Cage of Responsibility
Mark Batterson
This weekend we start a new series called Wild Goose Chase. I’m excited about where God is going to take up over the next six weeks. I want to take the opportunity while I’m here in Edinburgh, Scotland to share a couple of thoughts with you as we get ready for this series. I’m in Celtic country, this is where in the 5th Century, Christianity made its way into Britain and Scotland and Ireland. I’m actually at a 7th Century ruin that is pretty symbolic of what this series is about. There is on one side of me, the city of Edinburgh, a very industrial, institutionalized, lots of man-made buildings and on the other side of me, the Crags, nature in it’s raw element, and a portal in between those two eras, it was the Celtic Christians who had the fascinating name for the Holy Spirit, they called Him An Geadh-Glas or the Wild Goose. When I first heard that name, I though it was intriguing but the more I thought about it, I thought what a great description of what it’s like to live a spirit-led life. You aren’t going to know where you’re going most of the time and that produces tremendous anxiety in our lives because of that circumstantial uncertainty, but I would also suggest that it goes by another name and we call it adventure. The thing I love about a wild goose is that it can’t be track or tamed. There is unpredictability or a hint of mystery or an element of danger that surrounds the wild goose. In a sense, if you take the Holy Spirit out of my, my life is boring. But if you add Him into the equation of your life, you never know who you are going to meet, where you are going to go, what you are doing to do, all bets are off.
A couple of years ago, I visited the Galapagos Islands and it was there that I experienced nature like I’d never experienced before, and wild animals in their natural habitat, marine iguanas, and 200-year old tortugas and I went snorkeling with manta rays and swimming with sea lions and there were these pelicans that looked like prehistoric pterodactyls that would circle our boat and dive-bomb into the ocean and come up with breakfast in its beak, then I went home and I remember it was about two weeks later that we took our kids to the National Zoo and it’s a great zoo, but as we’re walking through the zoo, it just was not the same experience seeing a wild animal in a cage, it was too tame, it was too safe, it was too civilized, and as we were walking through the ape house, this thought ran through my mind—I wonder if churches have done to people what zoos do to animals? In a sense we try to tame them in the name of Christ, we try to remove the risk, remove the struggle, remove the danger, and what we end up with is a caged Christian. Yes, it’s safe and comfortable, but I think there is a primal longing deep down inside for something else, for something more, and that’s really at the heart of what the Wild Goose Chase is about. It’s about entering into a relationship with Christ and then chasing after the Wild Goose so that we live our lives the way that God originally intended.
[End of Scotland video]
How are you doing? This feels like a family reunion, I’ve been gone for a couple of weeks and I miss my family, my immediate family and my church family. It’s so good to be back. I want to welcome all of you here and at each of our locations, and I know we’ve got some folks watching a webcast or listening to a podcast, welcome to you as well. I’m excited because we begin a series called Wild Goose Chase. I’ve got to admit that it feels like I’ve been on a wild goose chase last week. It was a week ago Sunday that I caught a flight to Scotland, a red-eye flight. I played St. Andrews on Tuesday, somebody has to do it. I choose my words carefully, I didn’t play well, but I played it. I’ll be honest, really St. Andrews played me. It was awesome! On the front nine, seven shots to get out of one of the sand traps, it was humbling, yet really cool. We went and some of our team went because we took a conference that we’ve done here for pastors and leaders called Unplugged and we took it to Europe and we had leaders and pastors from six countries on the European continent who came. We had a wonderful time, not just talking about church and how we reach people, but also building relationship with people who are doing great things in amazing places. Then I caught a flight on Friday from Scotland to London and then got up Saturday morning at 1:00 a.m. EST and after three hours on the tarmac while they fixed a valve on the engine, flew for eight hours and made it just in time for Saturday night services. What I’m trying to say is that you should have very low expectations for this message. I really don’t know what time zone I’m in but I am here. And I’m really excited about where we’re going to head over the next few weeks.
