Look in a mirror, looking back is a missionary for Jesus.

There are five things every Christian missionary must be ready to do at a moment’s notice:

1. Preach
2. Teach
3. Pray
4. Sing
5. Die

I was very involved with foreign missions work; For many years I worked with an independent missionary organization during which time I made a number of mission trips to Eastern Europe and lived in Romania for about six months. But, I’ve never been qualified to call myself a missionary because I can’t do one of those five requirements; I can’t sing. 🙂

One of the things you learn when you spend some time on any mission field is that God gets bigger. Well, of course, He doesn’t actually get bigger, but He draws you closer, so you see more of His greatness. You see Him in all that happens around you, to you, with you, and through you. He’s the same here in America, here right now, but if we don’t approach each day as a day on the mission field for God, then we miss all those things God does for missionaries. 

For example, today, did you crawl (or leap) out of bed and proclaim, “Today is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it! Today, I’m a missionary ready to preach, teach, pray, sing, or die for Jesus?” No, me either.

The Apostle Thomas was living a missionary life being taught by Jesus. We find in John 11:16: Then Thomas…said to the rest of the disciples, “Let us also go, that we may die with him [Jesus].” Thomas was ready for #5 on the missionary’s list.

I’m not writing this to judge anyone; well perhaps myself. What I want to point out is that to have God’s presence so big within us that we think we are going to burst we have to change our life’s agenda.

The “Great Commission” in Matthew 28:16-20 commissions all Christians to be missionaries. So, when you look in a mirror, a missionary is looking back at you.

BTW – You know, Thomas gets a bad rap. Yes, he doubted Jesus’ resurrection, but the other disciples also struggled with this. And, Thomas went on to die as a missionary in India. There’s a large church named in his honor, and many of the twenty-eight million Christians in India are the fruit of Thomas’ work, there.

Wikipedia: Ezharappallikal or Seven and a half Churches are the seven churches or Christian communities across the western coast of India founded by Thomas the Apostle in the first century.^[1] According to Indian Christian traditions, the Apostle Thomas arrived in Kodungallur (presently in the Indian state of Kerala) in AD 50…

Photo by Carlos Ibáñez on Unsplash and Photo by Sujithvv at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15459701