Praise the Lord.
Praise the Lord from the heavens.
Praise Him in the heights above.
Praise Him, all His angels.
Praise Him, all His heavenly hosts.
Praise Him, sun and moon.
Praise Him, all you shining stars.
Praise Him, you highest heavens and you waters
above the skies.
Let them praise the name of the Lord,
for He commanded and they were created.
He set them in place forever and ever.
He gave a decree that will never pass
away.
So praise the Lord from the earth, you
great sea creatures in all ocean depths.
Lightning and hail, snow and clouds, stormy winds
that do His bidding, you mountains and all
hills, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals
and all cattle, small creatures and flying birds,
kings of the earth and all nations, you
princes and all rulers on the earth, young
men and maidens, old men and children, let
them all praise the name of the Lord
for His name alone is exalted.
And His splendor is above the earth and
the heavens and He is raised up for
His people a horn.
The praise of all His saints of Israel,
the people close to His heart.
Praise the Lord.
Sing the Lord a new song.
His praise in the assembly of the saints.
Let Israel rejoice in their Maker.
Let the people of Zion be glad in
their King.
Let them praise His name with dancing and
make music to Him with the tambourine and
harp.
For listen, let this soak in.
The Lord takes delight in His people.
He crowns the humble with salvation.
Let the saints rejoice in this honor and
sing joy on their beds.
May the praise of God be in their
mouths and a double-edged sword in their
hand to inflict vengeance on the nations and
punishment on the peoples, to bind their kings
with fetters, their nobles with shackles of iron,
to carry out the sentence written against them.
And this is the glory of all the
saints.
Praise the Lord.
Praise God and His sanctuary.
Praise Him for His acts of power.
Praise Him for His surpassing greatness.
Praise Him with the sounding of the trumpet.
Praise Him with the harp and lyre.
Praise Him with tambourine and dancing.
Praise Him with the strings and flute.
Praise Him with the clasp of cymbals.
Praise Him with resounding cymbals.
Let everything that has breath praise the Lord.
Do you have breath this morning?
Ever thought of what it would be like
if that last phrase in the book of
Psalms was switched around?
What if instead of saying, let everything that
has breath praise the Lord, what if it
said, let everything that praises the Lord have
breath?
How many of you would be alive right
now if your every single breath was dependent
on it giving great glory to God?
I am convinced that the God who is
worshiped in this room is worthy of nothing
less than every single breath.
God, we pray that our every breath in
this room would be breathed to Your glory.
Pray that You would show us Your glory
in Your Word and that You would show
the great sufficiency of Your Word in our
day.
You would magnify Yourself here and in the
churches we lead by magnifying Your voice and
pray, God, that by Your grace You would
help me to get the text right today
in a way that brings great glory to
You.
In Jesus' name we pray, Amen.
If you have a Bible, and I hope
you do, I want to invite you to
open with me to the book of Hebrews.
Hebrews chapter 13.
I don't say this tritely.
I really don't believe I have a lot
to bring to the table.
Today, apart from His Word, and so we're
going to dive right in to it.
I'm honored, privileged of being here, and I
pray that God will be glorified.
I've studied this text, which I believe is
in many ways a summary statement of the
entire book of Hebrews.
And I believe the people who were reading
this, who received this, were at a point
where they were facing a question.
And it's one question I want to ask
us today.
I believe it's a question that God's people
throughout Her history have had to face.
I believe it's the question that readers in
the book of Hebrews were facing.
And I believe it's one of the most
important questions facing the church today.
And the question is this, are we going
to die in our religion?
Or are we going to die in our
devotion?
Are we going to die in our religion
or die in our devotion?
Hebrews chapter 13, verse 11.
The high priest carries the blood of animals
into the most holy place as a sin
offering, but the bodies are burned outside the
camp.
And so Jesus also suffered outside the city
gate to make the people holy through His
own blood.
Let us then go to Him outside the
camp, bearing the disgrace He bore.
For here we do not have an enduring
city, but we are looking for the city
that is to come.
Are we going to die in our religion
or die in our devotion?
You and I know that there are all
kinds of questions about the book of Hebrews.