The first day that we got to Scotland, we stayed on the Royal Mile and it was just a few blocks, walking through the festival that happens there in August, to Edinburgh Castle. It was cool to see, it’s just awesome, and one of the things I noticed on the way in, the main entrance, the main gate of the castle, there is a plaque to none other than William Wallace. When I saw that, it brought back memories of one of my all-time favorite movie scenes or movie quotes, and you kill it when you do it in an American accent, but that’s all I’ve got. William Wallace has been fighting for freedom and he is captured, and there’s this moment before he is about to be tortured and executed and he says something, he says, “Everyman dies, not every man really lives.” And he faces death with an ‘I have lived life to the fullest’ and I think that is so true. All of us are born, all of us will die, we have a birth certificate and a death certificate, but most people die long before the date on their death certificate. That happens in lots of different ways. For some people, I think it is pain or brokenness or loss that robs them of life, the enemy comes to steal, kill and destroy, and life is taken away. I think for others, it is disappointment and failure and we just lose some of that life inside of us. But for many of us, here’s how it happens, it is so subtle. For many of us, our day to day responsibilities numb us to the possibilities around us and the passions within in us. And it happens slowly, most of us don’t even know how or when it happens but at some point, if we’re honest, we stop living and we start dying. It’s almost like we’re buried alive by our pain or our disappointments or our failures or debt or our responsibilities. Listen, nothing wrong with responsibilities. I have responsibilities as a husband, as a father, as a pastor and I need to embrace those responsibilities. You need to fulfill your responsibilities. You need to take out the trash, you need to save for retirement, you need to pay your bills, but it is so easy to get buried alive by our day to day responsibilities and totally miss out on the opportunities for spiritual adventures that are all around us all the time. I think what I’m talking about is epitomized by one encounter in the Gospels.
In Matthew 8, Jesus invites a young man to follow Him, but the young man says, “Lord, first let me go bury my father.” And Jesus said, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” Now there are a few different takes on this by Bible scholars. It is possible that he was putting off following Jesus until his father died, maybe he was sick and he was just waiting until that moment. It is possible that this young man didn’t want to follow Jesus to ensure that he got his father’s inheritance. It’s possible that he was afraid of leaving the family business while his father was still living. But I think part of us that hear a story like this and is there a part of you that sympathizes with this young man? Like, what’s wrong with that? It seems reasonable and responsible, to look out for his family and bury his father. But here is an important lesson I’ve learned in reading the Bible. When you are tempted to sympathize with someone other than Jesus, when something doesn’t make sense, there is a little dis-equilibrium, I think you need to take a closer look at what’s happening in the story. You need to drill down a little and try to figure out what is happening here and why am I feeling the way I am feeling? Here’s my take. I think this young man was doing what many of us do. Here’s what it is. I think he was turning a responsibility into an excuse. I think Jesus saw through the smokescreen. He was allowing a responsibility, burying his father, to get in the way of his greatest responsibility and greatest opportunity which was following Christ, and we do the same thing. We turn our responsibilities into excuses and that is when our responsibility can become a form of irresponsibility. What happens is this, less important responsibilities began to replace more important responsibilities and that’s when we’re practicing irresponsible responsibility.
I’m going to unpack that in a moment but if you have a Bible, I want you to turn to Nehemiah or you can follow along on the screen. I want to tell you during this series, I’m going to give you a couple of homework assignments. I want you to read the Bible, and if you want, I want you to read the Book, because there is no way we can cover all the things we want to talk about in a 30-minute message. We are going to talk about six stories and six cages. I think if you take this time and spend some time in the Book of Nehemiah this week, what will happen is, you’ll begin to apply, you’ll begin to get insights into what we are talking about this weekend. I believe that’s the way God will speak into your life. So I encourage you to do that. We’ll just touch the surface but I think we’ll touch enough to get where God wants us to go.
