravery and heroism; it drives them to give their all to reach for the dream.  History is filled with the stories of millions who hoped against hope for another world and who risked their lives to establish justice in their pursuit of joy.

The dream of God includes us—our efforts, our passions and our risks—to establish His dream where it is not.  The dream of God is not merely a future reality. It is a reality that we can taste, touch, feel and live today if only we would reach for it together. Throughout the history of the church, this has been the foundation of biblical mission.

A dream can literally change the world, as we see with the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  We often use the concept of a dream to refer to a wish, a desire or a hope.  Real change, however, comes through conviction, passion, power and action.

Jesus says that the Spirit’s work within Him enables Him to proclaim the good news to the poor.  The proclamation of God’s good news as we see throughout the Bible revolves around the work of Christ, His death, His resurrection, His rule and His return to judge the living and the dead.  However, what made the announcement of Christ so significant was the fact that it was to the poor.  The poor are at the heart of mission because their poverty is an expression of evil, of brokenness; it is antithetical to the dream of God.

In the announcement of the dream of God in Jesus’ first public message, we see the end of time.  We see God’s dream unleashed on a world of pain and suffering.  In this, we see the foundation for all missions, a dream that is beyond justice, beyond salvation, beyond rescue.  We see restoration and flourishing. 

And in the end we see the joy of the Lord.