Devotional Thought of the Day.

It’s amazing the difference a word makes, or just a few letters ending words starting with “comm”.  TO be precise  “and” versus “ission”.

As I prepared my studies for this weeks sermon, the difference glares out to me.  The word in Greek has, very definitely, the nature of commission.  Yet over and over we translate it command.  With that translation, we create a load of issues that are not really there.

If you commission something, a piece of art, a building, a musical piece ( I think of Mozart’s Requiem) any project, you give the scope of the work, what your expectations are when it is completed.  It draws the boundaries of the work and brings definition to it.  It is a project something that takes on beauty over time.  And if the work is fulfilled, the one who commissioned it has caused a masterpiece to be created.  It is about the end product, and the formation of it  – a masterpiece.

A command is something with even harder definitions – I always think of an execute order in computer program.  Print X,  the sum of 3+4.  Or the directive that is specific and immediate.  Don’t do this, do that, go here, and that which is commanded must do what is to be done.  The command executed, the project finished, then what?

When it comes to God, and what He would have us do, He is commissioning something, He is describing the parameters and vision for a project that is underdevelopment all our lives.  His goal is a masterpiece, without flaw, something that will endure, and br praiseworthy and glorious.  It’s far more than a moment by moment execution in blind obedience, its being formed and shaped and there is a goal.  The goal is simply defined by one word – a relationship.  The relationship we recognize when we see that He is our God, and when we also recognize that by His work, we are His people.

Indeed a masterpiece!

Yet how many times would we get in the way of that – would we decide to ignore that which He commissioned – to draw outside the lines, the parameters that a common to the commissioning.   (SOme refer to this as disobedience – but its more – the is is that it is an attempt to destroy the masterpiece God commissioned – to ignore or mar His plan with what we want.  It is like spraying grafitti over the artwork in the St Peter’s Basilica,  it is like having someone “sit in” and overdub “Dust in the Wind” with a Kazoo.

Using commission brings a whole different understanding to why God draws the parameters for our lives the way He does.  It reflects on that great verse of Paul in Eph 2:10.  “^2:10 We are God’s work of art, created in Christ Jesus for the good works which God has already designated to make up our way of life.”  Ephesians 2:10 (NJB)   

So to does commission create a more vivid picture of sin, as we destroy a masterpiece in the making, as we ignore the beauty that God would see in us…so that we create the havoc we think is …

Luckily we aren’t the one who holds the commission – that responsibility is belong’s to the Artist – to the One Isaiah calls the Potter, the One in Whom we are created.  And in Christ, somehow, miraculously, that artwork we once thought was destroyed, is restored, brought back to life and beauty, healed and made whole.  That was His commission – and the giftedness it took, literally was an investment of His life.

Thank God for that mercy, shown to us.

His people, His work.

May as we cry out Lord have mercy, respond with our lives, lived within that which He has commissioned.

AMEN