Nehemiah 1:1: these are the memoirs of Nehemiah, son of Hacaliah. In late autumn, in the month of Kislev, in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes’ reign, I was at the fortress of Susa. Hanani, one of my brothers, came to visit me with some other men who had just arrived from Judah. I asked them about the Jews who had returned there from captivity and about how things were going in Jerusalem. They said to me, “things are not going well for those who returned to the province of Judah. They are in great trouble and disgrace. The wall of Jerusalem has been torn down, and the gates have been destroyed by fire.” When I heard this, I sat down and wept. In fact, for days I mourned, fasted, and prayed to the God of heaven. Then I said, “O Lord, God of heaven, the great and awesome God who keeps his covenant of unfailing love with those who love him and obey his commands, listen to my prayer! Look down and see me praying night and day for your people Israel. I confess that we have sinned against you. Yes, even my own family and I have sinned! We have sinned terribly by not obeying the commands, decrees, and regulations that you gave us through your servant Moses. “Please remember what you told your servant Moses: ‘If you are unfaithful to me, I will scatter you among the nations. But if you return to me and obey my commands and live by them, then even if you are exiled to the ends of the earth, I will bring you back to the place I have chosen for my name to be honored.’ “the people you rescued by your great power and strong hand are your servants. O Lord, please hear my prayer! Listen to the prayers of those of us who delight in honoring you. Please grant me success today by making the king favorable to me. Put it into his heart to be kind to me.” In those days I was the king’s cup-bearer.
Now there is no way I can tell you the whole story, but let me give you a little bit of back-story. In 586 B.C. King Nebuchadnezzar invaded Judea and took many of the Jewish people captive back to Babylon. In 538 B.C. Zerubbabel lead the first remnant back to Jerusalem, about 43,000 Jews. In 458 B.C. Ezra returned with a remnant of about 18,000 and Nehemiah picks up the story at around 445 B.C. The bottom line is this, the Wall of Jerusalem is in total disrepair and the significance of that is this, for an ancient city, a wall was it’s first and last line of defense, so the city of Jerusalem is defenseless. So it’s a cup-bearer in Babylon who has this passion that is conceived in his spirit to go back and to rebuild the wall. Now against all odds, this is the Cliff notes version, he goes and in 52 days, he rebuilds the wall of Jerusalem and goes on to serve as governor of Jerusalem for more than a decade. But here’s what I want you to see. Here’s how it starts. It starts with a single desire. Somehow this cup-bearer gets it in his mind, in his spirit that maybe God is calling him to do something about this problem, and honestly, he is not qualified to do it. As far as we know, he has never been to Jerusalem. As far as we know, he has no education, no experience that would qualify him to go and do this. Honestly, maybe it should be his brother, Hanani, who would go and do this. Or why not the remnant back in Jerusalem? Why is it a cup-bearer in Jerusalem? It doesn’t make total sense to me, but I know this, the people that God uses are the people that God conceives these God-ordained passions within us that sometimes seem crazy, that sometimes seem irresponsible, but it’s those people that truly make a difference.
Now, I want to say something up front, then we are going to dive in a little bit deeper. When God puts a passion in your heart, you need to take responsibility for it. I think that’s the gap. That’s where so often the kingdom doesn’t really advance because we don’t really live that spiritual adventure because the passion that God has put in our heart, we never act on it. But you’ve got to act on it, whether it be human trafficking in a third world country, or inner-city education or making movies with redemptive messages, whatever that passion is, you need to take responsibility for it. You need to own it. You need to see the problem and then become the solution to it.
Here’s how it starts. In Nehemiah Chapter 2, the story continues:
In the month of Nisan in the twentieth year of King Artaxerxes, when wine was brought for him, I took the wine and gave it to the king. I had not been sad in his presence before; so the king asked me, “Why does your face look so sad when you are not ill? This can be nothing but sadness of heart.” I was very much afraid, but I said to the king, “May the king live forever! Why should my face not look sad when the city where my fathers are buried lies in ruins, and its gates have been destroyed by fire?” the king said to me, (listen to this question) “What is it you want?” then I prayed to the God of heaven, and I answered the king, “If it pleases the king and if your servant has found favor in his sight, let him send me to the city in Judah where my fathers are buried so that I can rebuild it.”
