Well this morning I want to draw your
attention to one verse in Peter's first epistle
and it's in the second chapter.
It's the ninth verse and there Peter writes
these words.
He says, but you are a chosen generation,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, his own
special people that you may proclaim the praises
of him who called you out of darkness
into his marvelous light.
And so what we want to focus on
here today is really just the mission of
the church.
I thought it was an appropriate topic for
having the emphasis this week on mission.
So we want to look at the mission
of the church.
We could, I think, I was thinking maybe
a better title might have even been the
mission of God.
Because God is on a mission and he's
seeking to fulfill that mission through the church.
So God is on a mission, the church
is on a mission, we are individually members
of the church.
So the reality is each one of us
are called to a mission and that's what
we want to consider for just a few
minutes today.
I want to quote to you from a
recent book by John Stott.
He said this, according to the apostle Peter
the church is both a royal priesthood to
offer spiritual sacrifices to God, which is worship,
and a holy nation to spread abroad God's
praises, which is witness.
Every Christian congregation is called by God to
be a worshiping, witnessing community.
Indeed, each of these two duties necessarily involves
the other.
If we truly worship God, we find ourselves
impelled to make him known to others in
order that they may worship him too.
The church has a double identity.
We are a people who have been called
out of the world to worship God and
sent back into the world to witness and
serve.
These are, in fact, two of the classical
marks of the church.
According to the first, the church is holy,
called out to belong to God and to
worship him.
According to the second, the church is apostolic,
sent out into the world on its mission.
So I couldn't agree more.
The church is both a center of worship
to offer up our praises to God, but
we are also, as Peter says, called to
show forth the praises of the one who's
called us out of darkness into his marvelous
light.
So what is the mission of the church
exactly?
There are numerous passages that we could draw
from, but just to kind of summarize what
the New Testament says, it is simply this,
that the church is to proclaim the gospel
to the whole creation and to make disciples
among all of the nations.
So this is something that I think is
so vital that we understand we have a
purpose as the church.
We are on a mission.
A church is not a spectator event.
It's not something that we come and just,
you know, watch other people do things, but
it's something that we are each one of
us to be engaged or to be involved.
There is a work to be done in
every nation.
The majority of people have not heard the
gospel.
Some have perhaps heard of Christianity.
Some might even have come into contact with
the church.
Perhaps they've heard the name Jesus, but most
haven't heard the gospel.
You can bet that that is true, and
you don't have to go outside of the
border of this country to find that to
be the case.
All around us today, there are people, listen,
who haven't heard the gospel.
They've heard of Christianity for sure.
They might have visited a church.
They know the name of Jesus, but hearing
the gospel is a totally different story.
I have met numerous people that are familiar
to some extent with Christianity, but when it
gets down to the gospel itself, you find
that they've never really heard it.
As I've had experiences over the years of
sharing the gospel with people, I've had them
respond back and said, I've never heard it
like that before.
So this is what we're faced with.
We're faced with a world that for the
most part hasn't heard the gospel, and it's
the church's task to get the gospel out.
That's our mission.
And I don't know about you, but I
get excited to think that we're on a
mission, that each and every day of our
lives can be an adventure because every morning
when we wake up, we wake up to
the reality of a mission.
Lord, there's something today that you want to
do.
There's something you want to do in my
life.
There's something you want to do through my
life.
There's a purpose for getting out of bed
in the morning besides just going out to
the mundane.
That's the wonderful thing about being part of
the church of Jesus Christ.
So we want to look at three things
here today in regard to getting the gospel
out because that's what we're to do.
So how do we do that?
And first of all, we do it by
preaching.
Preaching, proclamation.
When we think of preaching, generally what we're
talking about is getting the message to the
unbeliever.
And preaching is carried out by gifted evangelists
as well as ordinary Christians.
Now we all probably understand the gifted evangelist
part, but I think a lot of times
we don't realize that ordinary Christians do much
of the work of evangelism.
As a matter of fact, if it weren't
for ordinary Christians, most of the work of
evangelism wouldn't get done because even when you
have gifted evangelists who maybe speak to large
groups of people occasionally, they're totally dependent on
ordinary Christians to invite people to these events,
to encourage them to come out and hear
the gospel.
But we see this in the scriptures.
As we read the book of Acts, we
find the gospel preached by gifted evangelists such
as Peter on the day of Pentecost.
You remember he preaches the gospel there.
We find Stephen is a gifted evangelist who
preaches the gospel.
