We are Apostles.
Brittney, a servant of God and the Lord Jesus Christ,
To friends and family, and anyone who desires to know more about my Dad and his love: Peace, blessings and understanding from God our father and our brother Jesus Christ.
Starting the world race, and doing the whole missionary thing has made me want to see God in new ways. I’ve grown up with God in a box, and have put limits on what he can and can’t do. A lot of what Dad is teaching me has to do with fully embracing everything about who he is, and who Jesus the human was.
I guess I’ll start with this. (A little rabbit trail to begin…) So, my team was having a conversation about some of the leadership at Adventures in Missions, and how often times we view these people in golden light. They’re different from us because they speak wisdom to us, so we’re slightly afraid of them, and we could never really see them as a friend or an equal. We respect them and think highly of them, but they’re just not on our level. We do the same thing with historical figures too. (Think Jesus, or the apostle Paul.) We don’t think of them as a living breathing person with the same issues that we deal with, like, having an upset stomach, or anxiety, or fighting with our families. We see them as history does. Who they were, and what they did to make history remember them. Dad has been showing me how to see the humanity and realness in these people, specifically Jesus’ disciples.
So I’ve been reading through the New Testament, and had just started 2 Peter. I was honestly a little bored, and not super excited to read what Peter had to say, but I asked if Dad would reveal something new to me in this passage. I started with the intent to read the whole book, and never got past the first 2 verses. (Which, usually doesn’t happen because the first two verses of a book in the NT are the greeting of a letter, which doesn’t have a lot of juice, you know?)
The greeting of 2 Peter is this (ESV) :
“Simeon Peter, a servant and apostle of Jesus Christ.To those who have obtained a faith of equal standing with ours by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ: May grace and peace be multiplied to you in the knowledge of god and of Jesus.”
When I read this greeting I was automatically struck with a vision of someone (Peter?) sitting down and writing a letter. I became very aware of the crazy notion that the words I had just read were once written by a human hand. It was such a mundane, human feeling. Like a little history flashback, but all of a sudden it wasn’t history anymore, it was right now. It was me, typing these words.
Dad made it really apparent to me about the similarities between myself (and other world racers/missionaries) and the apostles.
I am doing the thing that Jesus called them to do back then, right now. I was called, I followed, and now I’m halfway around the world writing back to the people I know about God and what he’s doing in foreign nations. (I really hope you see what I’m seeing here.)
When the New Testament (which is a big collection of letters) was written, I don’t believe that the apostles had any idea that we would be reading and reveling over their words in a book today.
They were just writing letters.
I’m just writing blogs.
We are apostles. We have embraced the great commission and we are, currently, writing history about the movements of God throughout the nations, via blog. We are Paul, we are Peter, we are John.
I guess this blog post is to say that I’m learning what it means to be like an apostle in the New Testament, and it’s such an awesome thing. Dad is showing me how to view the Bible in a new way and in turn, view him differently. He is my Dad, and Jesus is my brother, whom I walk alongside and serve with, as the apostles did.
In peace,
Britt
