Jesus is our orientation!

Jesus is our ever-fixed mark, the One we gaze upon in worship and the One we follow with a blood hound like tenacity.

As we band together in love to know Christ and to make Him known, we become more and more impactful as the Lord purifies our affections and refines our focus onto His focus for each of us and for each of our clusterings of Jesus-followers.

Small groups and small small churches are critical building blocks for our Lord’s ministry among and through us, as we seek to engage this world full of pain and unbelief.

A simple view on this is going back and re-living encounters through the Gospel writers with John in camels’ hair and Jesus with the Spirit descending upon Him like a dove and the Father saying, “This is My Beloved Son, with Whom I am well pleased.” As we re-live encounters with Jesus in particular, don’t we see a simple band-like behavior of Jesus’ followers following Jesus out in the community in many cases, meeting people together and making a difference in their lives, engaging with the hurting, broken, lonely, dejected, and bringing them community with Christ and His followers. (In this verse from 1 John, wherever “Him” is used I’m placing “Jesus” as the context makes clear…)

“… whoever keeps Jesus’ word, in him truly the love of God is perfected. By this we may know that we are in Jesus: whoever says he abides in Jesus ought to walk in the same way in which Jesus walked.” – 1 John 2:5-6

What would happen if Jesus-followers made an intentional daily and weekly focus of simply doing day-in and day-out ministry TOGETHER in small cloisters of Jesus-followers looking for opportunities to serve fellow Jesus-followers and the lost, hurting, dying, sick, in-prisoned, broken, enslaved, and so on? My prayerful suggestion is that Jesus would bring revival through these clusterings of Jesus followers more consistently than through our grand performance-oriented services, which in many cases do a dis-service to the Mission Jesus has called us to of making disciples of Jesus, genuine followed of the Suffering Servant, the Lamb of God!

My prayer is to see these bands of Jesus’ followers doing live with deep and resolved focus upon Jesus and His manner of ministry. As this happens, may we be ready to even feel the very Joy of Jesus welling up within our souls with Heaven and our Master in our sights!

In the photo for this post there is a man named Bobbitt who helped a young woman with some gas. She has all she needs compared to him, yet from his poverty he was able to be available to her in her highest need and vulnerability. May we be so simple and loving in our availability to Jesus’ work that we are actually of some use in the this life. May we be so eternally minded that we are of some earthly good.

– Torrey