“The Lord may not be calling you to plant a church, but whatever your job, vocation or skill is, maybe God won’t call you to leave your job for the sake of the mission, but He might call you to leverage your job for the sake of the mission,” Vance Pitman recently told students as he spoke during chapel at the University of Mobile.
“Here’s my prayer for you, ‘Whatever degree that you’re getting that you would lay that degree on the altar before the Lord and would allow Him to leverage that degree for the sake of His kingdom all around the world,'” he told them Sept. 24.
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As president of Send Network, Pittman shared his personal testimony with students of how God called him to live on mission. He acknowledged he didn’t become a follower of Jesus until he was a freshman in college despite having grown up in the church his whole life.
Pitman encouraged students to surrender control of their lives to Jesus if they haven’t already.
Beyond ‘going through the motions’
“If you’re just trying to go through the motions, here’s what I’m telling you that I discovered as a freshman in college: the relationship that I’ve been invited into through Jesus to God the Father, everything else now rises and falls based on that relationship,” he said.
He added, “Everything now has meaning, significance, purpose and value based on that relationship. What you’re looking for, you’ll only find in an intimate love relationship with God through Jesus Christ. If you don’t know Him, the first thing I would invite you to do today is to surrender control of your life to Jesus. Everything else will begin to make sense. God made you to know Him, to love Him, to be in fellowship with Him. Until you have that, the rest of life won’t make sense.
Pitman read Matthew 11:28–30 as he reminded students to find rest in Jesus and fully rely on Him.
Understanding and total surrender, Pitman noted, came when he learned to leverage his life and to live on mission with God as he read Luke 4:42-43, where Jesus said, “I must preach the good news of the Kingdom of God to the other towns as well; for I was sent for this purpose.’
“The church is born for the mission of God,” he said. “When I began to understand what it meant to allow Christ to live in and through me, I began to live sent into the world on mission with God. Students, hang on to the vine and get ready for the greatest ride of your life if you live on mission with God.”
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