Reflection on My Utmost for His Highest: Missionary Munitions

I read this today and it is 100% true for InterVarsity Staff.  During whatever season God has us in at this moment, whether it is fund development, ministry with students, administrative work, moving to an unfamiliar place, staying in the same place we have been our entire lives, or anything else, are we displaying Christ in the most menial work we do?  Ministry does not start only once I start working with students.  It started much before that.  At home, at school, in the application process, in fund raising, in moving, in training, in my life away from direct contact with InterVarsity, these are places of the most ordinary actions but can be transformed into ministry when I act as Christ did.  When I am an example of Christ in all my surrounds and not just my "ministry job."  So if I say that I am not doing ministry until I start working with students, I am sorely mistaken and not ready to work with them.  I have the opportunity to minister to others in ALL parts of my life, INCLUDING fund development.

Below find the devotional I read.

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September 11th

Missionary munitions

Ministering as Opportunity Surrounds us. If I then, your Lord and Master, have washed your feet, ye also ought to wash one another’s feet. John 13:14.

Ministering as opportunity surrounds us does not mean selecting our surroundings, it means being very selectly God’s in any haphazard surroundings which He engineers for us. The characteristics we manifest in our immediate surroundings are indications of what we will be like in other surroundings.

The things that Jesus did were of the most menial and commonplace order, and this is an indication that it takes all God’s power in me to do the most commonplace things in His way. Can I use a towel as He did? Towels and dishes and sandals, all the ordinary sordid things of our lives, reveal more quickly than anything what we are made of. It takes God Almighty Incarnate in us to do the meanest duty as it ought to be done.
 
“I have given you an example, that ye should do as I have done to you.” Watch the kind of people God brings around you, and you will be humiliated to find that this is His way of revealing to you the kind of person you have been to Him. Now, He says, exhibit to that one exactly what I have shown to you.

‘Oh,’ you say, ‘I will do all that when I get out into the foreign field.’ To talk in this way is like trying to produce the munitions of war in the trenches—you will be killed while you are doing it.

We have to go the ‘second mile’ with God. Some of us get played out in the first ten yards, because God compels us to go where we cannot see the way, and we say—‘I will wait till I get nearer the big crisis.’ If we do not do the running steadily in the little ways, we shall do nothing in the crisis.


Chambers, O. (1986). My utmost for his highest: Selections for the year. Grand Rapids, MI: Oswald Chambers Publications; Marshall Pickering.