To Encourage You

2 Corinthians 3:4-6 “Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. Not that we are sufficient in ourselves to claim anything as coming from us, but our sufficiency is from God, Who has made us sufficient to be ministers of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit.”

Do you realize that the highest calling, the greatest purpose in which a person can be involved, is the ministry of sharing the truth of the gospel?  It’s something for which no person, in and of themselves, is sufficient.  As the passage above tells us, it is something for which only God can make one sufficient.  So many of us live on the plane of the mundane. We go about doing what we do, one day following another, with no higher purpose than to get along in life.  We go to work, read the newspaper, eat our dinner, enjoy our hobbies, and interact with our friends and family with no vision of the much higher purpose to which we are called.  We who are believers, each and every one of us, is called to the most magnificent privilege any person could ever know, that is, to be “ministers of the new covenant.”

The apostle John saw this as he relayed to us the Revelation of Jesus Christ with these words: “To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood and made us a kingdom, priests to his God and Father, to him be glory and dominion forever and ever. Amen” (Revelation 1:5-6).   A priest is a person who represents God to man and raises the needs of man to God.  That’s exactly what every believer has been called to as we share the “new covenant” with those around us and as we pray to God that they will be receptive to what we have shared.  This new covenant is the promise that “God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). It is this wonderful truth that is the means by which people are turned from death to life.  It is by the hearing of this message from God that faith comes, but it is by the mouths of the “ministers of the new covenant” that the message is proclaimed.  As we are told in Romans 10:14-15, “How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in Him of Whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!’” 

So, if you know Christ, are you true to your calling? Are you engaged in the awesome ministry of sharing the good news of salvation with those in the circle in which God has placed you?  Are you rising above the mundane plane of everyday life to this high and majestic calling? As you raise your children, interact with your friends and neighbors, work at your job, pursue an education or career, and do whatever you do from day to day, do you realize that you are a minster of the new covenant in that place, and is the truth of the Word of God on your lips? 

May God help us to have eyes to see this high calling and glorify Him by as we live it out.  It’s something that is so high that none of us are sufficient for it in and of ourselves. Yet it is something for which the God Who has saved us has made us sufficient by the Holy Spirit He has given us.

Praise His name!