Focused but not Narrow

Focused but not Narrow

Recently I was in a meeting with a ywam leader.  He said to me “FM is very narrow.”  As we talked, I found that what he really meant was that we as FM are very focused.  We are called for one very specific task…to see CPMs among the unreached.  But his statement has had me thinking about this a lot these past few days.

It is good to be focused.  We must be focused.  We must not lose our focus!  Sometimes we talk about the need for a laser sharp focus.  We have to keep the goal and end vision of a CPM among the unreached constantly at the forefront of everything we do.  If what we are doing isn’t leading us toward that, then we need to ask ourselves whether or not we should be doing those things.  We have to be careful to avoid distractions.  So many things pull us away from this goal!  One quality I’ve seen in every person who is truly seeing fruit and success in starting CPMs is that they maintain a very sharp focus on CPM work. 

It is NOT good, however, to be narrow.  Especially if that means we are narrow-minded.  It is NOT good for us to think starting CPMs is the only thing that is important in the Kingdom of God.  It is NOT good when we stop listening and learning from other ministries that are not CPM focused.  It is NOT good when we isolate ourselves from others who have different callings and anointings then we do, or when we cut ourselves off from fellowship and friendship with them. 

I am a very focused person.  When I am working on something, I don’t hear anyone, see anyone or even notice other things going on around me.  There have been times when I was working on something on my computer, writing an article, or thinking through an issue and my husband or my kids wanted to ask me a question.  There have been times when they wanted to say something to me, or even just get a hug from me.  When Im really working hard and very focused on something, I don’t like to be disturbed.  Sometimes I can react to people who disturb me.  Sometimes my reaction is less than loving.  Sometimes I am rude even.  I’ve hurt my husband and kids sometimes in my reactions..because I am so focused on my task.

I’ve had to learn how to manage this part of my personality.  I’ve had to learn that my FOCUS can sometimes WOUND others.  I’ve had to learn to let go of my intense focus for a few minutes, to listen, to look, to engage with others around me, to show them love and care.  Then I can return to my focus, task and goal.  I’m learning and my family understands me, loves me and has forgiven me many times.

I think it’s a little like that with us in FM.  We can become so FOCUSed that we aren’t always loving toward those around us, toward other ministries in YWAM.  We are too focused, too busy, to take a moment to acknowledge them, to show we care about them and what they are doing.  Sometimes we may be so intensely focused that we are even rude. 

We need to learn how to manage our focus well and with love and maturity.  We need to be willing to be interrupted in our focus, for a moment or two, to stop and listen and love and care for others who are not engaged in the same focused task as us.  That might mean we attend a YWAM gathering that doesn’t really have anything to do with CPMs, or what we are wanting to see happen. It might be providing hospitality or help to a short term team for a day or two.  That doesn’t mean we lose our focus.  Im not saying we should just throw out our focus or even leave it for very long.  In fact we need to be careful that these kinds of things don’t start to dominate our schedules to where we have little time for what we are truly called to do.  We must maintain our focus.

But lets not be narrow people.  Lets love, learn from, welcome and engage with the rest of our wonderful YWAM family.  We have much to gain by our relationship with this family.  We also have much to give.  Lets be focused in our task, but have broad hearts of love that are not narrow, but that embrace all that God is doing in the world.  Lets honor, champion, encourage, respect, and engage with others who have different callings, perspectives, and goals then we do.

Lord, give us wisdom and maturity.  Help us to stay intensely focused on seeing CPMs among the unreached.  Please help us not to be distracted from this very, very important calling you’ve given us.  We can so easily get off track.  But please also help us to be open people.  Open minded.  Open hearted.  Willing to be disturbed from our focus, for brief moments, as we love the people around us.  We need you Lord.  Thank you for helping us grow more like you.  Amen. 

 

August 2014- Where do you receive affirmation & encouragement?

A Note from the FM South Asia Leader’s Desk:

Today as I write this note to you, I find myself with a curious question.  Where do you receive affirmation and encouragement?  Where do our FM leaders, staff, and church planters in the field get the affirmation and encouragement to keep going?  Church planting among unreached peoples is not easy work to do.  Sometimes we face great challenges, setbacks, and spiritual warfare.  Sometimes, even in times of victory, we can feel we have few people to even rejoice with us in or understand how significant the breakthrough we experienced was for us. God designed us as human beings to need encouragement and affirmation.  Without it, there is a gap or a hole inside of us that longs to be filled. 

Often, when feeling the lack of affirmation, we can start to blame others.  It’s easy to say, “My leader doesn’t visit or call me enough.” Or we can wonder why YWAM doesn’t have better member care.  Or why our parents and friends forget to write to us, or don’t understand our work and calling.  Sometimes we want more affirmation from our team members, closest friends or spouse.  This need in our life can cause loneliness and make us handicapped or crippled from effective, fruitful ministry in the harvest field.  This is not God’s plan or desire!  He wants us to have full access 24 hours a day, to abundant affirmation, love, acceptance and encouragement!  He wants us to be full and overflowing with this, so we can give it away to others.

