Partnerships

Partnerships

“For we have become partner with Christ if in fact
we hold our initial confidence firm until the end.”
                                                 Hebrews 3:14

Partnerships are formed for a wide variety of reasons: one person may bring the finances to a business while the other has an idea or invention that sounds promising. In another situation, one person might have manufacturing expertise while another has the marketing skills needed to convince people to buy their product. Partners compliment each other and form an enterprise that neither one could succeed at without the other. And to think that we have been called “partners with Christ” is quite an amazing thing.

The story is told of a mouse who was riding on an elephant’s back as they took a journey together. After traveling for some time, they came to an old, wooden bridge and began to cross it ever so carefully. Despite its creaking and wobbling under the weight of the travelers, the bridge held up and they made it to the other side. It was at that point that the mouse declared, ever so boldly, “We really shook that bridge, didn’t we?” And of course we know the answer, which is yes; they really did shake that bridge together! The mouse’s eight ounces and the elephant’s two thousand pounds, taken together, were almost too much for that rickety old bridge to handle.

The story is a cute reminder of some of the dynamics of our relationship with the Lord. Without a single doubt, it’s clear that the person who enters into a true, sincere, and wholehearted partnership with our God can and will shake the world. They will, as was said of the early church, turn the world around them, families, friends, neighbors, and even their local church, upside down. Sometimes accepting that we are like the mouse in the story is hard to swallow, but that reality can free us to partner with God in the works He is calling us to do.

What is amazing is not so much the choice that people make to give all to God and follow in His work, but that God, the all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-seeing God, would choose to partner with us. In spreading the good news of God’s salvation through Jesus Christ, God has all the wisdom, strength, and power that He contributes to the partnership. On our part, we make our bodies available as living sacrifices to do God’s good and perfect will. And together, you and God, me and God, we can shake the world.

God Bless,

Pastor Joe

Gateway Church