A line from a headline stuck with me this week. A speaker named Toni Collier put it plainly: if Jesus didn't do it alone, maybe we shouldn't either. That's the whole argument. No statistics, no scolding. Just a question with a hook in it.
Because he didn't, you know. Read the Gospels with an eye for it and you start noticing how much help the Son of God accepted. He borrowed a boat to preach from. He asked a woman at a well for a drink. He sent two men ahead to find a room and set a table. He asked three friends to stay awake with him when his heart was breaking. And at the very start, before the preaching and the healings, Mark tells us he "appointed twelve that they might be with him." With him. That was the first job description. Not a strategy for efficiency — he could have covered more ground alone, honestly — but company.
Self-sufficiency wears a good disguise
In leadership, whether that's a church, a crew, a classroom or a household, the temptation to carry it alone almost never shows up looking like pride. It shows up looking like competence. It's faster if I just do it. They're already busy. By the time I explain it I could have finished it. I don't want to be a burden.
Every one of those sentences can be true in the moment and still be a bad way to live. I watch good people in our church — capable people, the kind others lean on — quietly running on fumes because nobody knows what they're carrying. Not because the church wouldn't help. Because they never said a word.
He sent them in pairs
Here is how Jesus organised the work. "After this the Lord appointed seventy-two others and sent them two by two ahead of him to every town and place where he was about to go. He told them, 'The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few; ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field'" (Luke 10:1-2).
Two by two. When the need was greatest and the workers were fewest, when simple arithmetic would have said split them up and double your coverage, Jesus halved his reach on purpose. He'd rather have thirty-six pairs than seventy-two individuals. That tells you something about what he thought the work actually required. Someone to pray with when the door closed. Someone to remember what was said. Someone to walk the road back with you.
And notice what he told them to pray for: not strength, not boldness — workers. The first assignment of the sent one is to ask God for company in the sending.
The Spirit doesn't give one person everything
There's a reason this is built into us. Paul writes that "to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7). To each one. The Holy Spirit distributes — a word of wisdom here, a gift of healing there, faith in this one, mercy in that one. Nobody gets the full set. Which means the moment you decide to do it alone, you've decided to do it with a fraction of what God has already given.
I see this most clearly when we pray. Someone asks for prayer for their body, and two or three gather round, and one of them says something simple and true that nobody else in the room had thought of, and you can feel the air change. God is still doing that. He does it in the plural more often than in the singular.
Mission has never been a solo errand
This Sunday, October 4, is Mission Sunday here at Outpouring. And the shape of that day is the shape of Luke 10 — God sending ordinary people out, not as lone heroes but in pairs and in partnership, some going and some praying and some giving, nobody carrying the whole thing. When we gather to pray on Tuesday the 13th, it's the same principle: we don't ask anyone to pray alone.
So let me ask gently. What are you carrying by yourself right now that was never meant to be a solo load? Who could you tell this week?
And if you have asked for help before and nobody came — if the phone stayed quiet — I'm not going to pretend that doesn't sting. It does. But hear this: the one who sent them out two by two also said, "I am with you always." He is not a distant commander. He is the companion who has never once let go of the other end of the rope. Start with him, and then let him send you someone.
Join us this Sunday at 10:30am — Outpouring Worship Center, Ravenna.