What If Jesus Is Sending You Instead of Giving You the Answer?

By Pastor John Erickson

There's a question that comes up over and over when we try to follow Jesus: 'God, when are you going to fix this?'

When are you going to straighten everything out? When will the people in charge finally get it right? When will the world begin to look the way you said it would?

Those are understandable questions.

And what's fascinating is that the disciples were asking a version of the same thing right after Jesus rose from the dead.

I recognize that gap between expectation and reality. When Gina and I entered our first year as lead pastors, we had a picture of what life would look like. All our kids would be in school. We would have some time during the day. We had hopes for the church and the season ahead.

Then came the pandemic. Masks, disrupted school routines, and a congregation partly watching from home were not in the picture I had drawn. Our first year did not look much like the year I had expected.

That experience did not mean Jesus had stopped working. It did make me face how easily I confuse my expectations with His plan.

His answer probably wasn't what they expected.

The Story Is Bigger Than the Disciples

The book of Acts describes the growth of a small movement in Jerusalem into a community of Jesus' followers that spread across the Roman world.

At the beginning, that movement hardly looks like something that will change history. We have a group of people who have followed Jesus, seen him die, and then encountered him alive again.

Jesus spends time with them speaking about the kingdom of God. And even after all that, they're still trying to understand how the kingdom will arrive.

I think this is one of the reasons Acts is so encouraging. The people Jesus uses are not people who have it all figured out.

And Acts isn't merely a collection of stories about exceptionally gifted apostles. It's the story of what the risen Jesus continues to do through the Holy Spirit and his people.

The Question They Asked

In Acts 1:6, the disciples ask Jesus whether he is about to restore the kingdom to Israel.

You can understand why. Their people had lived under foreign power for generations. They knew God's promises about a kingdom that would endure. And now the Messiah had conquered death.

Surely this was the moment for everything to change.

But Jesus doesn't hand them a timetable or an outline of the political future.

He says the times and dates are the Father's responsibility. Then he tells them what will happen next: they will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on them, and they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.

They ask when the kingdom will be restored.

Jesus tells them they have a mission.

You can almost hear the wheels turning: 'Hold on. That's not quite what we asked.'

A Mission That Moves Outward

Acts 1:8 is like a roadmap for the whole book.

The good news begins in Jerusalem, spreads through Judea and Samaria, and eventually reaches much farther.

That movement matters. Jesus isn't sending his disciples merely to the people who already think like them. Samaria itself represented a boundary that many of his Jewish followers would have been reluctant to cross.

The kingdom won't spread simply by changing who holds political power. It will move through ordinary people empowered by the Spirit, telling the world what they have seen and heard about Jesus.

And being a witness is an interesting assignment.

A witness doesn't have to make something up. A witness tells what happened. The disciples have encountered the risen Jesus, and they are being sent to tell others.

That doesn't mean they won't need wisdom, courage, or careful thinking. But the center of their message isn't a program for making everybody agree with them.

It's a person: Jesus.

You Don't Have to Know the Whole Timetable

I think one of our struggles is that we would rather understand God's entire plan than take the next step he's placed in front of us.

We want to know how everything turns out. We want a timeline. Maybe a spreadsheet would be nice. A color-coded one.

But the disciples don't get that.

They receive a promise of the Spirit and a calling to bear witness.

The same pattern can challenge us. Where has God already made something clear even though the future still seems uncertain?

Maybe you can't solve the larger problem in your community, but you can love the neighbor in front of you. Maybe you can't explain every mystery, but you can speak honestly about what Jesus has done in your life.

I love the promise of power in Acts 1:8. As a Pentecostal, that word gets my attention. But the sentence does not end with power. It points back to Jesus: you will be My witnesses. The Spirit is not given so I can impose my preferred vision on everybody else. He equips us to make Jesus known.

And maybe you don't have to wait until you feel like an expert.

The Mission Begins Where You Are

Jesus doesn't begin by sending the disciples immediately to the farthest place imaginable. He begins with Jerusalem, where they already are.

That's worth remembering.

We can spend so much energy dreaming about the extraordinary assignment that we overlook the ordinary opportunities right outside our door.

Acts invites us to trade some of our obsession with predicting the future for participation in what God is doing now.

Jesus is still king. The Spirit still empowers his people. The mission is still to bear witness to him.

So rather than only asking, 'When will God fix everything?' perhaps we can ask, 'Where is Jesus sending me to make his goodness known?'

That's a question we can do something with.