Not exactly sure who wrote it and not
exactly sure about all the details surrounding its
context.
But we do know it was most likely
written to a group of Jewish Christians.
Most likely at a time where it was
not particularly easy to be a Jewish Christian.
Where full conversion to Christianity meant leaving Judaism
and meant possible persecution or expulsion at least
from that Jewish community.
And as a result, all throughout this book,
we see the author urging them not to
fall away from their faith, their trust in
Christ, and not to fall away from the
mission that God had put in front of
them to make the glory of Christ known
among all nations.
I believe there were two main problems among
the believers in the book of Hebrews.
First of all, they were driven by formalism.
They were a people who knew all of
the rituals and knew all of the regulations
and knew how to practice religion, but somewhere
along the way it had become style without
substance.
And over and over again, we see some
of the most beautiful pictures of the glory
of Christ in the middle of all these
Old Testament sacrifices and Old Testament practices.
And they missed it.
They had been so consumed with how they
worshipped that they had missed the point of
who they were worshipping.
They were driven by formalism.
And second, they were paralyzed by fear.
You have a people who were shrinking back
from their faith and shrinking back from the
mission that was put in front of them
because of what it might cost them to
really surrender to Christ.
They were trying to find a way to
follow Christ, but stay in the camp of
Judaism.
Driven by formalism and paralyzed by fear.
And I think that left them with two
options.
And I think it's the two options that
the author of Hebrews is confronting them with
in this particular chapter.
They had two options.
Number one, they can retreat from the mission
that God had put in front of them.
Or number two, they can risk everything for
the mission God had put in front of
them.
And I want us to see this in
the context of Hebrews because I think it
will help us to understand this text.
Two options.
We can retreat from the mission, retreat from
the faith that God has entrusted to us,
or we can risk everything for this mission.
And I believe those two options have faced
God's people throughout history.
Let's take a quick, short tour of the
Old Testament.
Turn back with me to Numbers 13.
Go back with me there to Numbers 13.
And you're familiar with this story at Kadesh
Barnea and the people of God on the
brink of the Promised Land.
And you get to Numbers 13, and you
see Joshua and Caleb, which, by the way,
on a side note, Dr. Moeller mentioned that
we have a son we just adopted from
Kazakhstan, and his name is Caleb.
We had been trying to have kids biologically
for a while, and God and His sovereignty
had not chosen to give us that.
And so we had an incredible journey of
adoption, adopted Caleb from Kazakhstan.
And then two weeks after we got back,
found out that my wife was pregnant.
So I think that's a good thing.
And so we will have two kids this
year.
And the second will be named Joshua.
Caleb and Joshua are going to take the
nations for His glory.
But back to the text.
Numbers 13, verse 31.
You know the story.
Joshua and Caleb are the only ones who
are saying, go, everybody else is saying don't.
Listen to what happens at Kadesh Barnea, verse
31.
But the men who had gone up with
Him said, we can't attack those people.
They are stronger than we are.
And they spread among the Israelites a bad
report about the land they had explored.
They said the land we explored devours those
living in it.
All the people we saw there are of
great size.
We saw the Nephilim there, the descendants of
Anak come from the Nephilim.
We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes.
And we looked the same to them.
That night, all the people of the community
raised their voices and wept aloud.
All the Israelites grumbled against Moses and Aaron.
And the whole assembly said to them, if
only we had died in Egypt or in
this desert.
Why is the Lord bringing us to this
land only to let us fall by the
sword?
Our wives and children will be taken as
plunder.
Wouldn't it be better for us to go
back to Egypt?
And they said to each other, we should
choose a leader and go back to Egypt.
You see the two options they have in
front of them.
We can retreat from the mission or risk
everything from the mission.
And what are they doing?
They're retreating.
Let's go back to Egypt.
And so Moses prays for them.
He knows that God has delivered them from
slavery.
This is the picture that God set up
to show His deliverance among His people in
the Exodus.
And so he prays, God forgive them.
And you get over to Numbers 14, verse
20.
And what does God do?
Here was God's response.
Don't miss it.
The Lord replied, I have forgiven them as
you asked.
