"Touching the Nations with practical, biblical truths that will equip and release ordinary people to achieve extraordinary things in their local communities."

If you cut me in half, written down the middle of me just like a stick of rock is the words ‘Called to the Nations’. I tell people all the time, “I am called to the nations.” Yet every time I say it I feel like Abram must have felt when God changed his name to Abraham which means ‘father of many nations’, while at the same time people could see he was 100 years old and his wife not much younger. I am sure every time he told people his new name he must have had to deal with a twinge of embarrassment as he realised the futility of what he was saying.

Every time I say to someone, “I am called to the nations” I face the present reality that I am an unknown living in a tiny village in Scotland, and the devil says to me, “you’re just trying to promote yourself” followed by the usual garbage such as, “who are you anyway…?” Or “it’s just your pride speaking trying to make something of yourself." When it comes to being a nation changer for most of us our natural response is “I couldn’t change a light bulb, never mind a nation”!

Well I know God has placed a burning desire and passion on the inside of me to touch the nations and you know it’s not as crazy as it sounds, because He has called you to do the same. In Matt 28:19 the passage known as the great commission says, “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,” (NKJV) but religion has told us we are nothing and God is everything so we downgrade the call to the nations, and it becomes a call to “make disciples of individuals” instead, and we focus on our weakness instead of His greatness.

When the apostle Paul said “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”, (Philippians 4:13 NKJV) he wasn’t boasting out of a false sense of pride, he just had a revelation of who he was in Christ and of the greatness that was on the inside of him. Notice he didn’t say “Christ could do all things through him”, but in acknowledging he (Paul) could do all things, he was accepting his responsibility and acknowledging his own greatness because of Christ in him.

I have just read a section in an outstanding book by Kris Vallotton and Bill Johnson called “The Supernatural ways of Royalty” where Kris relates the story of when he was teaching a group of people that the prophetic gift is used to call out the greatness in a person. Someone challenged him by saying something along the lines of, “God is great, people are not great and if you tell them that it will just puff them up with pride”. Kris responded by pointing to a nearby picture and started saying things like, “that’s a terrible picture, look at those colors they’re washed out, and look at that person, they don’t even look real…” He then asked the person whether what he had said honored the artist? To which the person replied “no, of course not”. Kris explains that we are like the painting, God is the artist who created us and to make matters worse, Jesus was the model for us when He was creating (or painting) us, and for us to do what religion has taught us by denigrating ourselves in the false belief we are humbling ourselves, is simply to cast a slur on the Creator who fashioned us in the first place. Not only that but talking about the old us before we were made new creations is like talking about the blank canvas before it was painted and criticizing it, totally pointless and irrelevant.

You see I know I am nothing without God, but the point is I will never again be without Him again because He has promised me He would never leave me or forsake me (Heb 13:5) so why would I focus on talking about myself without Christ, when real humility means accepting who I am with Him?

You and I are called to be nation changers and we need to wake up to the reality of who we are with Christ, and stop talking about ourselves without Him, then perhaps we too will get a revelation on the inside of us that “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”, and realize that Paul said he could do all things through Christ, and not that God would do all things for him or through him. It involves you and me and requires us to step up and take our rightful place so that we can fulfill the great commission in our lifetime.