Don't Go Yet (We Meant It)

​The last thing I said to you at the close of District Conference was not an action step. It was a command Jesus gave to a room full of people who were ready to go. He had a mission for them that would reach the ends of the earth, and his instruction was to wait. "Do not depart from Jerusalem, but wait for the promise of the Father" (Acts 1:4). Stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.

One week out, I want to make sure we meant it.

The conference is behind us now. The room has emptied, the reports are filed, and the moonshot we said yes to is written down where our boards can read it. July has settled in, the slowest month of the church year, when attendance dips and the building goes quiet and the calendar finally loosens its grip. This is exactly the moment the disciples faced. The teaching was finished. The commission was clear. Everything in them wanted to move. And Jesus told them to sit in an upper room and wait.

We do not like that instruction. We are builders. We have a plan now, and a plan is a call to action, and action is what leaders do. But hear what Jesus was protecting them from. He was not delaying the mission. He was fueling it. The upper room was not a waiting area before the real work began. It was the source of everything that followed. Without Pentecost, Acts is a group of frightened people with good intentions and a locked door.

I said something at the rally that I want to keep saying all summer: if the church is going to make an impact for God, it first needs a fresh encounter with God. That order is not negotiable. Encounter comes before impact. The plan is the wineskin. The Holy Spirit is the wine. We can pour ourselves into cohorts and Great Commission Plans and Kingdom Expressions, and if we attempt all of it in our own strength, we will produce a great deal of activity and very little fruit.

Consider what actually happened in that room. They devoted themselves to prayer (Acts 1:14). They were not strategizing. They were not workshopping their launch. They were waiting on God together, and when the day of Pentecost arrived, "suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting" (Acts 2:2). Then, and only then, the doors opened and three thousand were added in a single day. The mission moved at the speed of the Spirit, not at the speed of their ambition.

Here is my concern for us, and it is a pastoral one. Vision is at its most vulnerable in the weeks right after it is cast. The glow fades. The ordinary returns. And the temptation is to treat the encounter as something we already had, back at the conference, in that moment when the room was full and the singing was strong. But an encounter you had in June will not fuel a mission you are living in October. The upper room is not a memory. It is a rhythm.

July is our first chance to prove we meant what we prayed. There is no conference to prepare for, no big Sunday looming, no reason to rush. That means there is no better time to do the one thing the disciples did before they did anything else. Wait on God. Ask him to fill you before he sends you.

I am practicing this myself. As many of you know, I am away with my family this week, and I am trying to let the rest be its own form of trust, a way of confessing that God runs this district and I do not. Some of you are the opposite of rested right now, using the one open stretch on the calendar to run hard and get everything done. Wherever you are, the invitation is the same. Do not go yet. Not because the mission does not matter, but because it matters too much to attempt on fumes.

We have a plan worth giving our lives to. Let us make sure we give it to God first.

​This week's practice: Before you build anything else this summer, schedule your own upper room. Put one unhurried hour on the calendar this week, guard it like an appointment, and spend it waiting on God with nothing to produce. Ask him plainly to fill you before he sends you. Then watch what he does with a leader who learned to wait.