The king asked Nehemiah a very pointed question, what is it that you want? If I asked you that same question, what would you say? What is it that you want? But can you identify, what is that God-ordained passion? I said this before, I’ll say it again a lot during this series, I think most people don’t get what they want because they really don’t know what they want. They’ve never really defined what they want out of life, never set any goals, never identified what those passions are, never defined a dream, and they have no idea what they want, so we are out of touch with our emotions. But more importantly than that, I would suggest that if we don’t have a God-ordained passion, we are out of touch with the heart of God Himself. So how do you identify those passions? And how do you know they are from God? And how do you act on them?
I had a professor in graduate school who asked a great question. It’s one of the few things I remember from graduate school but I’ll never forget this. He said, “If you want to identify a passion, here’s the question: what makes you cry or pound your fist on the table? What makes you sad? What makes you mad?” I would throw one more into the mix, what makes you smile? What makes you mad, sad, glad, and if you can begin to identify those emotions, I think you begin to figure out what your passions are. I think God-ordained passions are somewhere in the mixture of those emotions, and we’ve got to identify what it is. Let me start putting a little skin on this because I want to bring it down to earth as much as possible.
About a year ago, I sat down with Gary Haugen, the founder of International Justice Mission. I think many of us in the DC area are familiar with IJM, what a great organization. It was wonderful to have a little bit of time with Gary. Whenever I’m with people like that, I always ask the genesis question. I’m fascinated with how things get started, so I asked Gary, “How did this thing get started? I know what’s happening now, some great things, but what was the genesis?” He told me that he was working for the Department of Justice quite a while ago and he was put on loan to the United Nations and he was the Chief Investigator of the genocide that was happening in Rwanda and that experience absolutely changed his life. He came back and said he had to do something about what he saw. Listen, he had a great position with the Department of Justice, it would seem responsible just to stay there, wouldn’t that be the responsible thing to do? Instead, he had to do something. It was the suffering he saw that made him pound his fist on the table and say he was going to do something about it. He started IJM and a decade later, the IJM lawyers and investigators and social workers, they are leading the fight to end modern slavery and oppression around the world.
Here’s the thing, you never know how a God-ordained passion is going to get conceived in your spirit. This is beautiful because this is where the sovereignty of God comes into play. For Gary, it was the trip to Rwanda. By the way, do you think there is any motive behind our last series, A1:8 and wanting to challenge every single NCCer to go on a mission trip? You just need to go! God will get a hold of your heart in ways that it’s not going to happen otherwise. I wish I was that good a preacher but I’m not. You need to go on a trip. You need to expose yourself to what’s going on around the world, the good things and the bad things. You need to cry, you need to get mad, you need to get glad, you need to allow God to get a hold of your heart. Often, that’s getting out of the context that we live in, this cage of responsibility that we find ourselves in.