So, let me come back to the question again: where do you receive affirmation and encouragement?  Pause a moment and answer this for yourself.  Then, ask yourself, where do you wish you received it but don’t?  Acknowledging our need before the Lord is the right place to start.  We don’t have to pretend we are strong and don’t need this.  We can admit that we really long for someone to notice how much we have worked or suffered or to tell us “Good job!  Keep going.  You’re doing well.”  But we can’t stop there.  Father God, our Papa, is longing to speak those words to us if we will slow down, quiet our hearts and listen.  He designed us with that gap, so we would turn to Him (not others, leaders, team members or those who never can truly fill this hole in us!)  He is an abundant source of encouragement and longs to speak to you, even now, “Well done, my faithful son or daughter.  I am well pleased with you.”  Romans 8:31-37 tells us that if Papa God is for us, who can ever be against us?  Nothing can separate us from his love.  Except maybe our own inability to listen or receive from Him. When we close our ears and are too busy to listen to the love, affirmation and encouragement He is waiting to give us. 

My prayer for you today (and for myself too) is this: May your heart be quiet enough to hear His still small voice whisper-“ I love you.  You are mine.  I am proud of you.”  May the voices of shame, loneliness, failure, or rejection be silenced enough that your Papa God’s voice can be heard.  “You did well my child.  I love you unconditionally.  Keep going. I am with you.  I am using you and doing more through you then you can see.”  Let’s pray this for one another this month.  As He brings greater revelation to us, we will be strengthened in Him and have an abundant supply of love to give away to the unreached and lost around us.

July 2014- Supernatural Strength for Increase

A Note from the FM South Asia Leader’s Desk:

Good morning!  My prayer for you today is that God would give you his grace and strength in supernatural abundance.  It’s the hot and humid season now, but the monsoon rains have started.  It can be a time when we get easily frustrated.  Or, at least, I do, when Im hot and sticky and uncomfortable. 

This last few months I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, praying and learning about the issue of strength.  Where do we get the kind of supernatural strength we need for the race God has called us to be running?  To see supernatural increase, to bring in a supernatural harvest, we need supernatural strength and energy.  We also need to learn to be excellent managers/stewards of the strength God gives, rather than waste it or use it up in ways that leave us empty with nothing left inside. 

This morning in my quiet time I was reading from Psalm 84.  Verse 5 says “What joy for those whose strength comes from the LORD, who have set their minds on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. When they walk through the Valley of Weeping, it will become a place of refreshing springs.  The autumn rains will clothe it with blessings.  They will continue to grow stronger, and each of them will appear before God in Jerusalem.”  The Jewish practice of going on pilgrimage to Jerusalem was vital to their faith.  The Hebrew word for pilgrimage means “going on foot”.  Even kings would get off their horses and go up to Jerusalem on foot as a sign of humility.

One of the keys to receiving joy and strength from the Lord, that supernatural strength we need for what we do, is to become a people who “set our minds on pilgrimage.”  We need to set aside the time, money, energy and effort to regularly go to His Presence for renewal.  Jerusalem represented the place where God’s Presence was most felt, where He dwelt.  This month, let’s pray for ourselves, and for each other, that in the midst of working so hard to bring in the harvest, we will carefully guard our energy source- and realize our strength comes from Him.  We will press in and make necessary sacrifices to get away with God, so that even our places of sorrow can become refreshing springs (vs 6).  When we are full of Him, His joy, His strength, and His love, bringing in the harvest will become easy and fun, not exhausting! 

Revelation of the Father and Supernatural Increase

Revelation of the Father and Supernatural Increase

More and more I am convinced that one of the Keys to seeing a Supernatural Increase in the Harvest and a release of disciple making movements among the unreached is this: a deeper understanding and revelation of the Father's Heart. 

What?  That sounds strange, you might think.  That is a DTS teaching isnt it?  What does it have to do with Frontier Missions and CPMs?  Haven’t we "Been there, Done that" and moved on to bigger and more important things like cpm strategies, contextualization, coaching techniques and such?

I would like to say this even more strongly. I believe that a revelation of the Father is not only a key to seeing the release of supernatural increase.  I'd say it is foundational to seeing the move of God released among us that we so long for.  Parallel to the message we are bringing of a call to Increase and Greater Fruit, must come the message of a call to increased intimacy with the Father and a deeper revelation of what it means to walk in our identity as Sons and Daughters of the King of Kings. We are in need of a profound and ongoing revelation of this. We are also desperately in need of a greater revelation of His Father's heart for the Lost and the Urgency this revelation will place within us.