Philip, Paul, Barnabas, Apollos, all of these different
men, we've got pictures of them throughout the
book of Acts, showing them preaching the gospel
to larger numbers of people.
But we also have the picture of ordinary
Christians who went everywhere proclaiming the good news.
So we have both of these things exemplified
for us in the biblical text.
We also find occasions where preaching is directed
toward groups of people, such as the thousands
that Peter preached to on the day of
Pentecost, as well as occasions where preaching is
directed toward individuals.
So we find Philip, for example, speaking to
the Ethiopian eunuch, or we find Paul and
Barnabas sharing the gospel with the pro-council
Sergius Paulus.
So the book of Acts is, it's sort
of our blueprint for how the church is
to go about the mission of God throughout
its time here on earth.
So we look back to those things that
happened then as an example to us, but
we today must proclaim the good news to
our world as they did to theirs.
So we don't just read about what they
did and say, wow, that was exciting back
then, and boy, I wish I would have
lived back then, and too bad, you know,
that all happened way back then.
We look at that and say, okay, this
is the model.
This is what God was doing back then,
but it was a picture of what he
wants to do in each successive generation right
to the moment when the Lord returns.
So what do we do then?
Well, we preach the gospel today through gifted
evangelists as well to groups of people.
That's what we do in regard to the
different outreaches, and we've had a vision for
outreach.
We want to maintain a vision for outreach.
We want to get behind those opportunities to
reach out with the gospel where you have
some sort of an event maybe that people
are invited to that they can hear a
clear presentation of the gospel, and this is
a valid, legitimate thing to do.
You know, sometimes people, when it comes to
getting the gospel out, it seems like a
lot of times people get stuck in sort
of, well, there's just one way to do
it.
To me, I think as many ways as
we can possibly get the gospel out, we
ought to utilize all of those ways.
Some people say, oh, you know, I don't
believe in crusade evangelism or something like that.
It's just masses of people coming and, you
know, you never know if anybody's getting converted
or not.
And then they've got their particular way of,
no, I think you ought to do it
this way.
Well, you know, I think we ought to
do it every conceivable way, every imaginable way.
Any way we can get the gospel to
people, we ought to, of course, prayerfully and
be led by the Spirit, but we want
to do that.
And so we've got those kinds of outreach
things that we support.
We've got outreach things that we sponsor.
We've got outreach that we encourage you, the
body, to be involved in.
But then, of course, there's the ordinary Christian,
average everyday person, just out there speaking to
their friends and their neighbors and their co
-workers and sometimes occasionally even strangers, speaking to
them about the Lord.
We often feel, I've heard many people say
this, well, you know, I'm not really gifted
as an evangelist.
You don't have to be.
You just, as a Christian, you can just
open up your mouth and just tell your
story of what God's done in your life
or just, you know, reach out and seek
to speak to people.
And when we're talking about preaching, getting the
word out through preaching and, you know, talking
about ordinary Christians preaching, I'm not suggesting that
tomorrow morning you go to work, you get
a soapbox, you set it up in the
middle of the office and you, you know,
say, you know, hear ye, hear ye, I've
got a message for ye all.
You know, you do it, of course, through
relationships, through, you know, just there on the
job with people, making yourself available, being open,
just saying, Lord, here I am, would you
use me?
You see, here's the thing that we need
to get a vision of.
We need to get a vision of being
missionaries right in our own world, right in
our own culture.
We don't have to go across the sea
to a foreign field to be a missionary.
We have to start thinking of ourselves as
the mission field is all around us.
We've got a mission field right here.
God has brought us into contact with lots
of people that don't know him.
And that's our mission field over the years.
And, you know, in the past 25, 30
years here in this particular area that we
live in, you think of all of the
people that have come from different nations, Asian
nations, Middle Eastern nations, and South American nations,
all of the people that have come to
this area, in many ways, God has brought
the mission field right to us.
So we have to think in terms of
getting out there and realizing that I am
a missionary.
As a Christian, I am a missionary.
I'm on a mission.
God's on a mission.
The church is on a mission.
I'm part of the church.
So our mission is to get the gospel
to people.
I watched an interview this past week with
a young church planter, a young guy that
has planted a church.
And before he planted his church, what happened
is he was seeking the Lord and he
was reading through the gospels, he said, and
as he read through the gospels for a
year straight, he said the one thing that
was really being impressed on his heart was
just how Jesus was a friend of sinners.