Nevertheless, as surely as I live, and as
surely as the glory of the Lord fills
the whole earth, not one of the men
who saw My glory in the miraculous signs
I performed in Egypt and in the desert,
but who disobeyed Me and tested Me ten
times, not one of them will ever see
the land I promised on oath to their
forefathers.
No one who has treated Me with contempt
will ever see it.
You get down to verse 32.
It gets even more strong.
You, this is God speaking to His people.
He says, you, your bodies will fall in
this desert.
Your children will be shepherds here for 40
years, suffering for your unfaithfulness until the last
of your bodies lies in the desert.
For 40 years, one year for each of
the 40 days you explored the land, you
will suffer for your sins and know what
it is like to have Me against you.
I, the Lord, have spoken, and I will
surely do these things to this whole wicked
community which is banded together against Me.
They will meet their end in this desert.
Here they will die.
Don't miss the picture here of God's mercy
and judgment.
He says, I have forgiven them.
I forgive them and I'm not going to
let them go back to Egypt.
I have forgiven them.
Nevertheless, they will wander in the wilderness until
they die, because they have retreated from what
I have put in front of them.
That's one instance.
Keep flipping to the right.
They get into the Promised Land.
Judges 2.
They take the Promised Land.
And what was God's command?
When you go into the Promised Land, when
you go into the land of Canaan, when
you rid the land of the Canaanites, you
take everything that does not bring Me great
glory, you are to display My holiness completely
and totally.
And the end of Judges 1 gives a
record of how they had completely missed out
on that.
They had retreated and they had taken some
of the plunder for themselves.
And they were not doing what God had
told them to do.
So listen to God's response in Judges 2.
The angel of the Lord went up from
Gilgal to Bochim and he said, I brought
you up out of Egypt and led you
into the land that I swore to give
to your forefathers.
I said, I will never break My covenant
with you, and you shall not make a
covenant with the people of this land, but
you shall break down their altars.
Yet you have disobeyed Me.
Why have you done this?
Now, therefore, I tell you that I will
not drive them out before you.
They will be thorns in your sides and
their gods will be a snare to you.
You go on to verse 10.
Listen to this.
A whole generation had been gathered to their
forefathers.
Another generation grew up who knew neither the
Lord nor what He had done for Israel.
The Israelites did evil in the eyes of
the Lord and served the Baals.
Look at what happened because they had retreated.
They forsook the Lord, the God of their
fathers, who had brought them up out of
Egypt.
They followed and worshipped various gods of the
peoples around them.
They provoked the Lord to anger because they
forsook Him and served Baal and the Ashtoreths.
In His anger against Israel, the Lord handed
them over to raiders who plundered them.
He sold them to their enemies all around
whom they were no longer able to resist.
Whenever Israel went out to fight, the hand
of the Lord was against them to defeat
them.
Just as He had sworn to them, they
were in great distress.
People retreating from the mission, as a result,
missing out on God's blessing.
One more, 1 Samuel chapter 8.
1 Samuel chapter 8, once they were established
in the land, surrounded by nations who had
pagan, idolatrous kings who brought them worldly fame
and worldly power and worldly glory.
And what does God say?
He says, I'm going to show My glory
as I lead you as your king.
But they look around the nations and they
say, we'd rather have what they have.
And again, they're retreating.
Listen to what it says in 1 Samuel
chapter 8.
They said, give us a king to lead
us.
And this displeased Samuel, so he prayed to
the Lord.
And the Lord told him, listen to all
the people are saying to you.
It is not you they have rejected, but
they have rejected Me as their king.
As they have done from the day I
brought them up out of Egypt until this
day, forsaking Me and serving other gods, so
they are doing to you.
Now listen to them, but warn them solemnly
and let them know what the king who
will reign over them will do.
You get to the end of the chapter
in verse 19.
The people refused to listen to Samuel.
No, they said, we want a king over
us.
Listen to the motivation.
Then we will be like all the other
nations with a king to lead us and
to go out before us and fight our
battles.
When Samuel heard all the people said, he
repeated it before the Lord.
And the Lord answered, listen to them and
give them a king.
We know that this is the pattern.
