"Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you." Jesus.

There is something significant about the word SENT. Many times Jesus pointed out the fact that he was sent by the Father. He was saying that the very reason he command us to go to do the will of the Father was because he also was sent out to the world to do the will of the Father. We need to take this as our lifestyle, as our flesh and blood where we incarnate the great commission in our everyday living.
There is much talk these days about SENDING church. I am more interested in SENT OUT living. When we speak of the church we can easily point out the church’s faults and irrelevance but exclude ourselves from the criticism. I had to confess that I had done some silly things in the past that had offended other people and for that I have to ask for apology. It is easy to find fault with “the church” but much more difficult when we accept that we are the church.
Accepting Jesus’ invitation to “go and make disciples” gets at the heart of what church is all about. That is sent out living. When I think of making disciples I think of it in a holistic sense of being involved in every area of a persons’ life.
Sent out lifestyle is about investing in the lives of other people. It is not a program. It is certainly more than organized outreach activities. Being a sent out person means intentionally building bridges to other people – for the sake of them knowing Jesus and discovering what it means to be a fully alive, free human being. It is an attitude that says, “I will invest my life in others for the sake of Christ and his purposes on earth.” It means I will live that way in every sphere of life and every day of the week. It needs a revelation for us to understand why we are working in our work place right now, or to know why we meet certain people in our neighborhood every day. We are there for a purpose is to do the will of the Father.
To impact people around us we have to have a dream, a dream of what it will look like if we impact the lives of other people for Jesus. Each of us can dream about what God wants to do through us to impact other people. It is not popular to dream in today’s world, especially to dream big about it. But unless we have a dream greater than the dreams of materialists, cynics and hedonists around us, we will be swallowed up by their dreams. Our dream has to be the same dream with what God dreams about the river that flows out from the temple. The river that influence the surrounding world with healing and hope.
Not only do we need a dream, we also need courage to transfer that dream from our hearts to reality. Courage has to do with pursuing our dream without fear of man, but it also means saying no to opportunities that will lead us away from our dream. Courage is the willingness to take risks, face criticism and rejection, and to dare to believe God to use us to impact other people’s lives. Like in the river we need to have courage to go deeper and go far away from the temple to experience swimming in the deep river when our feet cannot reach the bottom of the river anymore. We need to understand that a dream is not only a phantom of our brain but is the outline of our destiny.
Lastly the characteristic of effective sent out people is the willingness to continually reevaluate one’s effectiveness in living and communicating Jesus to our friends and neighbors. This willingness is an expression of humility. We are often given the impression that humility has to do with inner spirituality, but surely it has to do with the willingness to be sent out learners as well. We need humility of we are to learn how to engage our culture and effectively share the good news of Jesus with people in the culture. We need to learn humility from Jesus. Let us embrace the sent out lifestyle. Welcome to discipleship.