You never know how it’s going to happen. It might be a book you read, it might be a missions trip, it might be reading the newspaper, it might be a Google search. It could even be a loss, like a death or a divorce. That experience breaks you but it also conceives a passion within you. Most of us are familiar with MADD, Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but you might not know the story behind the story. It was Candy Lightner who started that organization who lost her own daughter in an accident with a drunk driver. And out of that pain and out of the brokenness, a passion was conceived that she acted on. For Nehemiah, it was a conversation. But here’s the thing, I’m afraid that for many of us, for me, I wonder if this wouldn’t have gone in one ear and out the other, and I would’ve just said too bad. But somehow, it didn’t go in one ear and out the other. There was a spirit that was sensitive enough, that was soft enough to allow God to conceive something within him. I don’t know exactly how it happened, but can I just remind you that it is not about you discovering, it really is about God revealing. The pressure is not on us, God is going to reveal it. If you are living to glorify God, if you want to live on mission, if you want Christ to be at the center of your life, if you are living in the Word of God, if you’re praying, if you’re worshiping, if you’re sensitive to the Spirit of God, He will reveal those things. He is going to conceive passion within your spirit. I love Psalm 37:4 because it gets to the heart of what I’m saying. It says: Delight yourself in the Lord and He will give you the desires of your heart. The word ‘give’ actually means to conceive. I suppose if you wanted a technological analogy, it might mean to download. When we delight ourselves in the Lord, God begins to download new desires within us, He begins to get a hold of our heart. Or He conceives those things within us and they are birthed as the single cell desires. They are almost unexplainable and inexpressible but something makes you mad, sad or glad and you don’t really have a handle on it, but you feel like God is doing something in your heart that you can’t explain and that’s how it starts. Then we have to act on it. Listen, it was irresponsible for Nehemiah to give up his position, he had a great job, cup-bearer to the king, part of the administration and in a sense, it seems like he is throwing all of that away, but I think Nehemiah knew something that so many of us have to learn the hard way—if you succeed at the wrong thing, you fail. All of us know successful failures don’t we? People that are really successful and really unhappy. And they succeed at things that just don’t really matter, or there is just no fulfillment at the end of the day and my heart breaks for those kinds of people. I love the way Stephen Covey said you can climb the ladder of success and then realize it is leaning against the wrong wall. I think Nehemiah could have climbed all the way up the ladder of success, and at the top, if it wasn’t leaning on the wall of Jerusalem, felt like a total failure, because he really would not have pursued what God had called him to do.
Listen, we need to identify what it is that God wants us to do. Here’s a word of caution. I think figuring out what you want could be a very selfish endeavor. So you better make sure that what you want is what God wants. Ya know? How do you do that? I wish I had a formula, but I don’t. But again, I’m confident that if you are in the Word, if you are sensitive to the Spirit of God, He is going to lead you into those things that He wants you to be passionate about. If you delight yourself in God, He is going to give you the desires of your heart and as you grow in a relationship with God, those God-ordained passions are going to grow in your heart.
Let me give you one more example. I want to personalize it, I’m learning this stuff just like you are, but I’m still trying to figure it out. We’ll be trying to figure God out through eternity, right? But I’ve learned that there are moments where the Spirit of God conceives something, you better pay attention to it.
Here’s one example. It was a couple of months ago that I was speaking at Beza International Church and Zeb Mengistu was here preaching for us a couple weeks ago. Wasn’t that a great message? It’s so wonderful to be connected with them and see what God is doing in Ethiopia, and we were just sitting with them and Pastor Zeb was taking the offering and I was getting ready to preach and he was having a little bit of fun and he made some comment about that if someone wanted to write a seven digit check they could make it out to Beza International Church, he was just having fun with it. And something got quickened in my spirit, I thought, the day will come when we write a seven digit check to the church. I can’t totally explain it and it wasn’t what he was looking for, but something got conceived in my spirit. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but the day will come when we will invest a million dollars. How does that start? Well, it starts with us giving $25,000 towards the AIDS outreach to Entoto Mountain. It starts with us sending that team over to be on the ground and make a difference. It starts with us being obedient with the little things. If we are obedient with the little things, then those desires that God conceives in our hearts will become reality. I believe that.
Let me just zoom out and make this observation. The Wild Goose will show up in wild places at wild times and He will take you places you never imagined going by paths you never knew existed, if you are open to Him conceiving those God-ordained passions in your heart. You never know how God is going to conceive a passion in your heart, and it might take the form of sadness or anger or joy, but once that passion is conceived in your heart, you need to do something about it. I want to talk about that. You better make sure it is from God, but if God begins conceiving something in your heart, you need to do something about it.
