This week we will continue looking at some lessons learned from Pastor's trip to The Cove. We'll see our mission as Christians, and how we can better fulfill it, by looking at four commissions that Jesus gives us as His followers.
This message is based on Matthew 28:16-18.
I want to start this morning with something we looked at last week, because I found it really encouraging…
We saw that this last group has always been about 25% - So while 75-85% may have claimed to be Christians, only 20-25% have ever gone to church – and that’s been steady for nearly 100 years. So the church is not dying. Main-line denominational churches are struggling as more and more people are choosing non-denominational churches, but overall, the Church is not dying. Attendance has been steady. But we saw that aren’t winning, either. We saw some things to keep in mind last week, and we heard that we need to remember our mission. But as I said last week there are actually four commissions that Jesus gave us – four missions, that as His followers, we should all be involved in. And they all come together to form one purpose. 1. We Are Sent. The first is found in John 20:21. It says, “Again, Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’” God is a sender by His very nature. He sends what is needed when it is needed. Often the sending involves moving people to where they are needed. We see this a lot in the Bible, usually just by speaking to a follower, telling them to go see someone, or go do something. We see this with Phillip and the Ethiopian eunuch. The bible tells us that “The Spirit told Philip, ‘Go to that chariot and stay near it.’” Philip ran to the chariot and could hear the man reading Isaiah. Philip starts a conversation that ends with the eunuch getting baptized in some water on the side of the road. God directed Phillip where he needed to be, so he could hear the eunuch reading, so he could share with Him. My favorite thing is what happens next. Phillip explains the passage, the eunuch asks to be baptized, then the bible says “When they came up out of the water, the Spirit took Philip away, and the eunuch didn’t see him again…” Philip was taken to Azotus, and he just started preaching the gospel there, figuring that’s where God needed him to be, not knowing why, but that was okay with Phillip. God sent Philip, and that was enough for Philip. With this understanding of being sent by God, there’s a really neat progression in Luke that you might not have caught. It starts in Luke 9, where it says, “When Jesus had called the Twelve together, he gave them power and authority to drive out all demons and to cure diseases, and he sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick” Luke 9:1-2). So Jesus, our sending God, sends out His twelve disciples. In the next chapter, it says, “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. (Luke 10:1). So in chapter 9 he sends out 12, in chapter 10 he sends out 72. Now Luke doesn’t finish this progression in his gospel, but he also wrote the book of Acts. And he starts his book of Acts with the final step in this progression, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). We’re going to look at this verse again a little later, but first Jesus sent the 12, then He sent the 72, then He sends us all – we are His witnesses. The thing to understand is that we are sent to do His work. 2. To Different Kinds of People. And this comes from our reading this morning, “Then Jesus came to them and said, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 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’” (Matthew 28:18-20). Here is something to think about. When it says go into all nations, maybe it doesn’t necessarily mean all geographic people groups, may it just means all demographic people groups. Today, we are more diversified than ever. We can meet people from all different nations just by walking down the street. So understand that while this includes global missions, it isn’t exclusively global missions. It includes your neighbors, too. Something Ed Stetzer said at the retreat, “The term Missionary is not in the bible. But mission is. All Christians have a mission. Our lives are like decades long mission trips.” Think about this with me. If someone is going to get ready to go to a foreign country and be a missionary, what do they do? First, they probably need to learn the language. They need to study a little about the culture they’ll be working in. They will need to fit in when they get there, so they need to understand the culture. If we’re all missionaries, we need to understand the culture. In Waverly, 38% of the population is under 30 years old. And that’s pretty consistent in all three communities. So in the communities of Waverly, Sayre and Athens, we have about 13,398 people – 38% are under 30. If we want to reach our community with the love of Jesus, we’ve got to know who our community is. And the median age is only 39. Some churches still do services like they did 100 years ago. We’ve changed, but are our services geared toward a 39-year-old? If that’s the median age, maybe that’s where we should be aiming. What do you think? We said last week that society is changing. A lot. And if we could be really honest with ourselves, more and more we don’t understand younger people. We might say we don’t understand the teens anymore. But truthfully, even those in their thirties have very different backgrounds than we do. They grew up differently, they understand things differently, they value things differently. They didn’t learn church things growing up – we can’t assume they know the gospel, we can’t assume they have any religious background at all. We need to be very clear when we talk to them, we can’t use those words we learned in church, because they don’t know them. Yet you are sent to reach them. But first we need to figure out who they are. Because most of us in our fifties and sixties and seventies don’t have any idea how they act or how they think. Maybe we need to learn our culture again. Because we’ve been sent, and a pretty big number of those we’ve been sent to are young people. Every time we pick up a paper we see that we are in a battle against drugs. Addiction is a huge issue here in the valley. Some of the people we’ve been sent to have addiction issues. How might we reach them? God has already sent us some of these people – Marvin, Steve Rowe, Justin and Heather. We’ve had some success, we’ve had some failure. But I don’t think God judges the successes and the failures as much as he judges the effort or the lack thereof. Because He has sent us to reach them. Ed Stetzer told a story of when he was invited to speak to a church that was fairly newly planted, maybe two years before, and he accepted because he knew the pastor that