The black community is in mourning and the only answer that can be given right now is the comfort that comes from the God who sees and hears, who became the sin of both victims and the victimizers of injustice on the cross so that through Jesus Christ all men can be reconciled to God and to each other.

Are you watering the seeds of offense in your own heart by only watching, listening, and reading people who have the same worldview and experiences as you and do not have a heavenly perspective?

We are hearing words these days like essential travel, essential workers, essential businesses. This is right. Identifying what is essential for society to function is important in a moment when you are working together to stop the spread of a novel virus. In the midst of the search for essentials, I can sense the Holy Spirit searching the church, helping us identify what is essential for our existence and function as the Body of Christ.

This is a season where the Spirit of the Lord is sifting through our ministries, families, and our personal lives separating what is essential and what is additional; what is primary and what is secondary. I believe that God is using this current global pandemic to help us slow down, pause, and identify what is necessary. We have become so addicted to activity here in the West. Bigger, better, faster, and more have become the modern mandates.

But when everything is taken away… what remains?

In Acts 4:36–37, Luke shows us how Barnabas’ trusted ministry began—it began with a demonstrated freedom from the love of things and a heart of love for people. He sold a field that belonged to him and gave all the proceeds to the apostles to use for the movement. In this story, he stands as the example of what the grace of God and the spirit of revival does in the human heart.

Antioch Sending Centers are always deeply marked by the lives of fathers and mothers like Barnabas who long ago “sold their field” to be a part of what God was doing on the earth. They have been radically transformed by grace. They have seen Jesus as supremely worthy, and they have responded with all their hearts. What you do today is setting the stage for what you will walk in, five, ten years from now…

Even though Peter had the correct theological stance of inclusion for the Gentiles through the gospel at the Jerusalem council, we find out soon that having the right theological stance can be much different than acknowledging your own ethnocentricity and allowing God, by the power of the Spirit, to search you and fully deliver you from the culture that nurtured your fallen mindset. When Peter finally makes it down to Antioch to see what is transpiring in this new apostolic center, he comes face to face with his own racism…

Racism is the enemy of missions because true missions is born out of a vision of the worth of Jesus that produces a self-sacrificing love for peoples and nations that we have nothing in common with. The only commonality we have with the unreached of the earth is the compassion of the Lamb.

You are not from here. You were born from beyond the cosmos. The New Jerusalem has birthright citizenship. Therefore, nationalism at its core is anti-gospel because it is a lie that deceives the believer into thinking that where they live is where they are from and the culture they are surrounded by is the culture they belong to.

The New Testament writers confronted this stronghold head-on; this was no side issue to the Apostles.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for His own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God's people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. 1 Peter 2:9-10

In the tests of delay and promotion, Jesus pries our grip off of what we imagined the fulfillment of the promises over our lives would look like so that we don’t reject the promise when it comes. In the delay, Jesus addresses the levels of our identity and self-confidence that are wrapped up in our “dreams” and our “callings”. He breaks down all the confidence in what we think qualifies us and produces a brokenness that is a sweet fragrance to God.

Jesus is looking for something dynamically different than what the world is looking for in leadership potential. Men are enamored with giftedness, intelligence, charisma, skill, and strength. Jesus is looking for purity, love, humility, and a willing spirit. Our destiny and assignments are dynamically affected by how we respond in the grace of God to Jesus’ leadership in every season of the journey…