Imagine

Imagine with me if you will the new earth.

Picture lush gardens amid the most beautiful architecture. Ivy and morning glories wrap around chiseled, stone walls. Silver and glass walls glisten in the light and reflect the surrounding trees. Rose bushes, sans thorns of course, border a bamboo hut.

Picture flowing streams of water and juicy mangoes ripening on the trees.

Let’s take a tour of the new earth. Perhaps you want to go on the back of a tiger. Maybe you prefer flying. Or walking on water. As we go along, we pass a group of people performing a Mozart symphony, voices harmonizing perfectly. We pass a sculptor chipping away at a flawless piece of marble. We don’t know what she’s creating. It’s too soon to tell. There’s a tribe dancing garbed with rattling, rhythmic bracelets. A little down the ways, we see a painter combining shapes and colors in a new way. Another woman stands at a drawing board checking her calculations for a new building going in. She discusses the drawing with a few people. They point and gesture, excited at the possibilities. A man whittles at a piece of wood. It looks like he’s shaping a centaur. Next to him, a group raps. Another man nods his head to their beat as he knits a scarf of autumn colors.

All these people are doing exactly what God created us to do: glorify him as we create beauty.

Contrast this with the picture we often see around us: people hurting each other, consuming rather than creating, destroying rather than building.

Missions exists because these two pictures are different. Missions is about freeing the oppressed. It’s about transforming cultures not to be nice but to reflect Christ. It’s about pointing people to the hope we have in a future of God’s life-giving presence.

Missions is about sneaking the future into the presence through the power of the Holy Spirit and bringing those in our present into the future.

Will you respond based on the joy set before you?