Emma sent me this picture with the caption: ‘Anxiously awaiting a fish.’ I replied: ‘Like father, like son.’
As sons and daughters of God, we are invited to participate in the Father’s great purposes. As friends of Jesus, we have the privilege of adopting His priorities and entering His life and work.
Sometimes this may mean waiting with our Father… or watching with our Friend. Jesus asked his three closest friends to pray with Him as He entered His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. Three times the disciples fell asleep. “Could you not keep watch one hour?” (see Mark 14:37-38)
Peter, James, and John wanted to be loyal friends, but they could not endure that night. “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” Jesus said. Having perhaps set a record for sleeping in church in my younger years, I know their feeling, but what about now?
The disciples matured to a far stronger place after Jesus ascended and they would agree the Holy Spirit gave them the power. We have been given the Holy Spirit, but do we ask what our Friend is thinking?
The Holy Spirit wants us to have ‘the mind of Christ.’ Is His top priority a national election? Or a championship baseball game? Or an important financial decision? Perhaps our Father is concentrating on a ‘fish’ who is about to enter His Kingdom. Perhaps our Friend’s pressing concern is a group of believers suffering for His Name. Will not the ‘mind of Christ’ produce a radically different outlook than the thinking of the world?
Several years ago, an American lady named Kimberly entered an effort to rescue children in South Sudan, the newest nation on earth. This past summer, civil war broke out and thousands of precious children have been in the danger zone.
Romano is a Sudanese brother who has committed to do all he can to house, feed, and educate 300 orphans in one of the most dangerous locations. A few days ago, an armed segment of one of the warring factions threatened Romano, accusing him of being a spy. Appealing for food the ministry had already purchased, Romano was told: “If you say any more, then we will not be held responsible for any deaths which may occur at an attack upon your place. It will be your fault.”
Romano sent a message through his American friend Kimberly: “Will you ask all who know about us to pray through the weekend?” Such pleas lead to opportunities for friends of Jesus to participate with our Savior. “Holy Spirit, let us be attuned.”
“These are the things God has revealed to us by His Spirit. The Spirit searches all things, even the deep things of God. For who knows a person’s thoughts except their own spirit within them? In the same way no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. What we have received is not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand what God has freely given us… The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit. The person with the Spirit makes judgments about all things, but such a person is not subject to merely human judgments, for, ‘Who has known the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him?’ But we have the mind of Christ.”
I Corinthians 2: 10-16