Take a Risk, Find Reward

On July 30, I got one week’s notice I was needed in Sweden. Desiring God was partnering with two ministries to put on a conference, with one main speaker who had just learned from doctors he shouldn’t travel internationally for the next month. They needed a last-minute sub. My calendar had space; my wife was supportive. I was being sent.

For years, I’ve shied away from traveling overseas. I get antsy about long flights and nervous about trying to sleep on planes. But there wasn’t time for waffling on this call and counting my comforts at home. The need emerged, and I needed to go.

And I am inexpressibly glad I did. I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I know it’s cliché to talk about going somewhere to help others and finding the greatest blessing yourself. But it’s so often said because it’s so deeply true. Then I got home, and swapped overseas ministry stories with Peter Wachtler, who just got back with the team of eleven from our church ministering in Ireland — and I heard the same from him.

We both testified that it was so good for our own souls, so good for our faith, so enriching for our joy, to meet and seek to minister to Christians from faraway places — to see their faith in and love for Jesus, and be deeply, richly blessed by God in the whole process.

So, in light of Sweden and Ireland, here’s my exhortation to myself and to you, my dear church: take risks to bless others. Don’t let the many comforts that fill our modern lives keep you from putting some of them aside to meet needs — here at home, and maybe in some faraway place as well. And when you do, look to your heavenly Father to reward you better than you can even dream. Let’s pray.

Prayer of Confession

Father in heaven, you have filled our modern lives with so many comforts and conveniences. They are genuine graces, and they are tests. Oh what joys we forfeit when we choose the comforts over taking small risks to love others in Jesus’s name. What refining, reinforcing, stabilizing blessings for our own souls we go without — because you are a Father who leaves no child without reward for acts of faith and love.

So, Father, we confess this morning that in our sin, we often fail the tests. We cling to small comforts and cost ourselves the far deeper joys of stepping out to minister to others in need. Not just overseas but in our own homes, in our workplaces, in our own city. We confess this morning our failures to love, and other failings in our sin, in the quiet of this moment…