Here Am I, Send me!

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” And I said, “Here am I; send me!”
-Isaiah 6:8

After briefly looking at the theology and history of how the Church has understood the Kingdom of God, the next question is: Is this really something ordinary Christians have any role in? Isn’t it the height of hubris to believe that I can have any material impact? Isn’t this something that God is doing? I would answer those questions: yes, no, and yes! 

Christians are not called to build the Kingdom of God. This is something God will accomplish in the fullness of time, and it would be rank arrogance to assume we can do it. That is why I have written that Christians and the Church are called to build toward the Kingdom of God. We are not the King, but rather the servants, priests, and heralds of the King. Our job is to so order and live our lives by faith in and according to the example of Jesus Christ, our crucified and risen King, that our way of life is a signpost pointing toward the Kingdom. 

If you are struggling with the idea that God wants us to take part in this work, I implore you to return to the scriptures. I’m straining my brain to think of a miracle that Jesus accomplished without at least some minimum amount of human participation–he asked servers at the wedding at Cana to fill water jugs, he relied on his disciples to supply the few morsels with which he fed the five thousand, he told lepers to go and wash in a pool to be healed, he told several lame men to “take up their mats and go.” The entirety of the scriptures suggests that, in all of God’s actions, there ought to be a divine-human partnership. From Genesis to Revelation, the scriptures chronicle the experiences of normal people who responded to God’s call by echoing the words of the prophet Isaiah, “Here am I, send me!” 

Building toward the Kingdom of God means work in the world, here and now. It means more than an evangelism of words, but a recognition that our actions make up the bulk of our Christian witness to the world. Our faith is so much more than some neoplatonic navel-gazing, which views the world as inconsequential to the ultimate goal of going to heaven. Christ said that he had come to give life and give it abundantly, and I think we can all agree that while life proceeds after death, it doesn’t begin with death. We are alive now! 

One of my favorite historical books is Lest Innocent Blood be Shed by Philip Hallie. It tells the story of a small French village called Le Chambon and how its community, led by Rev. André Trocmé and his Huguenot church, saved the lives of between three and five thousand Jewish refugees during the Second World War. Because of this, Rev. Trocmé and others were arrested by the SS and sent to a concentration camp that mostly held communists. Upon arrival, they began celebrating worship in the barracks. The book talks about their first service:

“After the benediction, the group sat around to talk, and one of the communists asked, ‘Your hopes–are they for the next world or for this one? If they’re for this world, we’re with you. If they’re for the next, then they don’t interest us–they’re too vague, too far away.’

“To this, Trocmé answered, ‘Faith works on earth. I do not know about heaven.’ For Trocmé, the test of whether a faith was real or not lay not in patience or in passionately rehearsed imagery but in what faith could do to make our own lives and the lives of others precious now, in our own homes, in our villages…After an extensive discussion about the power of faith to change one’s everyday life, the group insisted that they meet not only on Sundays, but every evening. They finally agreed to meet three times a week.

“On the [next] evening, there were twenty present, and the small room given to them by the authorities was full. The next evening meeting attracted forty, and twenty prisoners had to hear and sing while standing outside the open windows of the barracks.”

Think about it! If a group of people committed to building toward the Kingdom of God can have such a legacy as to save thousands of lives from violent oppression AND inspire committed atheists like these European communists to the worship of Christ, there is absolutely nothing we cannot do. 

Where do you feel called to build for the Kingdom of God?

Rev. Ryan Young