We must be walking in an experiential and growing understanding of how incredibly unconditional and unlimited His Love and Goodness is.  Without this, we will be powerless, performance driven, and ultimately fruitless in spite of our best efforts to take seriously the call to greater fruit and supernatural increase.

When God spoke to me four years ago from the Luke 19 Parable of the Minas, I knew He was speaking to me to believe Him for More, to ask Him for More, to expect More.  He is a God who wants His people to be fruitful in His Kingdom.  In this parable, He gives everyone the same command.  He gives everyone the same opportunity and resources.  But not everyone sees the same results. The Master in this parable, gives different rewards to each, according to their results.  This can feel unfair.  The one with the greatest results received the greatest affirmation and was given the most authority in the Kingdom.

10 fold increase, and especially 30, 60 or 100 fold increase is not something we can see released by simply working harder.  This kind of increase demands of us an ability to take risks of faith, and to step out into the realm of the impossible and the supernatural.  It also means being willing to change and repent of "dead works" of the flesh, to turn from doing the things that are good ideas, but no longer God ideas.  It requires a passion and desperate determination to be like Jesus in only doing what the Father is doing and only saying what He is saying.  It means taking risks of Faith, walking in new ways and embracing new wineskins.

We can only be this dependent on Him, this willing to step out in faith, when we are full of a revelation of His love for us.  We can only move in unusual new supernatural authority for breakthrough, when we come into deeper revelation of what it means to be the Sons and Daughters of the King of all Creation.

It is not true that we do not have what we need to see the breakthroughs we long for.  It is not true that we do not have the authority to move in supernatural signs and wonders or to release God encounters, deliverance, healing and salvation among the unreached.  This power, this authority, has already been given to us. But sometimes, our fear gets the best of us.  Sometimes we fail to step out in faith due to our insecurity, past experiences of failure, and our unwillingness to change.  A child who knows their Father takes joy in jumping into His arms, fully secure that their Daddy will catch them.  They giggle and laugh and delight in the adventure of risk because they have great confidence in their Dad. Without a revelation of our Father, we will hesitate to jump, we will hesitate to let go of the familiar and the things we have used in the past.  We will miss the wave He is bringing.

The mina is in our hand.  It’s already been given.  We have all we need. Sometimes we have buried it, sometimes we have lost it, sometimes this revelation of His Fatherhood and goodness has been lost or buried under many other things we have learned and now are so "wise" about.

We must go back to the bottom line of why we are doing what we are doing in FM.  We want to see movements among the unreached, not because it’s a cool strategy that we really like.  Not because CPMs are part of our identity as FMers, or they are our distinctive in the YWAM tribe.  No, our bottom line has to be that we want movements because there are millions who are lost and away from a Father who made them and desperately loves them.  Our motivation for CPMs must be the Father's Heart revealed and living in us.

Recently, God spoke to me through a situation in my family.  My son in law had been in a motorcycle accident and had some indications of a head injury.  Knowing this could be very serious, I desperately wanted him to see a doctor to make sure he was okay.  I wanted him to get a CT scan and confirm that there was no serious injury.  It disturbed me, and pained my heart that he was delaying going to the doctor, and might not be getting the help he needed.  This was potentially life threatening!  My heart ached and I couldn't rest until I knew that he was getting what he needed.

As I prayed about this, I knew God was speaking to me.  His heart aches and He is disturbed by the delay of His message getting to the unreached.  This is a situation of eternal life and death.  They must get what they need!  We must see the unreached have an opportunity to receive this message and to come into His Father's arms of love.  His heart cries and longs for His creation to come home to Him.

 Disciple making movements rapidly bring large numbers of people into His Father's arms, into His embrace. His Father's love is what is releasing movements around the world. People are dying apart from Him.  He is getting impatient for them to come to Him. We must work differently.  We must see them get what they need more quickly. Too many die each day apart from the Father, lost from their true identity, lost and away from their true Home.

Let’s go back and uncover that Mina.  That buried mina we once were given way back in DTS, the revelation of the Father's Heart. Let’s start to put it to work.  Let’s ask God first to put it to work in our hearts and lives in fresh ways.  Let’s ask Him to reveal to us again what it means to be His Sons and Daughters.

 As we do this, the message of the Minas, the call to much greater multiplication, will never be about performance.  We will never hear this message as a condemnation because we haven’t worked hard enough, or been good enough to please the Master. Greater increase will never be about performing or being successful to earn more of His love.

Instead, with much joy we will delight in bringing movements of thousands of people, as our gifts to our Dad.  We will joyfully bring our 10 fold increase and place it before His feet, knowing how precious those returning Sons and Daughters are to our Father.  It won’t be about us and what we have done or not done.  It will be all about Him and we will know that no matter whether we see fruit or no fruit, His love for us is absolutely unchangeable.