Luke 5:17–26 provides many illustrations of how God is helping those in need. Sometimes God uses others to help us, or He uses us to help others. This work can be challenging, but it brings great rewards. By helping those in need, we are modeling the ministry of Jesus Christ. 

We all know the text: “ ‘ “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” ’ ” (Luke 10:27, NIV). Yet, our love for God can become superficial if we say that we love God but do not obey Him. We think that we love God, but how is this love demonstrated in our day-to-day life? Loving God requires full commitment of our heart, soul, body, and mind—daily. Anyone can say that he or she loves God; doing it, however, requires conscious effort.

Ideally, though, our motives for preaching Christ, for mission, for reaching others with the good news, should be out of love, and out of truth—and not from selfish ambition, envy, or strife. What, then, are some of the motivations for preaching Christ, and what are some of the ways that we can prepare for doing this?

Not everyone called to mission was as compliant as Abraham. Jonah is an example (read Jonah 1–4). God called Jonah to cry out against Nineveh, capital of Assyria. This city, located in modern-day Iraq, was 560 miles from Jerusalem, a good month’s journey. Jonah not only refused to go—he ran in the opposite direction. Arriving at Joppa, he purchased passage to Tarshish, now southern Spain. Sailing the 2,000-mile trip would have taken at least a month, depending on the weather. Not wanting to confront the king of Assyria, Jonah uses the month it would have taken him to get to Nineveh to get away from it. Why would he, a man of God, have done that?

From the start, Abraham wanted to be used by God for mission. This truth can been seen, for example, in Genesis 18, when God warned him about what was going to happen to Sodom and Gomorrah. “Surely the Lord God does nothing, unless He reveals His secret to His servants the prophets” (Amos 3:7, NKJV). And in the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, “His servant the prophet” was Abraham.

God can sometimes move us out of our comfort zone and make us His witnesses. Sometimes this change can be used to accomplish His purposes, such as in the example of the dispersing of the people at the Tower of Babel. “This dispersion was the means of peopling the earth, and thus the Lord’s purpose was accomplished through the very means that men had employed to prevent its fulfillment.”—Ellen G. White, Patriarchs and Prophets, p. 120.

The mission of God functions as the background through which we should see and understand God’s Word to us. When we read the Bible, we can identify a God who is intentionally reaching out to us. In spite of the separation caused by sin (Isa. 59:2), through His mission God continues to restore the broken relationship with humanity until the glorious moment when He will “make all things new” (Rev. 21:5, NKJV).

Mission finds its origin and purpose only in God. This mission did not begin with Abram’s call (Gen. 12:1–4) or with the Exodus (Exod. 12:31–42). It did not begin even with Jesus Christ on the earth (Matt. 1:18–25) or with Paul’s missionary journeys (Acts 13:4–14:26). This mission began with God Himself, when He brought the universe into existence and later created humanity (Gen. 1:26, 27).