The Spiritual Art of Ministry

Dear Friends,

People often say to me, “I wish I knew what God wanted me to do with my life.”

“That’s easy,” I reply.  “Ministry.”

Their eyes open wide.  “You mean give up my job and go away to a nunnery or something?”

“No,” I reply, “probably not.  Just get going.  Look around you. The mission field is between your own two feet at any one time.”

Ministry is not something for the professional Christian only—someone who has been to seminary or Bible school or on the mission field.  It is for all who have become new persons in Christ Jesus and have experienced “the old things passing away, and all things becoming new” (see 2 Cor. 5:17).  It is for those who have had a radical change in their lives because of their conversion and who want—more than that feel—a responsibility to make sure everyone has the same opportunity.

Ministry is being a blessing. It’s serving and giving and not counting the cost. It’s what we who love Jesus are supposed to be doing all day, every day. Ministry is talking about Jesus, serving Jesus, being Jesus where people are in need of Jesus. Ministry is the most exciting, stretching thing in the world. It’s an art—a spiritual art.

Ministry—helping people—happens all day every day and all night every night. Ministry goes on all over the world and on all seven continents. Old people and young people minister. Black people and white people. Wealthy people and poor people. Sick people and healthy people.  Ministry is a full-time twenty-four hour thing. An “I can’t wait to get going in the morning” thing. An “I don’t have time to sleep” thing. An “I can’t believe I have the privilege of doing this” thing. It’s a hard thing, a glorious thing, a stretch, a reach, a “pulling you in every direction” thing.  It is exhausting and exhilarating, an emptying of yourself and a “filling up to overflowing” thing. Ministry is in the end an art of the Spirit—a spiritual art that is for all of us—those of us who have grown up in the church and those of us who, like me, have come to Christ from the outside of “Christian everything.”  So don’t say, “But I don’t have any opportunity to minister. I have no training.” Ask God to show you the hundreds of opportunities that are right under your nose every day.

Blessings,

Jill Briscoe

Executive Editor

Just Between Us Magazine