"You Were Made For A Mission"
Sermon Transcript for November 16, 2003By Rev. Mike Beck
Jesus was gathered with His disciples in the Upper Room for what we refer to as the “last supper”. And during that evening, Jesus prayed these words to His Heavenly Father. He said, “In the same way You gave me a mission in the world, I give them a mission in the world.” And it was just a few days later that the resurrected Christ would speak these words to His disciples. He said, “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.” Friends, if you are a follower of Jesus Christ, if Jesus is your Savior and Lord, then these words are not only for those original disciples, they are also for you. You were made for a mission. What is the nature of that mission? The Apostle Paul answered that question in Acts, Chapter 20, when he said: “The most important thing is that I complete my mission, the work the Lord Jesus gave me.” And I want you to read with me the rest of what is said. The mission is “to tell people the good news about God’s grace.”
Our fifth purpose in life is to share the good news. Once we have discovered our purposes for living, we are to take and share them with others. Like each of the other purposes, there is a word connected to this purpose. The word for this fifth purpose is the word “evangelism”. And although often that word has been seen in a negative light, in the original Greek it simply means “good news”. In Chapter 37 of Rick Warren’s book that I read this week, he has one of the best definitions for this phrase “good news” that I have ever come across. What he did is combine two scripture verses—Romans 1:17 and II Corinthians 5:19—using the contemporary translations. I invite you to read his definition of “good news” with me now. “The good news is how God makes people right with Himself – that it begins and ends with faith. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to Himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. This is the wonderful message He has given us to tell others.” There is a part of that I especially like. It begins and ends not with what we do. It begins and ends with faith.
Jesus spoke these words to His followers just before He returned to heaven. And let us remember, often the very most important thing that a person will say to us, is the last thing they say before they depart. Jesus said, “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” And what a great job the choir did setting the stage for our worship today as the anthem that Sarai picked out had those words as a part of it.
We have a couple of attorneys here in our church. Both of them are present here this morning. I want us to think for just a moment what it means to be a witness. In a courtroom, a witness isn’t expected to argue the case. That’s the attorney’s job. A witness isn’t expected to prove the truth. A witness isn’t expected to press for a verdict. And I want to repeat that quote, for as I read it this week out of Rick Warren’s book, I said to myself, “It’s when we do those three things that we give the word evangelism a bad name.” A witness isn’t expected to argue the case. They aren’t expected to prove the truth. They aren’t expected to press for a verdict. Witnesses simply report what happened to them and what they observed firsthand. These first disciples of Jesus were simply to share with those around them their first-hand knowledge of the life, the death, the resurrection of Jesus Christ who they had been given the privilege to live with for the past three years. And for you and for me, evangelism simply means we don’t argue the case, we don’t try to prove the truth, we don’t press for a verdict, we simply tell others the good news of the difference that knowing Christ has made in our lives.
In Week Three, we learned that from Genesis to Revelation, God is at work building a family of people. A group of people who love Him and who trust Him, a group of people who are going to spend eternity with Him. Ephesians 3:11 tells us, “This was God’s plan for all of history which He carried out through Christ Jesus our Lord.” And here’s the amazing part—God has chosen me and he’s chosen you to complete that mission!
Perhaps you have heard the story of God in Heaven. He’s talking to one of His angels about His plan for the salvation of human kind. He tells this angel that He is going to send His son, Christ, to earth to die for people’s sins, to be risen again. And then His followers were to share that message with all of those around them. And the angel replied, “That sounds like an awfully risky plan, God. What if they don’t share it? What is your Plan B?” To which God replied, “There is no Plan B!” We’re it! We’re it! Kind of an awesome responsibility, isn’t it? But what a great privilege to introduce someone else to the life-changing power of God’s grace, to be a small part in helping them receive the greatest gift a person could ever receive—the gift of eternal life which God wants to give to persons who will trust Him.
So where do we begin in carrying out this plan? There’s a story in Luke, Chapter 8, of a man who Jesus healed. After Jesus healed him, the man told Jesus that he wanted to travel with him. But Jesus replied, “No, that’s not what I have for you to do.” Jesus said to the man, “Go back home and tell people how much God has done for you. So that man went all over town telling how much Jesus had done for him.” I want you to note that phrase “go back home”. My mission and your mission today starts with our friends, with our family, with our co-workers, and with our neighbors. We will find numerous opportunities to share the good news with persons right around us if only we have two things. We have to have spiritual eyes that the Holy Spirit can give us, to see the opportunity. And then having seen it, we’ve got to have obedient hearts to share what Christ has done for us. And, friends, persons are far more interested in spiritual things than what we realize. In a recent Gallop poll, he found that there were at least 80 million Americans who have no church home. And when he explored with them a little more fully, he found that over half of the persons that were surveyed, said that they would attend church if, now listen carefully, they were personally invited by someone they knew and trusted.
And so I ask you this question. Who is it that has become a part of the Grace Church family in the last five years because of you and your invitation? And if the answer to that question is, “I can’t think of anybody.” then you are not fulfilling this fifth purpose of God for your life. Friends, each of us today would be lost if someone had not shared the good news with us. II Peter 3:9 tells us, “God doesn’t want anyone to be lost, but He wants all people to change their heart and lives!” If we want to have God’s blessing upon our life, we’ve got to care about what God cares about most. And you know what God cares about most? People. God loves and cares for your unsaved family member, for the unsaved friend, the unsaved neighbor, the person you work with who hasn’t yet come to know that there is forgiveness and new life in knowing Jesus Christ. And God wants you to be a witness, to be an instrument to bring that person into this family.