According to cognitive neuroscientists, we process information in a couple of different ways, here’s the short version. Some things we process from bottom up, from primal parts of the human brain, the amygdale has this emotional response to things; and then there is top down processing where the pre-frontal cortex and the more developed parts of the human brain begin to get involved in that process, and both are amazing. Top down processing is a wonderful thing but it is possible to over-think. Now those of you who have any kind of background in athletics know what I’m talking about, whether it is calling a time out to freeze the field goal kicker or an Olympian who has done the balance beam a thousand times but not at the Olympics. Or a basketball player in a high pressure game shooting free throws at the end of the game, they practice those over and over. In those scenarios, as an athlete, if you over-think, you are in trouble because it is probably not going to work out. By the way, this is true in relationships as well. I’ve done my fair share of counseling and I did date Laura before we got married and I was subject to some of that over-thinking as well. I think the same thing happens spiritually. You need to talk about it, you need to think about it, you need to pray about it. Jesus said you need to count the cost, that’s top down processing. But we need to be very careful because I think a lot of us are trying to over-talk, over-think, and dare I say over-pray, when God wants us to act on it.
Let me give you a Scripture, and give you some examples, the last verse of Mark’s gospel, Mark 16:20: And they went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them confirming the Word with signs following. I think most of us want signs to precede. “God give me a sign, then I’ll step out in faith,” but generally, that’s not how God works. So what happens is this, we spend our lives waiting for God while God is waiting for us. And we wonder why God isn’t making the move and God is wondering why we aren’t making the move. We need to step out in faith. I could tell you so many stories, but I don’t have a lot of time. I think the history of our church, so many interesting stories. I remember when we were just around 25 people meeting in a DC public school, and I was leading worship. It was bad, we didn’t have a drummer and I have no rhythm. We would slow songs down. We were praying for a drummer, we were praying for a drummer forever. One thursday morning, I felt like God spoke to me and told me to go buy a drum set. I said, “We don’t have a drummer.” I remember going out and buying a $400 drum set, that wasn’t a lot of faith, brought it home that thursday. On Sunday, a guy from over at Eighth and I in the Marine Corp Bugle Corp showed up and was our first drummer. Three days after taking that step of faith. Is that coincidence? I really don’t think it is. You want to know the story behind Ebenezers? So many moments where we stepped out in faith believing in God. I remember when Ebenezers was just a crazy idea. I was at a school auction for my kids and there was a binder three inches thick from the Capitol Hill Restoration Society with all the zoning regulations from Capitol Hill. Needless to say, no one else bid on it. But I saw it and I’d been looking at the regulations and zoning trying to figure out if we could build a coffee house at 201 F Street and what would be the challenges we would face and what are some of the zoning issues involved, and by faith, for $65 bucks, bought that zoning manual. And I still have it, because it was a step of faith and God honored it. When you step out, God will begin to work. There are so many examples of this. God is blessing Ebenezers. Number 1 coffeehouse in the metro DC area, AOL City Guide, the vote came in! That’s awesome! That’s the hand of God’s favor on what’s happening here. We started serving sandwiches this week. That’s what I’m talking about! Great things happening. You know what we did a couple of months ago? Couple of us went to a franchising seminar. I don’t know what God has for us, but sometimes you need to take that step of faith and see what’s out there, what’s next.
So I want to push you a little bit. Here’s what I’m trying to say, you need to do something. Buy a book, make an appointment, enroll in a class, write a check. I don’t know what it is but you need to do something, and you need to do it now.
I read an interesting article this week about the Peace Corp and the fact that they are marketing to baby boomers. This program was established in 1961 by President Kennedy, I think it was in one of his inaugural addresses, he said, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” And this program came out of that, so Peace Corp targeting baby boomers and the percentage of older volunteers is rising. In fact, the number of 50+ volunteers has risen by 50% in the last year. So I’m reading this story about different people and one of them, I think it’s Lucy Stocky, is going to Uganda as part of the Peace Corp, and I love what she said. She said, “I never forgot his message,” talking about President Kennedy. “I tucked it away in the back of my head to act on someday.” then she said something so powerful, “Today is my someday.” Listen, today is your someday. You need to do something, you need to act on it. I’m not telling you to do something big, Rome wasn’t built in a day. It took 52 days to rebuild the wall of Jerusalem. It’s not going to happen overnight. You need to do something small, count the cost and step out in faith. I’m not saying ignore everything else in your life, pay attention to life stage. If you’re single, married, have kids, empty nester, those are different life stages that somewhat dictate what you are able to do. Honestly, I think financial debt is something that is crippling so many people from being to really step out and do what they think God is calling them to do. So I’m not saying we ignore those things, but at some point, I would suggest that inside out processing is far more important than top down processing. What I mean by that is this, what is the Wild Goose speaking? What is God conceiving in your spirit? And are you willing to step out and really, I’m just trying to say your greatest responsibility is pursuing God-ordained passions. If you over-think it, it’ll never happen.
