Immanuel Baptist Temple :: The Simple Life
Title: Explaining the Simple Life
Scripture(s): Matthew 9:36-38
Devotional Date: 2009-10-05
Author: Michael Eldridge
Friends, I welcome you to the first entry I'm adding to our online devotional page. When the time came for us to update our Web site, this is one element that we believed an important one. In the future it will probably develop into a blog, where you and I can comment back and forth on postings I submit. For now, however, I'd ask you only to read. In that way, I suppose this is less blog and more delog... as in Devotional Log... nevermind... My first entry comes around three hours before Dion Allen and I leave Henderson, starting our journey to Moldova. We'll be taking advantage of free food and housing with my parents in Tennessee before meeting the rest of our six-member team in Atlanta. Our United Airlines flight for Frankfurt, Germany should take to the skies tomorrow afternoon at 5:00 p.m. Henderson time, landing some nine hours later and starting a long layover before taking us to our second and final flight into Chisinau. It all makes for a long day, but so help me I love to fly. Give me some stale peanuts and a diet cola and you won't hear a complaint out of me. Before leaving last night I was encouraged with a final word of affirmation from one of our church friends. She said, "I pray God works to give what you need to give and get what you need to get." It was a simple statement that I'll value throughout this trip, for I depart feeling compelled by Christ to give but also feeling so hungry for Christ that I need to get. Mission trips, of course, are not about those who go, but God always proves His ability to minister to those willing to minister. This is a simple yet magnificent side of God I look forward to encountering again. Speaking of simple, I find myself so weary of matching our complicated culture with a complicated version of Christianity. We are now as busy as our secular friends yet getting no more of value done. Are we busy being the church or just busy doing what we consider as spiritual things? This is a question our generation of the body of Christ--particularly in America--needs to answer, and as more churches face it they're opting for the simple life. It's a life of clear and defended purpose, stated simply by Christ and lived simply by us. It's not a complicated thing to notice lost people. It's not a complicated thing to feel compassion for them. It's not a complicated thing to view lost people as a vast multitude--as a field in which the Lord of the harvest is at work. It's not complicated to pray, asking God to raise up more Christ-following believers to work in the field, and it's not complicated to commit yourself as an answer to that very prayer. Even among the noise that is our culture, it's simple to notice. It's simple to so commune with Jesus that His compassion for people becomes our compassion for people. It's simple to abandon an inward focus devoted to ourselves for the sake of accepting an outward focus that takes us into the field. All you have to do is be willing to be changed. Are you willing? In the midst of your busy going-and-coming, within the five minutes you've allotted to checking this devotional... amidst all that you willingly allow to complicate your life, are you willing to pursue Him who makes it simple? As if speaking to all who need a fresh dose of spiritual simplicity, Jesus invited, "Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and YOU WILL FIND REST FOR YOUR SOULS. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light" (Matthew 11:28-30 NASB). Welcome to the simple life... I'll see you here tomorrow. Michael
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