If someone were to tell me, “Your job is to save the world from suffering!” and do the other things God promised to bring through the prophet Isaiah:

bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners … (Isaiah 61:1)

… my first thought would be, “I am going to need a BIG whiteboard.”

I am a note-taker, a list-maker, a color-coder, and a checkbox-ticker. If an angel appeared to me with a grand assignment to fulfill the Great Commission or if I was promoted overnight to CEO of FixingEverything™ with the mandate to usher in the Kingdom of God, I would certainly need a board room. It would have a huge whiteboard (a smart one), and a long conference table. I’d invite the world’s most brilliant experts and strategists to have a seat.

Those experts would help me write that plan on the whiteboard. We’d workshop it, run focus groups, and invest time and money – I’d fund it grassroots style, to get a lot of people excited. No billionaires. Then we’d deploy that baby to save the world!

Not an actual baby, though. WAY too unpredictable.

I might think differently if I lived in first-century Palestine under the occupation of the Romans and their unmatched empire. The Romans promised to save the world by bringing peace through the wonderfully thorough plan of total domination – Pax Romana. Maybe I would trade my conference table for a war room and my experts for generals. Once again, I suppose I would need a lot of money. Maybe I should talk to the billionaires after all.

Those are the expected places we look to for transformative change, aren’t they? War rooms and board rooms. Systems of power and might. We put a lot of trust in them.

But God doesn’t.

The Gospel of Jesus is not about a God who makes a plan and deploys it from some kind of heavenly war room or a board room. This is a God who kneels tenderly like a mother kneeling to speak to her small child, who sees those in need. From Mary’s Magnificat to Jesus’s teachings, miracles, and of course his ultimate death on the cross, God shows us that the way of love is often small, untidy, and humble.

I don’t believe God is against color coding, whiteboards, or brilliant experts. But Jesus invites us to follow him before we whip out our strategies and grand plans: “Walk with me and work with me—watch how I do it. Learn the unforced rhythms of grace.”

This is where we start, with the humble and untidy things right in front of us. Set down the Expo markers and pick up the easy yoke of Christ. Lay down the need to plan and control and take up the burden of Jesus. 

This is how the world will be saved.