And then he said, and I realized I'm
not a friend of sinners.
And the guy who was interviewing him said,
well, what do you mean by that?
And he said, well, I pretty much had
isolated myself.
I worked at a church.
I spent all my time at the church.
I pretty much only associated with Christian people.
And he just said, I looked in my
phone and I noticed I didn't have any
phone numbers for sinners.
I didn't know any sinners.
So he said, you know, he just felt
really burdened by the Lord.
He needed to get out and engage and
start meeting some people who were sinners.
And so he prayed about what to do,
and he felt like he needed to go
out and get a job where he knew
there were sinners.
So you don't have to go far to
find them, of course.
But interestingly for him, he said that he
got a job at, and this is the
way he described it, a gay friendly rock
and roll bar.
And so the guy says, well, okay, so
what happened?
He said, well, you know, he said every
day I just get up and before I
go into work, I just say, Lord, I'm
going there as your agent.
I'm going there on a mission.
And so, Lord, I pray that you'd help
me develop relationships and, you know, that sort
of a thing.
And he just described how God began to
work.
And he said one day as he was
there cleaning the toilets, the Lord spoke to
him and said, you're going to preach the
gospel in this place.
And he just thought, okay, well, great.
That's what I'm hoping to do.
But anyway, he had a commitment to finish
up a seminary for a year.
So he went off for that year and
the whole year while he was finishing up
his studies, he prayed every single day that
God would send them back to that community
and use them to reach sinners.
So when he finishes up his education, he
comes back into town.
The first person he runs into is the
owner of the bar.
But interestingly, he had had no previous conversation
with that person.
He said the person was an atheist.
They were very hostile to God.
And so they'd never cross paths other than
him getting hired.
And that was the end of it.
So he says he runs into this person
and they said to him, oh, you're back.
And he thought, wow, I didn't even know
they knew that I'd left.
Yes, I'm back.
Well, what are you doing?
Well, I'm, you know, I've got this Bible
study and I'm hoping to start a church.
Oh, you've got a Bible study.
Could I come to it?
Could you come to it?
Well, sure.
You could come to it.
So the person came to the Bible study
in his house.
He said in his living room, there were
45 people.
And after the Bible study, the person came
up.
Remember this person's an atheist person comes up
and says, you know, this was nice.
I enjoyed this, but it's obviously not going
to work.
Your house is too small.
You need a bigger place.
And so he remembering what the Lord told
him earlier when he was cleaning the toilet,
he said, how about if we do this
in your bar?
And they said, sure.
Sounds like a great idea.
So they've got four Sunday services in this
bar today.
And, you know, what he was saying was
how, you know, God, and it's a mixture.
Obviously there's believers, but there's a lot of
unbelievers that are coming and they're, they're intrigued.
They're wondering, you know, what, you know, what
is going on?
There's a church in this bar.
I mean, you know, this, this is, this
is radical in one sense, but in another
sense, it's not, because this is the kind
of stuff that's been happening over all of
the centuries.
And when we look back at the early
days of what God was doing in this
church and many of the churches that are
part of the family of churches here, we
see that similar kinds of things were happening
because people have had that mentality.
I'm on a mission and that's, we've got
to get that mentality back.
And I think what a great opportunity we
have with a brand new year before us
to just realize today, man, I'm a missionary.
And tomorrow when I get up, I'm going
out to the mission field, Lord lead me
as I go, Lord guide me and give
me opportunities to share your word, to proclaim
the gospel.
So preaching number one, secondly, church planting, church
planting.
The local church is the place where disciples
are made.
Remember the mission?
What is the mission?
The mission is to proclaim the gospel to
the whole of creation and to make disciples
of the nations.
Disciples are made through the local church.
That's what the local church is.
It's the center for discipleship.
So we need to continue to encourage church
planting, continue to support church planting, continue to
look to raise up men to go out
and plant churches.
If you're in your late teens or twenties
or thirties or forties or fifties, you're a
candidate or sixties.
I'll keep going.
Uh, you're a candidate to go out and
do something.
When I was in my early twenties, I
sat in this church and I listened to
pastor Chuck teach week after week.
And my heart was stirred and I was
doing ministry.
I was working in a surf shop in
Huntington beach, and that was my mission field.
And every day I went to work, I
pray, Lord, use me here today and give
me an opportunity.
And unbelievably every day, the Lord gave me
some opportunity to speak to somebody about him.
