It continues to amaze me how this mission trip to Malawi keeps on reaching people. We have been home over a month now and the stories just keep coming in...how people are reaching other people all through one trip from one moment in time. It gets me thinking...it's like ripples in the water when you toss in a stone...they just keep going...they continue on reaching and stretching until they finally fade to the point that you can't see them....but the water keeps moving. This is what our time in Malawi was like.

Just the other day a team mate told me about a friend from Facebook who he is talking to about Christ because they were following his comments about the trip on Facebook. Another team mate invited friends from her workplace for dinner and shared pictures and the evangi-kube with them (none of them are Christians)...she allowed the trip to witness to what happens to a life when you give it completely to Jesus. I gave a PowerPoint presentation at work for several hundred staff and residents and talked about Jesus, showed pictures of people excepting Christ as their Lord and Savior and explained the gospel while showing them the evangi-kube . Some of my team mates and I went to speak with the young kids during Sunday school time at church and showed a video of our trip and talked to the kids about missions work....about going somewhere for God, and that that can mean your own community, or somewhere far away in the world. And I was in my local newspaper where a really great reporter shared my feelings about faith in action and actually quoted that God was the reason why I went to Malawi and also the reason why I did volunteer work locally with at risk youth living in a group home in my neighborhood. One of the younger kids who went on our trip made a video that was all over Facebook and reached hundreds of people. And another one of the young kids called me yesterday to see if she could work with me at the group home to try to reach kids for Christ as part of her Christian Endeavor leadership project!!! (Seriously these are only a few examples, remember we had 27 people go on this trip.) I even have the aspirations to try and consolidate these blog-posts and edit them a bit, to put together a devotional book and to get it published...

Imagine 27 lives, deeply changed, reaching out and touching hundreds, maybe even thousands of other lives....For those of you who are old enough, the  Faberge Shampoo commercial comes to mind..."You tell someone, and they tell someone, and so on, and so on..." before you know it you have reached the world!

This is how sharing the gospel works. Jesus sent out disciples...and now there are millions of Christians all around the world. There are thousands of Christians going out on missions to other lands today. There are thousands of Christians staying home and doing missions work today.  There are hundreds of thousands of people coming to Christ today!

We live in an interesting time in history....there is so much freedom, and yet more captivity than ever before. There are child and sex slaves, there are slaves to their careers and to money and to pleasure and to greed...there are slaves to video games, television, Facebook, gambling, drinking, drugs, pornography....The things that hold people captive ripple out as well. The things that ensnare our hearts and souls touch us, and then those around us just like the "Faberge shampoo commercial" We share our inadequacies, our fears, our dysfunction..."and so on and so on". Thank goodness the Gospel is also rippling out into the world with a rapid pace, rippling out over the sins of the world ...chasing the demons and the captives and the criminals and the victims...reaching out and touching lives, restoring them one by one. The truth of Jesus Christ continues to stretch out and grasp those who are quickly falling off the endless precipice of a meaningless existence and pulling them back to life, to real life, to an abundant life!

"For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned  already because they have not believed in the name of God's one and only Son. This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear their deeds will be exposed." - John 3:16-20

Life with Jesus is abundant, joyful, exciting, complete! (John 10:10) Before I became a Christian, my concept of the Christian life was that it was riddled with rules, it was inflexible and  most importantly, it was boring. What I had seen were a bunch of people who merely went to church on Sundays for an hour every week. They didn't apply God's word to their lives. They didn't effect their world. They didn't challenge themselves to grow and mature...They didn't live in the light!

What I had seen was people who picked and chose which parts of God's word that they were comfortable following, and left the rest for those "Radical born again types". What I had seen was organized religion which functioned primarily with out Jesus. What I had seen wasn't the gospel, it wasn't the truth...and so instead of making me whole, it repelled me. Unfortunately this is what the majority of the unsaved see.

We as the church, as disciples, have been given a command. We have a very specific job to do. "Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you." - Matthew 28:19-20.

As far as I can tell, we should all be "going" and "making"...not "sitting" and "singing"...Don't get me wrong, There is great benefit to gathering with the body of Christ on Sundays and being instructed by the word of God and worshiping together...great benefit! But, this is only part of the christian life... just a sliver of the whole. We should be in constant communication with the Father. Every day should be filled with instruction from His word. Every day should find you worshiping Him. Every day should find you taking the time to have meaningful relationships with others wherever you go...making disciples, teaching them how to obey God's commands so that they too can have eternal life.

Every day is a missionary opportunity, where ever it is that you are going...to the local grocery store or to Malawi Africa, you take with you the most precious life giving gift! You are able to do something of eternal value today...just Go! Go with confidence in the One who sent you. Make a difference. Change the world.