Multiply
“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”
- Jesus of Nazareth
I had a conversation earlier this week with one of the most disruptive men I have ever encountered. He is quiet and unassuming but makes the boldest faith steps of anyone I have ever known. Each one shakes the others witnessing to their foundations.
At one point in his journey, he sold his business and all his assets, traveled the country in an RV (homeschooling his kids along the way) for a year to fully unplug and discern from the Father what he was supposed to do next with his life and work. And that is just one of those bold steps.
He ended up building highly automated self-storage facilities that created a lot of passive income and required very little of his time and intervention. He hired a young man to run each and deeply invested and discipled each of them to prepare them for the next leg of their journey. That sometimes included forcing great employees to move on because they had become too comfortable in their life/work and needed to take their next step.
Years later, he sold everything again and moved his family to California in order for his wife to go to seminary along with their two kids and be able to sail up and down the West coast. He was motivated partly by this quote by Oswald Chambers.
“If you do not cut the moorings, God will have to break them by a storm and send you out. Launch all on God, go out on the great swelling tide of His purpose, and you will get your eyes open.”
I always walk away from my interactions with him with questions and motivation to find their answers. In this conversation, he talked about math. He said Christians…
Know how to subtract, take away, minimize, and leave.
We know how to add, overcommit, and put too much on our plates.
We are really, really good at dividing (no explanation required!)
But we are not particularly strong when it comes to multiplying.
And he said that multiplication was kind of the point. One of the leaders in South Africa we are working with said this:
“I feel like you have almost like been to us what Jesus was to the disciples. And the comfortable solution would have been for Jesus is to just keep hanging. We’re loving what you are imparting. We’re loving the wow moments. We’re loving having seen the miracles. But at some point in time, for it to really be a movement, there has to be multiplication.”
There has to be multiplication.
There has to be multiplication.
There has to be multiplication.
I have to keep repeating that line. The tendency of my personality type is to control. To keep my hands on things. To not cut the moorings. To make sure they go the way I think they should. But the Kingdom is all about multiplication. It is about releasing.
For this recovering control freak, it is terrifying and uncomfortable, but invigorating. And multiplication is happening right before our very eyes.
Consider
Are you good at math?
Are you better at adding, subtracting, dividing, or multiplying?
What are you holding onto too tightly and not allowing it to find the multiplication that is possible?