Sometimes I hear person’s say, “Well, isn’t our church big enough?” Well maybe it was big enough when we had 100 people in worship. But you see, the question “Isn’t our church big enough?” is the wrong question. The question that needs to be asked is, “Are there people who have not yet come to know the Savior?” We do not grow for our own benefit. We grow because there are people around us who need to know our Lord and Savior. True story. There’s a friend of mine who recently moved to a new church. He was meeting with the Pastor/Parish Committee for the first time. They had asked a number of questions. And then they said, “Jeff, do you have any questions for us?” And he said, “Yes, I want to know what is the commitment of this church for reaching unchurched, lost people?” And there was kind of an eerie silence for a moment, Jeff said. And then here was the reply from the committee, “Well, you need to know we’re pretty comfortable the way we are. We want just enough new people to replace the ones who died. But over and above that we’re just pretty comfortable the way we are.”
Friends, God has entrusted each one of us, God has entrusted Grace Church with the good news of salvation. If there are people that haven’t yet heard it or responded, God expects us to share it starting with those closest to us. But our responsibility to witness to the good news of Jesus Christ doesn’t end with our neighbor across the street. That may be our starting place, but in Acts 1:8 that we read earlier, Jesus’ command to His disciples, which again includes us, was that they were to be His witnesses. Now I want you to notice the progression. He says, “I want you to be my witnesses…in Jerusalem.” That’s where his disciples were hearing the message so that’s the people closest to him. But Jesus didn’t end there. He says, “I want you to be my witnesses…in Judea and Samaria.” Those were the people that may be relatively near to them, but they are different in some way. Jesus said you have a responsibility to them as well. But then Jesus said, “I want you to be my witnesses…to the ends of the earth.” And think about this, when Jesus said that, there’s no e-mail, there’s no airplanes, there’s no automobiles. And he says, “Take this message to the ends of the earth.”
In Mark 16:15 are these words of our Lord. He said, “Go everywhere in the world and tell the good news to everyone.” I want you to focus as you look there at the screen for just a moment on that simple little word “go”. And then I want you to note this—that the word “God” and the word “gospel” begin with those simple two letters—“go”. We must allow God to push us out beyond the confines of our own comfortable little world to be, as John Wesley said, “The whole world is my parish.”
Galatians 6:2 tells us, “Stoop down and reach out to those who are oppressed. Share their burdens and so complete Christ’s law.” And do you remember when Jesus was asked, “What is the greatest commandment?” He said this, “To love the Lord your God with all of your heart, mind, soul, and strength, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.” God says that faith is proved when we reach out with acts of love not only to those who are close to us, but also to those who are different, who are far away. Look at this next verse, “Real religion, the kind that passes muster before God the Father, is this…reach out to the homeless and to the loveless in their plight.”
One day Fulton Sheen, the famous Catholic Bishop, was in a leper colony in Africa. He was repulsed by the open, cancerous sores on the bodies of people in front of him. He walked by a man who had terrible, open, puss-filled wounds on his leg. He leaned over to speak to the man and as he did so, the chain that held a cross around his neck broke. And the cross fell right in to the man’s open, puss-filled wound. And for a moment, Fulton Sheen was paralyzed in shock over what had happened. But he wrote in his journal that then he was overwhelmed with love for this man who had nothing. And he reached out, put his hand in to the sore, picked up the cross, and gave it to the man. Friends, isn’t that a wonderful picture of what Christianity is all about? It is God reaching done into the messy stuff of life and bringing healing and hope through the cross of Jesus Christ?
And I want to say this morning that I am proud of you, I am proud to be a pastor of a church that seriously takes responsibility for God’s challenge to “go into all the world with the gospel”. When you walk in to the door of Price Hall, the first displays that you come to are the mission displays. Pick up one of those lists of the projects that you have supported and read down through them and give thanks to God for the privilege of sharing the word all around the world. There’s an area of missions still we need to do better. We do a pretty great job of giving our money, but we need to do a better job of giving ourselves. So take time also to stop at the Hands-on Mission display and let them know in what ways you would like to be involved hands on. For it’s when we reach out that we witness to the love of Christ in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
I felt led this morning to allow Rick Warren to conclude today’s message. His closing comments that you are going to see on the screen were a part of the simulcast that began our “40 Days of Purpose”. As you’ve had the chance to see Rick and listen to him, you’ve been reading his words, and I think in these brief moments, you’ll see the heart and the passion of this servant of God. And I invite you now to allow the Holy Spirit to speak to you through Rick’s words; through the song that follows about this fifth purpose God has for us.
VIDEO
You were made for a mission—to help reach one more for Jesus. Let’s bow for a closing prayer, “Father, more than anything else, we want to fulfill the purposes for which You have made us. May the prayer of each one of us be, ‘Use me Lord, any time, any way, any place’. We want to help others to know You. We want to be a part of what You are doing in the world. Help us to reach one more for Jesus, in whose name we pray and are sent forth to serve. Amen.”
E-mail Comments to: Reverend Dan Sinkhorn