But I just, I wanted to do that.
I wanted to share the word.
And then lo and behold, as I just
sat and listened, I thought I want to
teach the Bible and God opened the doors.
And that's happened to many, many hundreds.
And yet I don't want to keep always
looking back and saying what happened back then.
We want to have the mentality that this
is still happening today.
We still need churches.
We need more churches.
Every city in the world, as far as
I'm concerned, ought to have a Bible believing
Christ centered church.
I think that that's a good goal to
shoot for.
We might never make it, but you know,
Hey, it's something to shoot for.
So the local church, we've got to keep
planting churches, disciples become ministers of Christ in
their daily lives and impact others for Jesus.
So you see, that's why the local church
is so important.
This is why, even when we do evangelism,
we never do evangelism separate from a local
church.
Years ago, when God sent me into Eastern
Europe, we went in there knowing nothing, having
very, you know, just a few people we
had contact with that invited us in.
We went in, we started to minister on
the streets.
We reached out, we preached the gospel.
We had a dozen young people receive Christ.
And that very moment I was in this
great quandary because I knew we've got these
kids that just accepted the Lord, unless they
have a church, they're never going to survive.
And we knew in the environment that they
came from, there was no church that would
have accepted them at that point.
And so it was crystal clear to me
that we got to have a church for
these young people.
And I said to them, I said, listen,
we've got to go back to the States,
but I promise you, I want you to
hold on for a month.
I want you guys to meet every day.
I want you to read your Bibles together
every day.
And within a month, we'll have somebody back
here.
And I came home and recruited a group
of young people and sent four people back.
And that was the first church plant in
Eastern Europe.
And that's the discipleship began there.
And these kids started to grow.
And now many of them are leading churches
themselves.
But you see, we've got to have that
connection with the local church, the local church
equips, encourages, and sends others out to plant
new churches.
And so get that in your head, be
open to that, be, be realizing that God
might want to do that with you.
You've sat and you've been equipped.
And I want to give you that encouragement
that God might want to, to move you
in that direction.
You know, I think sometimes it's easy to
just, you know, you just sort of look
at the guys up front teaching or whatever,
and you, you know, you just think, well,
that's great.
I could never do that.
Well, guess what?
All of us at one time sat thinking
the same thing, but God had different plans.
So this is how we get the gospel
out through church planting.
And then thirdly, we have to realize as
well, the connection between sharing the gospel, getting
the churches established and love and good works.
You know, we're living in progressively more difficult
times, aren't we?
Things are getting tougher.
Life is changing here in this country and
in places around the world.
And I think that we can safely say
things are going to continue to get worse.
I don't know that things are going to
get any better, but it doesn't, it doesn't
really matter.
If we understand who we are and what
we're doing here, we're not here to just
live a comfortable, easy life and, you know,
just relax and cruise.
That's not the purpose of the church.
That's not the mission of the church.
We're here to get the gospel out.
We're here to serve the Lord.
And one of the things that opens the
door for receptivity to the gospel is when
God's people reach out to unbelievers with love
and good works, the poor and the needy,
the widow and the orphan, the sick and
the suffering Jesus ministered to all of these
kinds of people.
And guess what?
The way things are going in our culture,
we are going to see more poor and
needy, more widows and orphans, more sick and
suffering.
And we have a golden opportunity there to
reach out.
This is what Jesus was talking about when
he said, let your light so shine before
men that they may see your good works
and glorify your father in heaven.
Have you noticed that it seems that the
world is in more turmoil these days than
it was in earlier decades?
Seems to me that it's just constant.
There's constant turmoil.
And I think that's just the direction that
things are headed in.
We have to realize that this atmosphere is
the ideal atmosphere for what we do.
This is how the mission is moved forward.
When people are comfortable, when people are at
ease, when people are prosperous, when people don't
have any problems, they're generally not interested in
help or they're not really concerned about whether
there's a God.
But it's when things get tough and all
of the foundations fall out from underneath people,
that's when they start to reconsider everything.
And so when we think of the catastrophes
that have come and will come, the terrorism,
the failing economies, the unemployment, and the like,
all of these things present us with unique
opportunities to reach out in love with good
works to share the gospel.
So these are the things that we do
as the church.
This is the mission.
The mission is ultimately to see people come
to Christ.
We do that through preaching, through church planting,
and through reaching out.
And I think that we will have more
and more opportunities.