Over and over and over, time after time
after time, God's people facing these two options.
We can retreat from the mission that God
has called us to or we can risk
everything for it.
And over and over again, they're resisting.
And I believe when we get to the
book of Hebrews, we fast forward here.
What we've got is a host of Jewish
Christians who have been given a command.
Take the gospel from Jerusalem to Judea and
all Samaria to the ends of the earth.
And you make disciples everywhere.
And they're retreating.
They're trying to find a way to stay
in the camp of Judaism and not give
themselves to this mission.
You're thinking, Dave, thanks for the Old Testament
history lesson, but what does this have to
do with us today?
You fast forward a couple of thousand years
from the book of Hebrews.
And here's what I see.
I see God's people on September 6th, 2007,
surrounded by a world where the nation of
Pakistan is still struggling from an earthquake that
swallowed up 80,000 people just like that.
Almost all of whom did not know Christ.
I see the nation of Indonesia, the world's
largest Muslim-dominated nation, that over the last
couple of years has seen a quarter of
a million people die in natural disasters, tsunamis
and earthquakes, leaving hundreds of thousands of others
homeless, susceptible to all kinds of diseases and
hungry.
Almost all of those quarter of a million
having little to no knowledge of the name
of Jesus.
I see a nation like India, where there
are more people living below the poverty line
than there are people in the United States
altogether.
I see a world where half the people
are living on less than $2 a day
while we sit here, every single one of
us, filthy rich compared to the rest of
the world.
I see a world where our dogs and
our cats are eating better than our brothers
and sisters in the Sudan, where last week,
last week alone, 50,000 people died of
AIDS.
Last week alone, 100,000 children died of
hunger-related diseases.
In addition, hundreds of thousands of others that
were trafficked around the world for human sexual
exploitation.
And our biggest concern last week was how
our football team played.
And on top of all of that, thousands
upon thousands of our brothers and sisters who
are imprisoned and persecuted in China and Laos,
North Korea and Saudi Arabia.
In addition to over a billion people who
haven't even heard the name of Jesus that's
on our lips as we sing this morning,
haven't even heard His name.
I see all of that.
And then I look back, and in the
church that we have created and we are
leading, I see so few of our churches
risking everything for the mission.
We have retreated.
We have retreated into our nice, big buildings
where we sit in our nice, cushioned pews
and chairs, where we are insulated and isolated
from the inner cities and the spiritual lostness
of the world.
Where we've given a tip of our hats
to world missions and evangelism as an optional
program for the faithful few while we go
on designing endless programs that revolve around us.
And when we should be on the firing
lines for God, when our people should be
on the firing lines for God, most of
them are still in the nurseries of our
churches drinking spiritual milk.
And I am convinced that we stand at
our Kedesh Barnea with the mammoth needs of
a world without Christ in front of us
and the glory of Christ in us.
And we face two options.
We can retreat from this mission into a
land of religious formalism and wasted opportunity, or
we can risk everything to fulfill the divine
purpose for which we have been created.
And I say, let's risk it all.
For the sake of a billion people who
haven't heard His name, I say, let's risk
it all.
For the sake of millions in our country
who are headed to a Christless eternity, I
say, let's risk it all.
For the sake of the lost people you
and I know and our families and our
neighborhoods and our communities, let's risk it all.
For the sake of our lives, our families,
our churches, our children's lives, let's risk it
all.
Because, ladies and gentlemen, let me remind you
that our God is gracious.
He is merciful.
Our salvation is not at stake here.
That was sealed on the cross.
He is gracious and merciful.
But I am convinced that if we retreat
from this mission, He may leave us to
wander in the wilderness until we die.
I believe He's done it with thousands of
churches across our country.
And we are fools to think that He
couldn't do it with any one of ours.
Are we going to die in our religion
or die in our devotion?
Dave, don't you mean live in our devotion?
Are we going to die in our religion
or live in our devotion?
Wouldn't that be a better sermon?
I don't believe that's what Hebrews 13 is
saying.
Let's go outside.
Outside, repeats it.
Verse 11, verse 12, verse 13.
You see the progression.
Hebrews 13, verse 11.
