Pastor, adjunct professor, and author Dr. J.D. Greear (@jdgreear) believes a Christian’s ministry is less about working for God and more about letting God work through the Christian. He says the greatest power of the church is when all members are equipped and sent out in the power of the Holy Spirit. He wants people to stop judging a church’s “success” by its seating capacity and put more emphasis on its sending capacity.

In his new book, Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Send (Zondervan, 2015), J.D. Greear unpacks ten ‘plumb lines’ to use to reorient a church’s priorities around God’s mission to reach a lost world. He says, “Every church, every ministry, and every follower of Jesus Christ ought to be devoted to planting—giving away—what they have for God’s kingdom.”

The following article is an excerpt from Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Send.

We Are Under Obligation

In Romans 1:14 (ESV) Paul uses a strange word to encapsulate his life and calling, one with enormous implications for both church leaders and members alike. “I am under obligation,” Paul says, to everyone who has not yet heard the gospel. Many translations render “under obligation” as “debtor,” because Paul is invoking language that describes a debtor’s relationship to his creditor.

When you are severely in debt, your life no longer really belongs to you. It belongs to the creditor. You can’t spend money however you would like anymore. If your boss gives you a $10,000 Christmas bonus, you won’t be able to use it to take a vacation to Hawaii or to buy new furniture. The creditor has first and final say in how the money is spent. I once knew a church that was so severely in debt that representatives from the bank literally stood in the back of the lobby during the weekly offering, taking the money straight to the bank, where bank officials would decide how much the church could keep that week. The church was no longer free; it was “under obligation.”

Paul thought of himself as a debtor to those who had not heard about Jesus. His future was not free. But why did he owe them? Because he knew he was no more deserving of the gospel than they were. He was not more righteous, nor had God seen more potential in him (see 1 Timothy 1:15). Paul saw God’s grace toward him exactly for what it was—completely unmerited favor. Paul knew that placed him under severe obligation to the grace of God. Paul’s future, bright as it may have been, having a great education and all the right connections, no longer belonged to him. Every spare resource—every ounce of energy, every moment of his time—belonged to his “creditor”: the grace of God.

Every person who knows and understands the gospel is under this same debt of obligation. As David Platt says, “Every saved person this side of heaven owes the gospel to every unsaved person this side of hell.” If you are saved, you are under obligation to leverage your life to bring salvation to the nations. Those of us called to be leaders in the church are under obligation to train you up and send you out.

We pastors are not free to build ministries that mainly make life more comfortable for us. Each of us is under obligation to do whatever we can to get the gospel to those all around the world who have never heard. And that means releasing—planting—the seeds we have been given. It means letting go and sending out our very best to bring a harvest in God’s kingdom, even—especially—when it doesn’t benefit our church directly.

The gospel is that Jesus Christ died as a substitute for sinners, offered now as a gift to all who will receive him in faith. Jesus has instituted a new kingdom, a kingdom that someday will bring final and ultimate healing to the earth through his resurrection, but one that begins now when sinners are reconciled to him through his death. God has given to us, the church, the mission of preaching his offer of reconciliation to all people everywhere—that Jesus lived the life we were supposed to live and then died the death that we were condemned to die so that we could be reconciled to God. We signify the message of that new kingdom through acts of healing and extravagant generosity, which depict for others the nature of the kingdom Jesus is establishing (2 Cor. 5:14-21). Everyone who has received the reconciliation is sent on that mission. Every believer is sent. You go from mission field to missionary.

Our God is a sending God. He sent his best into the world to save us. Jesus is referred to as “sent” 44 times in the New Testament. After his resurrection, Jesus passed on his identity to his disciples: “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (John 20:21).

To follow Jesus is to be sent.

Jesus’ command to every disciple is to “go” (Matt. 28:19). We may not all go overseas, but we are all to be going. This means that if you are not going, you are not a disciple; and, church leader, if the people in our churches are not “going,” we are not doing our jobs. A church leader can have a large church with thousands of people attending, but if people are not going from it “outside the camp” (Heb. 13:13), to pursue the mission and call of Christ, those leaders are delinquent in their duty.

Planting, investing, sending, and sacrificing are costly. It hurts. But the trajectory of discipleship is toward giving away, not taking in. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously said, “When Christ bids a man to follow, he bids him come and die.” Jesus did not say come and grow, but come and die. And he showed us what that means by his own example.

When Jesus laid down his life on that hill in Jerusalem, he had nothing left. Soldiers gambled for his last remaining possessions on earth. Everything he owned had been either given away or taken from him. But out of that death came our life. In giving everything away, he gained us. In Jesus’ resurrection from death, God brought unimaginable life to the world—to you and to me. Jesus was the first of many seeds planted into the ground to die.

Why would it surprise us that the power of God spreads throughout the earth in the same manner? Life for the world comes only through the death of the church. Not always our physical, bodily death (though it includes that sometimes), but death in the giving away of our resources. Death in the forfeiture of our personal dreams. Death in our faithful proclamation of the gospel in an increasingly hostile world. Death in sending our precious resources, our best leaders, our best friends.

When Christ calls any of us to follow him—whether he is speaking to us as individuals, or to our churches and ministries—he bids us, “Come and die.”

It is not through our success that God saves the world, but through our sacrifice. He calls us first to an altar, not a platform.

His way of bringing life to the world is not by giving us numerical growth and gain that enriches our lives and exalts our name. His way is by bringing resurrection out of death.

We live by losing. We gain by giving away. What we achieve by building our personal platform will never be as great as what God achieves through what we give away in faith.

It’s one thing to know these things, to believe they are true. It’s another to implement them. That is what this book is about. What does it look like to live sent—in your personal life, in your ministry, or in the church that you lead?

I will warn you: It’s relatively easy to nod our heads at this point and say, “Yes, like Jesus, we live by dying.” But to go to the next step—to invest some of your most cherished resources, or say goodbye to those whom you love as they go to begin something new—that is hard, and it never gets easier. Yet it’s how God’s kingdom grows.

We gain by losing.

The above excerpt is from Gaining by Losing: Why the Future Belongs to Churches That Send. Copyright © 2015 by J.D. Greear. Used by permission of Zondervan. www.zondervan.com. All rights reserved. Taken from pp. 16-19.

Bio: J.D. Greear, PhD, is pastor of The Summit Church in Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. The Summit Church has been ranked by Outreach Magazine as one of the fastest-growing churches in the United States. J. D. has a PhD in systematic theology from Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author of Stop Asking Jesus into Your Heart: How to Know for Sure You Are Saved and Gospel: Recovering the Power That Made Christianity Revolutionary. He lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, Veronica, and their four children.