By Michael Sullivant
Some years back my wife, Terri, and I entered what I like to call our “fourth quarter of life”. In both football and basketball, the fourth quarter is often the decisive quarter for a team’s success. For us, this means being deeply engaged in spreading the love and joys of being Christ-followers in practical ways.
We were married right out of college in 1977. Both of us came to faith in Jesus early in our college years during what came to be known as the “Jesus Movement”. We both were involved in campus ministry from the get-go as singles. Once we were married, we continued to lead others to faith and then help them to grow and transform more and more into the image of Christ. We chose to follow the Lord into vocational ministry and have been doing so for over 50 years. 36 of those years have been spent in the Kansas City metropolitan area. This has allowed us to be in rich Jesus-centered friendship with women and men who are also in our stage of life. As such, we have a bird’s eye view of the innumerable “good works” with which our dear friends are occupied.
We know that we are not redeemed by our good works, but we are redeemed for good works.
“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.” Ephesians 2:8-10
“Good works” are the obvious and natural outcome of possessing authentic faith in Jesus Christ that is vibrant with Spirit-filled life. You might say that as believers, we are preoccupied with all the implications of God’s love, which results in being occupied with our Father’s business in this world. Moreover, St. Paul said that these good works have been prepared beforehand by God for us … so we are exhorted to perceive, with the eyes of our hearts, the invisible footprints in front of us and simply walk into them.
The following is a list of just some of the good works fellow elders in our modest-sized relational circle have been faithfully ushering into the lives of others.
- Providing leadership, energy, and resources to a faith based non-profit serving adults with disabilities
- Regularly bringing in meals to the homebound and sick
- Serving lunches to inner city young adults
- Teaching English as a second language to refugees
- Serving as counsel to a international missions organization
- Donating money to help people in need
- Showing compassion to those in prison awaiting legal representation.
- Hosting intercession intensives to seek and pray what is on God’s heart
- Providing housing, friendship to homeless inner-city teens
- Reaching out to business leaders with compelling testimonials of faith
- Infusing the love of Jesus into the mental health field
- Restoring dignity to women, locally and internationally, who have been broken
- Providing regular hospitality in their homes to make disciples and build loving communities
- Training convicts in prison who are nearing release
- Counseling cross-cultural missionaries
- Equipping church leaders and faith communities in “closed” countries
- Changing a career to sign up to engage in international disaster relief
- Offering counsel from years of experience in the health insurance industry
- Doctors regularly serving a health clinic they founded in a poor nation
- Training faith-based physicians who are in residency
- Helping to raise and love on many children and grandchildren
- Offering inter-generational life coaching and spiritual direction
- Planting new communities of faith
- Translating the scriptures for an unreached people group
- Providing mentoring to help teens learn a trade
Within our Life Model relational ecosystem spread out around the world, we are seeking to help people to mature as they grow older. Maturity does not happen automatically. It must be built and rebuilt with great intention. Jim Wilder spent over 20 years examining what maturity consists of across the generations and across the cultures. This transformative research was recently collated into a short booklet called Maturity Pathway It is expanded upon in our enduring flagship book, Living from the Heart Jesus Gave You. We long to see folks embody authentic eldership. This application of eldership is not about filling the officially appointed roles of the “office” of elders in a church community but is about becoming unofficial spiritual mothers and fathers in all of life.
Elders like this do not look for permission from an institution to do what God has put within them to do. They just are who they have become by the grace of God and embrace the assignments that are distributed to them by the Holy Spirit. These kinds of elders are strategically placed in God’s family to intentionally spread the fragrance of Christ through humbly engaging in all sorts of good works. Elders infiltrate both communities of faith and communities at large to usher the joy, wisdom, and presence of our Immanuel God into environments where low joy, foolishness, and hopelessness are abundant. They are not concerned with doing great things, but doing all the things they do with great love. They are conscious, and sometime even unconscious, that what they offer to people in need, is actually a service to Christ himself!
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’” Matthew 25:40.
Our Lord also said, “Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.” Matthew 5:16
Such works are not done to be seen by others, many of them are actually done in secret. But they are done in such a way that when they cannot be hidden, the honor goes to God and not the human vessels he is working through.