The high priest carries the blood of animals
into the most holy places of sin offering,
but the bodies are burned outside the camp.
You go back.
Leviticus 16, verse 27 and 28.
Day of Atonement.
The blood of the bull and of the
goat is poured out on the altar as
a sacrifice for sin.
And then you take the bodies and you
burn them outside.
That's where the animals which represent the sin
of God's people, that's where we take them.
That's where they go, outside the camp.
Outside the camp is the dirty places.
We've got to put ourselves in the minds
and the hearts of the people who were
originally reading this and how astounding it was
to hear, go outside the camp when that's
the context.
You look at other places.
Leviticus chapter 13, verse 45 and 46.
You go outside the camp when you have
an infectious skin disease.
Lepers go outside the camp.
Those are the despised places.
When you don't belong and when nobody wants
to be around you, then you go outside
the camp.
The dirty places, the despised places and the
dangerous places.
Leviticus chapter 24.
You take blasphemers outside the camp because that's
where they need to be stoned, outside the
camp.
You don't want to go outside the camp
in the book of Leviticus.
And so he says to these Jewish Christians
who are familiar with that picture, let us
then go outside the camp.
That's where Jesus went, he said, outside the
city gates of Jerusalem.
Cursed, Galatians 3.13. Cursed is the one
who hangs on a tree.
He went to the dirty, to the dangerous
and the despised place.
He went outside the camp.
And so he says, let us then go
to him outside the camp.
To him, that's where he is bearing the
disgrace, the shame that he bore.
The author of Hebrews is saying very clearly
that Jesus is in the dirty places and
he's in the dangerous places and he's in
the despised places.
That's where he is.
If you go to him, you follow him,
that's where you go, outside the camp.
You don't sit back in comfort.
You go to the need.
You follow Jesus outside the camp, bearing shame.
That's not living.
That's dying to comfort.
It's dying to self.
It's dying in our devotion.
It's following Jesus in exactly what he did.
It's going to the pimps and the prostitutes
and the drug dealers.
It's going to the housing projects that are
most unpredictable in their gang activity.
It's going to the places where disease is
the biggest threat and where terror is the
biggest threat.
That's where we go.
But if we're honest, we're not there.
We're not there.
I believe we have a tendency to create
a more respectable Jesus than Hebrews 13 pictures.
He is more clean and more comfortable.
And he doesn't call us to go.
He calls us to stay.
He says, you continue your life and your
ministry and enjoy the prosperity that this world
brings you.
Even this church world brings you.
You enjoy that prosperity.
And you be successful in ministry.
And you don't give a second thought to
the fact that over a billion people haven't
heard the name of Jesus.
They are not your problem.
That's not the Jesus of the Bible.
And it's not the Jesus of Hebrews chapter
13.
Because the Jesus of the Bible in Hebrews
chapter 13 was in the dirty and the
despised and the dangerous places.
And there he was threatened and he was
mocked and he was beaten.
And they spat in his face.
And he was crucified to a cross.
And he bore great shame, great disgrace.
That's where Jesus is.
And I'm convinced if we continue to follow
the clean and respectable Jesus, don't miss this.
If we follow the clean and respectable Jesus
that we have created.
If we create Jesus to look a lot
like us, a middle class white American Jesus.
Then the danger is we will come into
our church worship services and we will sing
praises to this Jesus.
But the reality is if we've created Jesus
to look like us instead of who he
is in scripture.
And we're singing to him when he looks
like us.
And the reality is we are no longer
worshipping Jesus.
We are now worshipping ourselves Sunday in and
Sunday out.
But Jesus is outside the camp.
He's at work in the dirty and the
dangerous and the despised places.
I remember my first semester in seminary in
New Orleans.
And I was in a personal evangelism class
where we had to go out on the
streets of New Orleans.
And share the gospel with a group of
people.
And every week we were supposed to do
that.
We signed up with a church to partner
with.
My team was the last one to sign
up.
The only church left was Vuccare Baptist Church
which was right in the heart of the
French Quarter.
And I had grown up in suburban Atlanta.
Around people who were like me and thought
like me and acted like me and lived
like me.
And all of a sudden we went down
to the French Quarter.
