This morning’s word is Carried Forward.
The anchor verses are John 14:12 and Matthew 10:8.
In Barcelona today, the Sagrada Família basilica marked a milestone. The newly completed Tower of Jesus Christ received a papal blessing from Pope Leo XIV. The blessing honored Antoni Gaudí, the Spanish-Catalan architect whose unfinished designs for the Sagrada Família have been carried forward by other hands for one hundred years since his death. Construction began in 1882. Gaudí led the work for forty-three years. His unfinished design was largely destroyed during the Spanish Civil War. The basilica stands today as the world’s tallest church at five hundred sixty-six feet, still unfinished. Gaudí believed that “curved lines belong to God.” He saw what he could not finish in his lifetime and trusted it to the hands of those who would come after him.
This is the rhythm at Grace and Peace Studio. Each morning, readings are gathered and walked together until their single thread emerges. Today’s come from three streams. Day Three of “Does God Heal Today?” The opening of a new plan called “One Day at a Time.” And the next letter of Ignatius of Antioch, this time to the church at Tralles. The thread is one word. Carried forward.
Pastor Daniel Vander Klok of ResLife Church, who writes on the healing ministry of Jesus and the believer’s part in carrying it forward, makes a direct claim in Day Three. The healing ministry of Jesus did not stop when HE ascended to the Father. Vander Klok walks through the commissioning passages. Matthew 10:1, where Jesus gives the twelve authority over disease. Luke 10:9, where HE sends seventy-two more with the words “heal the sick and say to them, the kingdom of God has come near to you.” Matthew 28, the Great Commission to every believer. Acts 1:8, naming the Holy Spirit as the source of the power.
The verse that holds the whole movement together is John 14:12. Jesus, on the last night before HIS death, telling HIS disciples something almost too large to receive. “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do.” The qualification was never being one of the original disciples. The qualification was always belief. The Holy Spirit who moved through Jesus’s hands moves through every believer commissioned to carry HIS work into the present.
Matthew 10:8 names the principle. “Freely you have received; freely give.” What Gaudí received from his Designer he gave forward in stone. The architects after him carried that gift through the Spanish Civil War. Every believer has received the same gift from Christ. The receiving is so we can give.
Ignatius of Antioch, the second-century bishop and martyr who wrote seven letters to early churches on his way to Rome and execution, opens his letter to the Trallians today. He praises them for a disposition “blameless and unmovable in patience, not merely for outward use, but in your very nature.” Patience as performance versus patience as nature. The first wears thin. The second carries through generations. Then Ignatius closes with the phrase that becomes today’s spine. The Trallians, he writes, are “imitators of God.”
Imitators of GOD. The same shape Jesus named when HE said the believer would do the works HE did, the same posture the architects in Barcelona have taken for a hundred years, carrying forward a design they did not draw.
Cade Thompson, a contemporary Christian songwriter who writes on walking with GOD one day at a time, opens his three-day plan today with a practical pastoral move. He writes that everybody says you need a five-year plan, but he is just trying to make it to ten in the morning. His teaching, drawn from Jesus’s words about each day having enough trouble of its own, is that fearing the future does not fix anything. It pulls us out of the place GOD has promised to meet us today.
The architects in Barcelona did not build the whole basilica. They built today’s portion. The believer commissioned to carry HIS healing does not have to heal the whole world. We carry today’s portion. The work is too large for one life. The grace is sized to one day.
So today, two things are true. First, the work placed in your hands is part of something that began before you and will continue after you. You are an imitator of GOD. Second, your portion is only today. Just the part this Wednesday asks of you. The grace is sized to fit.
The tower in Barcelona rose because someone yesterday picked up where someone before him left off, and someone tomorrow will pick up where today’s hands stop. The kingdom of GOD is built the same way.
We are carried forward. We carry forward. Both are true today.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.