But here's the thing that's on my heart,
and this is something that I was thinking
a lot about as I was preparing the
message yesterday.
I was thinking about planning.
We've got to be thinking about these things.
We've got to have a little bit of
a strategy so that when the bottom falls
out, that we're there and we're ready to
do what we can to help and then
to get the gospel to people.
Patrick Johnston, a missiologist, a man who was
a missionary and has written much on just
the spiritual condition of the whole world, basically,
in his book entitled The Church is Bigger
Than You Think, he wrote this.
He said, the 20th century, and I think
the 21st can be added right in there,
but the 20th century has been notable for
terrible wars, famines, tyrannies, and immense natural catastrophes.
Yet it is these traumatic events that have
contributed to the harvest into God's kingdom.
These negatives are an essential component, he says.
Somehow God's redemptive purposes are worked out in
love, but in the context of tragedies that
open hard hearts and break down barriers to
the gospel.
Then he ends by saying God is doing
an unprecedented work in our day.
These mighty works are not in spite of
the disasters, but even because of them.
So what's the point?
The point is this.
God is allowing the world to fall apart.
It's going to fall apart.
We already know prophetically what the scriptures say,
but God is allowing the world to fall
apart, the church to remain here at this
time, and there's a great harvest to be
reaped.
Our mission is to take advantage of these
opportunities and to remember we are on a
mission.
God is on a mission, and we are
looking to take advantage of every opportunity to
get the gospel to as many people as
we can.
So God is on a mission to save
many from among all nations.
The church is his instrument for accomplishing the
mission.
You as a believer in Jesus are a
vital part of that mission, and this is
what I want you to leave here with
today.
You are a missionary.
You are on a mission, and if you
think that way, it'll revolutionize the way you
live.
It'll revolutionize the way you look at every
aspect of your life, that you see yourself
constantly as being on a mission.
I'm serving the Lord.
Whatever I'm doing, it's all being done for
the glory of God and ultimately for the
fulfillment of his purpose.
We are vital to this mission.
We are the mouth that will speak for
Jesus, the ears that will listen for him,
the eyes that will show compassion, the feet
that will carry the gospel to those who
haven't heard it, the hands that will reach
out and touch the hurting, the lonely, the
outcast.
God's on a mission, and we are the
instruments through which he wants to accomplish his
mission.
The younger generation of Christians today, they're using
terms, they're saying the same thing, they're just
using different terminology.
Talk to some of the young guys today,
and they talk about being on mission.
It's kind of like, man, I'm on mission.
What do they mean by that?
What they're saying is, I'm going out into
my own culture, and I want to be
out there as a missionary.
Whatever I'm doing throughout the day, I'm on
mission.
I'm serving the Lord.
I'm seeking to advance his kingdom.
I'll tell you, if we get that mentality,
if all of us get the mentality, I'm
on mission, it's going to create a revolution.
It'll turn things radically right side up for
many people.
Might never change the direction of the culture
ultimately or the nation ultimately, but it'll certainly
change the direction of the lives of multitudes
of people, and that's what God is primarily
interested in.
So God's on mission, the church is on
mission, and we're part of the church.
You're on mission.
Don't forget that.
Realize that.
Pray about that.
Yield to that, and get ready for some
excitement, because God's got a lot of work
for us to do in the year to
come.
Let's pray.
Father, we thank you that, Lord, you're working,
and you've called us to work together with
you.
And so, Lord, even this morning, right here,
we want to give ourselves over to you
again, Lord, offering up our lives as living
sacrifices, Lord, to fulfill the mission that you
have appointed for each of our lives.
Lord, help us to see with your eyes.
Help us to hear with your ears.
Lord, help us to understand with your heart
and mind.
Lord, help us to have your vision for
this world.
And, Lord, truly, as we get up each
day, may we get up with a realization
that today is another day on the mission
field with expectation that you're going to work
and use us for your glory.
We pray these things in the name of
Jesus.
Amen.
Let's stand together.
If you need some prayer this morning, maybe
there's something specific God's ministered to you.
As you've listened to the Word this morning,
the pastors are up front, available to pray
with you, would love to pray with you.
Maybe you need to, you realize, you know,
I need to get my life right with
the Lord.
I hear what you're saying about mission, but
I got to get my own heart right.
Do that.
Don't procrastinate.
Don't wait another day.
These men are up front.
They'd love to pray with you for that.
God's got good things in store in the
year ahead, and you don't want to miss
out on any of them.
So, God bless you.