had planted it, they went way back, and thought it would be neat to catch up with him and see how his church was doing. Now this church was in a city, but it was in a younger, artsy neighborhood. Lots of smaller art boutiques and coffee shops that appeal to younger people. When he walked in the back of the church, he immediately noticed that he was way overdressed, and he doesn’t dress up. And everybody looked so young, they all in their twenties, early twenties. Then he heard the music, and his first thought was that music is way too loud. And they were songs that he didn’t know. How are people supposed to sing if they don’t the songs? Then it hit him that he was the old man in the crowd, complaining about the music. That was him! And it wasn’t that he didn’t like contemporary music, every church he had planted was contemporary. But this seemed to be above and beyond contemporary. But as this sank in, he noticed something else. There were two people up toward the front that were praying together before the service started. During the service, in the prayer time, it seemed unorganized to him, but people broke off into groups of two or three or four, and they prayed together, and was very sincere, very real. The Spirit was moving. It was something so foreign to Ed Stetzer, but the Spirit was definitely moving in that church that day. And he kept thinking, thank God that his friend was sent to these young people. And that he took that call seriously. God has sent us to all different kinds of people. 3. With a message. It’s important to remember that we have a message for the different people around us. Luke 24:46-48 is our next commission, “He told them, ‘this is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.’” We are to reach our neighbors, but we’ve been given the message we are to tell them. It’s sort of like with an Old Testament prophet. He was given the words to speak. He didn’t speak his own words, he spoke God’s words. He listened to God to give to him the words, then he went and spoke. For us, those words are already recorded for us. We have the words in Scripture that we’re supposed to speak. And it’s necessary to speak them. About a year and a half ago, the ABC Home Missions came into our region and did some teaching on Missional Churches. How to reach out into our communities. Sandy and I were there. They talked about reaching into our neighborhoods with small, easy service projects. Some of the churches jumped on this and did things like painting a welcome sign in town. This led to being asked to paint some other things in parks, and even in a school. One church decided to make after school tutors available and were allowed to do this in a school. One church did a project to update a playground next to the church but used by everybody in the neighborhood. These projects were good, but they were just service projects. There was no accompanying message. And as a result, God’s not getting any glory, and no one is hearing about Jesus. And my concern is, that without sharing the message, all the good works in the world won’t bring anyone to Christ. A few years ago I volunteered with Billy Graham’s Rapid Response Team, which was a group of trained Chaplains that would respond to natural disasters. We usually followed in the Samaritan’s Purse Disaster Relief team. In fact, we often worked with the Disaster Relief team. Mornings we were side by side working on a home with the disaster relief teams. In the afternoon, we would go off in pairs and revisit some of the folks that had repairs done earlier and walk the streets to meet others who may have had damage. When Samaritan’s Purse works on a damaged house, after they are done, they gather the team together, and meet with the homeowners on the front lawn. Every person on the team signs a bible, and they give it to the homeowners with a personal note of encouragement, and the signature of everyone who worked on the damage. And the homeowner hears the message. Every homeowner that Samaritan’s Purse teams work for, hear the gospel message, receives a bible, and a follow-up from a chaplain. While serving others opens the door to allow them to share, it’s not enough to just serve, we’ve got to share the message, too. God loves you. He loves you so much that He sent His only Son to die on a cross for you. The penalty for sin is death, so Jesus died – for you! To pay the penalty for you! So you can be right with God with that penalty hanging over you. But he didn’t stay dead. He rose again on the third day, He saw over 500 people after he was risen, and then He was taken up into the heavens where He is now our mediator with God the Father. And if you repent from your sins, and you trust in Jesus to be your Savior and Lord, He will forgive you of your sins and help you live the life He created you for. It’s a fairly simple message. But we can’t forget the message. 4. Empowered by the Spirit. Our final commission is that while we are sent, to all different people, with a message, we don’t have to do it all on our own. We heard the commission in Acts a few minutes ago, let’s get back to it. It said, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Now I’ve heard that this meant kind of concentric circles. Jerusalem, then Judea, then Samaria. But Samaria isn’t a circle around Judea, it was a neighboring nation. But the mindset in this neighboring nation was very different. While they claimed to follow God, they weren’t considered to be pure in their faith. And they were really looked down on. They were considered like dogs, people you didn’t associate with. Let me ask you, who don’t you associate with? Who don’t you want to have anything to do with? Maybe Samaria in this context is the secular culture of today. Those people out there who are very different from you. Who are you avoiding? Who would you rather not talk to? Can you understand now that we can’t avoid them? We have to love them. We’ve been sent to them. But the Holy Spirit will give us the guidance and the strength we need as we reach out to them. It’s in His power. And here’s something to think about: The people we often think are the most different and the most distant often make good gospel soil. Share the message with them and let God do the rest. So Jesus’ four commissions to us provide our mission today: We are sent - to different kinds of people - with a message, - empowered by the Holy Spirit. That’s the mission Jesus gave us as His followers. Last week we saw the key words: Action, Labor, Focus. Let’s apply our action, labor and focus to doing the mission Jesus gave us. We need to do, reach out to people. Labor, it can be work. Focus, it needs to be intention, we need to be focused on it, it has to be a priority.
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