I’ve been reading about adoption this week and the way a lot of foreign countries are closing their doors to allowing Americans to adopt, and here’s my guess, there are people in our congregation that feel called to adopt, and that is such a wonderful thing. But if you top down process it, you’ll never do it. You’ll never be ready, you’ll find plenty of excuses. It’ll never happen. I can name a thousand different things. If you don’t act on that desire to adopt, at the end of the day, you’re going to wonder what if? How could you have impacted a little child’s life? There are a thousand scenarios like that.
So here’s my thought as I wrap up. Imagine a church full of people pursuing God’s ordained passions. A church like that would change a city. If all of us came out of the cage of responsibility and actually took responsibility for the things that made us mad or sad or glad, we would turn this city upside down. We would actually be the kingdom of God. If we would chase after the Wild Goose and pursue those God-ordained passions.
Last story, in 1910, a girl named Agnes was born in Albania. As a teenager, she felt called to ministry. She did her training in Ireland and India and one day she approached her superiors and said, “I have three pennies and a dream from God to build an orphanage.” Her superiors said, “You can’t build an orphanage with three pennies, with three pennies you can’t do anything.” Angus smiled and said, “I know, but with God’s three pennies, I can do anything.” For 50 years, Agnes worked among the poorest of the poor in the slums of Calcutta, India. In 1979, Agnes, who we know as Mother theresa, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. How does a woman with three pennies go on to become maybe the most recognizable person on the planet a few years later? How does someone like that with nothing raise billions of dollars?
I think the answer is simple. Never underestimate someone with a God-ordained passion. They rebuild walls, they start organizations, they adopt children, they go on missions trips. The just don’t allow their day to day responsibilities to bury the God-ordained passion in their lives. They don’t allow them to numb them to the possibilities around them to the passions within them, but they prioritize the calling that God has placed on their lives.
Towards the end of her life, Mother theresa was asked, “How can I make a difference with my life the way that you have made with yours?” She was asked that question repeatedly and she gave the same answer, four words, “Find your own Calcutta.” What is it that makes you mad or sad or glad? If you can’t answer that question, like Nehemiah, you better spend a few days outside the city walls, examining the walls, getting a sense of what God is calling you to. It might not happen overnight. Listen, I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. I know the passions I have now but I don’t have it all figured out. I’m believing that God is going to conceive some things in my spirit that right now I can’t even imagine, as long as I continue to grow in Him. Don’t let what you can’t do keep you from doing what you can. Come out of that cage of responsibility and chase the Goose.
Lord help us, help us I pray, to be a people of passion, a people that act on those passions that You have conceived in our lives. You invite us into the adventure of following You and God I pray that we would have the courage to accept that invitation. Lord I pray for those that are here that may be just checking this out trying to figure out what this is all about, Lord the Wild Goose Chase starts with a relationship with You. You said come and follow Me and it is an open invitation. I pray that those who are here that have never made that decision that today would be their someday. That today would be that day that they enter into a relationship with You. Thank You that it is as simple as believing You, believing You died for me, praying that You would forgive me of my sin and pray God that You would begin to work in my life and that I would become the person you destined me to be. Lord that we enter into that adventure chasing after You. God I pray for those who have become numb to the possibilities and the passions. God would You turn over the soil of our hearts so that we would begin to live the lives that You called us to. It doesn’t happen in one sermon, but God I pray that You would begin a good work in us. Thank You that You are the One who carries it on to completion. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.