"And you also are among those who are called to belong to Jesus Christ."
There is humility to surrendering your life to Jesus. Belonging to Jesus means admitting that “I am not doing a great job running my own life.” We belong to Jesus when you make him Lord which means that he calls the shots. This concept is going to keep people from answering the call to belong to Jesus
The responsibility of those who do belong to Jesus is not to decide for someone else whether or not they with respond to the call. Our responsibility is to be the messengers (apostles) of God’s good news of Jesus His son. We have no control over another person’s response to the call. Our responsibility is to share and to live as those who have answered the call and belong to Jesus.
It seems however that we so often miss this point. We are to share and to live. We should not stop sharing our lives with people who do not receive the call as quickly as we wish; after all we don’t know when even the hardest heart toward God could respond to the call. This letter is a witness to the fact that even terrorists of Christians can come to faith in Jesus. Few would have believed that Paul would answer the call but he did.
So those of us who are among those called to belong to Jesus Christ should live and share in the reality that any person might answer the call as we share and live as messengers. Pray we do not stand in the way of someone responding to the call because we are failing to faithfully live out ours.
Tye Parks 