Sat down with the pastor of this church.
He looked at us and he said, this
is a different place.
It's a tough place.
If you can learn to do ministry here,
you can do ministry anywhere in the world.
Now have a great semester.
And he booted us out the door.
So we looked at each other.
We looked at Bourbon Street and French Quarter.
What do we do?
Walked down to Jackson Square and all of
these tarot card readers and fortune tellers and
the Voodoo Queen and King of New Orleans
and homeless men and women.
Okay, where do you start?
We decided we wanted to get in on
a little bit of the action.
And so we decided one afternoon to set
up a table of our own there in
Jackson Square.
Right next to the Voodoo Queen.
We found a spot and put a table
up.
Put a nice tablecloth over and put a
sign up that said, we'll tell your future
for free.
We put some chairs in front, had a
couple of candles.
It was really cool.
And they would come and sit down and
they'd say, well, you're going to tell my
future for free?
Yes, absolutely.
We thought about pulling out their palms, but
we didn't.
We just left that and we said, I
want to ask you a couple of questions.
We would ask them a couple of questions
that would establish the fact they have sin
in their lives.
And we would look at them and tell
them that their future didn't look very good.
And from there we began to share the
gospel.
God began to open up our lives and
our eyes and our hearts to people that
we never would have been around before.
He began to establish relationships between us and
homeless men and women.
We would go down and we eventually would
just sit around in the corner and hang
out with them and get to know their
stories.
And it was dirty.
It was filthy being involved in all of
the intricacies of the variety of stories that
were represented in people who were on the
streets.
But one by one, they started coming to
faith in Christ.
They started coming to worship with us.
They said, we want to worship in the
French Quarter.
And so before Katrina hit, we had a
worship service in the middle of Jackson Square
with about 50 or 60 homeless men and
women every single Sunday morning, eating breakfast and
singing praise to Christ, preaching the gospel.
They were getting baptized.
The hurricane hit.
Things obviously fell apart all across the city.
I was back in New Orleans a few
months ago.
I was walking in New Orleans and a
guy came up to me.
He's got tattoos all over his arm, just
a couple of teeth.
He gives me a big hug.
This is one of the guys who we
picked up off the streets, came to faith
in Christ, was baptized.
He looks at me with tears in his
eyes as he gives me a hug.
He says, David, I've been waiting to see
you.
I want you to know that now I
am leading the French Quarter ministry at the
church where you served.
Jesus is at work in the dirty and
the despised and the dangerous places of the
world.
And our brothers and sisters who are training
for ministry are following him there.
Real brief, for the last couple of years,
I've had the opportunity to teach preaching in
an Indonesian seminary.
Listen to this.
In order to graduate from this seminary, every
student has to plant a church in a
Muslim community with at least 30 new baptized
believers.
It's not about papers.
It's about planting churches for them, leading people
to Christ.
And as a result, I spoke at their
graduation.
Every single person sitting in front of me
had planted a church in a Muslim community
with at least 30 new baptized believers.
Two of their classmates had been murdered in
the process.
House churches in Asia, I began to get
to know a couple of years ago when
I was on a trip there, not intending
to be involved with house churches, and God
in his sovereignty opened up an opportunity to
meet a couple of house church leaders.
Our contact there said, I've never seen anything
like this in eight years, but they want
you to do some training with all of
their house church leaders.
And so we went into underground locations.
First day, we went there two o'clock
in the afternoon and started studying God's word.
I don't remember where we started and what
we did, but eight hours later, we were
still going strong.
They were eating up the word.
If you can imagine, just a small room,
all the blinds closed on the windows because
they're meeting in secret, literally at the risk
of their lives in this country, in Asia.
And they've got their word open and they're
listening to it and they say, we want
to meet again tomorrow.
I said, okay, what time?
Maybe tomorrow night for a couple of hours?
They said, no, all day tomorrow.
So from eight in the morning to eight
at night, we study the word and they
say, can we do this again tomorrow?
Yes.
And for the next two weeks, from eight
to 12 hours a day, studying the word.
I remember one day sitting there teaching in
the book of Nehemiah, showing him chapter eight,
the supremacy of God's word, how it's the
center of the church and the people of
God.
