WHY DO YOU DO WHAT YOU DO?

I’ve been teaching a class this week on missions & church planting. I don’t know this for a fact, but I suspect the students taking the class came with the expectation that I would spend most of the time talking to them & exhorting them to go & be missionaries & church planters.

That’s not exactly what happened. We started out the week by discussing together the need for a biblical basis for whatever we do in ministry. I began the conversation by asking them this question: “What happens if we do a ministry activity simply because we think it’s good or enjoyable or beneficial, or because we just feel sorry for the people we want to help?” I followed that up with the question, “What happens to the ministry we’re doing if we try to do it without first trying to understand & apply what the Bible says about it?”

Here’s what inevitably happens if we just jump in, come what may:

• We do it wrong
• We do it for the wrong reasons
• We give up when it gets too hard, resources aren’t available, etc.
• We limit our vision & understanding of what God wants to say to us & do thru us

I’m convinced that there is a process, guided by the Holy Spirit, that should take place when any kind of ministry is being considered:

• Theology – what does Scripture say about it?
• Philosophy of ministry – how does what we see in Scripture give shape to our ideas about that ministry?
• Strategy – in specific & practical ways, how do we plan to do that ministry?
• Application – how does it all work in the real world where people live?

 Why take time to get an understanding of what Scripture says? Why take time to pray, think, & discuss about how what Scripture says applies to ministry activities today? The needs are so great – why take to formulate strategy before we go & do ministry? Precisely because we want as much as possible to get the what, the how, & the why right first, according to what the Bible says, before we jump in & start doing something.

We need to wait for the guidance & wisdom that the Holy Spirit desires to give us. He knows better than we ever will the people of the place where we want to do ministry. He wants to purify our motives. He wants to give us the perseverance that we’ll need when it gets too hard.

Of course, there are times when circumstance demand that we just jump in & meet a need. But I believe that most of the time we need to intentionally set aside time to give the Lord a chance to speak to us.

Then we can have a much better answer to the question, “Why do you do what you do?”