Becoming a Missionary

"Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word." Luke 1:38

We had a Christmas concert tonight. A young man read this passage from Luke. Although the verse is actually regarding Mary's humble prayer after she has just been informed that she will carry the Son of God, tonight God used it to reveal an important truth to me about becoming a missionary.

Missionaries tend to be revered in Christians circles. They somehow seem to get stuck with a sticker of "SUPER HOLY". I suppose if you have read Jamie The Very Worst Missionary's blog, some of those ideas may be less true to you now. Even still, it seems that the average church-goer thinks that missions isn't for them. Missions isn't for the common man. It's for the ones who are special-the ones who are really spiritual.

As one going to the missions field, when I hear phrases praising my "wonderful example" and my "incredible devotion to God", it's seems pretty easy to get puffed up with pride thinking that I am perhaps slightly more spiritual than the rest.

But, according to this passage, that is not how God wants us to think at all. God chose to use Mary. God chose to use a young woman who was frightened when the angel appeared to her. She wasn't sitting in her room waiting for him to arrive because she knew she had been behaving so well that at any moment God was going to reward her for her incredible devotion! No. She was shocked, scared, stunned. She fumbled around trying "to discern what sort of greeting this might be." She had no idea that "she had found favor with God".

That's the kind of attitude that God wants. He wants us to be so caught up in him that we have no idea that we are finding favor with him. He wants us to "stop being self-conscious, stop being a sanctified prig, and live the life hid with Christ" as Oswald Chambers puts it. After all, as Chambers also points out, "the lives that have been of most blessing to [us] are those who were unconscious of it."

Becoming a missionary is never borne out of a desire to be holy. It is borne out of obedience. God leads you to the point of abandon. He makes his plan so abundantly clear that you can do nothing else but obey. There is no self-awareness in it at all. Just complete surrender until we fall on our knees before him and say, "Behold, I am the servant of the Lord; let it be to me according to your word."