Gave him the background and history of the
book of Nehemiah.
When I had finished, they sent somebody up
to me and they said, teacher, we have
a question.
I said, what's the question?
They said, we really like getting all that
information about Nehemiah.
We don't know all that stuff.
Can you teach us all the books of
the old Testament while you're here?
I said, you've got to be kidding.
They said, we want to know the Bible.
And so the next day I gave him
a background history of the old Testament.
We started diving in from Genesis all the
way to Malachi.
I imagine trying to teach the book of
Song of Solomon to a bunch of Asian
believers and just praying that they don't ask
any questions.
They love to ask, what does this mean?
Doesn't matter.
Move on.
Let's move on.
We get to the next, the last day,
finish up in Malachi.
We've got one more day, 12 hours.
I don't have a clue what I'm going
to teach.
We've been through Habakkuk.
What else do they need?
And so we're sitting there in the morning
and I start teaching through something.
About an hour into it, a guy in
the back raises his hand and he says,
teacher, we have a problem.
I said, what's the problem?
He said, we appreciate what you're teaching us
here, but you've given us the whole Old
Testament and we don't have the New Testament
yet.
I said, you've got to be kidding.
They said, we want the New Testament today.
And for the next 11 hours, we go
from Matthew to Revelation.
They love the word.
It means something to them and they're risking
their lives for it.
Their version of seminary is 20 house church
believers gathering together.
Most of them 20, 21, 22 years old.
And they've gathered together.
They come up to me and they said,
David, we have told our families we will
not be coming back.
We're going to Myanmar.
We're going to Laos.
And we're going to India.
We're going to Pakistan.
We're going into the Middle East.
We're going to make the gospel known in
all nations.
That's seminary around the world.
Are we going to join our brothers and
sisters going outside the camp?
Why would they do that?
What would compel them to do that?
Why should we go to the dirty and
the despised and the dangerous?
Here's why.
Verse 14, for, listen to this, for we
do not have an enduring city here.
We are looking for the city that is
to come.
We go to the dirty places and the
despised places and the dangerous places because what
the author of Hebrews said the last couple
of chapters rings true.
We are aliens and strangers on this earth
and we are looking for another country.
A country that is not our own.
And God is not ashamed to be called
our God because He has prepared a city
for us.
And we will suffer disgrace like Moses for
the sake of Christ because we are looking
ahead to our reward.
You go to the dirty and the despised
and the dangerous because you're convinced that the
glory of Christ is worth it.
His glory in all of eternity and He
did not die on a cross to make
the way for us to experience and live
the pleasures of Louisville and Birmingham.
He died outside the camp bearing disgrace so
the nations might come to know the glory
of His Father.
That's why we go.
We go because there are millions of people
in this country that are headed to a
Christless eternity and Jesus Christ is worthy of
every single one of their worship.
And we go to Africa.
We go there because there's 3,000 tribes
who are following animistic religions that are completely
devoid of God and Jesus Christ is worthy
of every single one of their glory.
We go to Japan and Laos and Vietnam
because there's 350 million Buddhists who are following
Buddha's rules and Buddha's regulations and there is
one God who is worthy of all of
their glory.
We go to India and Pakistan and Bangladesh
and Sri Lanka because there's 950 million Hindus
who are following more gods than you or
I can even fathom and there's only one
God who is worthy of all their glory.
We go to China and Laos and North
Korea, communist nations, because they've, a billion of
them grown up in atheistic philosophies that don't
even have a word for God and there
is a God and he's worthy of all
their glory and we go to the toughest
places.
Dave, why do you get on a plane
next week to go to the Middle East?
Because there's over 1.3 billion Muslims who
are fasting and giving alms and making holy
pilgrimages to Mecca and praying five times a
day to a false God.
And there is one true God who has
revealed himself in Jesus Christ who died on
a cross, rose from the grave and ascended
in glory and we are going to him
outside the camp bearing the disgrace he bore
because we are not living for this city
anymore.
We are living for the city that is
to come.
Are we going to die in our religion
or die in our devotion?
God help us to do the latter.