But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth. Acts 1:8

Acts 1:8 – Answering the Call to Missions
Second Sunday in Lent  – March 13 2022 (am)

Prayer for Illumination:

Heavenly Father, as we return to our sermon series on answering the call to missions, we confess that we often approach this topic with fear or indifference or intimidation at the scope of the task.

And yet you have said, “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.” We love you Lord. Help us to keep your word today and abide in us as we abide in you.

In Jesus name, Amen.

Scripture Reading: Luke 24:44-49 & Acts 1:6-8

Luke 24:44-49   Then he said to them, “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled.” 45 Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, 46 and said to them, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things. 49 And behold, I am sending the promise of my Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.”

Acts 1:6-11   So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” 7 He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.” 9 And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. 10 And while they were gazing into heaven as he went, behold, two men stood by them in white robes, 11 and said, “Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven? This Jesus, who was taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven. 

Introduction

Welcome to the second sermon in our series entitled “Answering the call to missions.”

Our aim last week was to answer the question – “Who is responsible for answering the call to missions?” And the answer we arrived at was that every follower of Christ – that is to say – everyone who has received the peace that Christ offers – is responsible for taking that message of peace, of peace with God and forgiveness of sins, and spreading it to others.

The question we aim to answer today is the question of where? Knowing that we are all being sent out on mission by Jesus, where should we go to answer the call to missions?

This is such an important question for us, especially considering that the last two years have been defined by slogans like “Stay Home, Stay Healthy” or “Stay Home, Stay Safe” or  “Stay home, Save Lives.”

Without intending at all to make a statement on the proper response to the COVID pandemic, we have to wonder how such messages will impact society in the long run, how they have been embedded in the psyche of society, and how they will inform our response to potential danger in the future.

We also have to wonder how they will impact the church and the church’s mission. Could it cause the church to become a group of like-minded individuals who are committed to staying safe? Could the concern of saving our neighbors from potentially deadly viruses begin to take priority over the concern of the state of their souls? Could we come to the conclusion that not getting on a plane, and not going to the nations, is indeed the most loving thing that could be done?

Certainly we could see any of these scenarios playing out because they already are have been all around us. But it’s in light of this present climate that we must be reminded that the disciples of Jesus Christ were known as Apostles because the word Apostle means “Sent one.” They were sent ones – sent out by Jesus just as Jesus was sent out by the Father – and so also we are all sent by Jesus to bring His good news to others.

Ours is a commission that is not going to be accomplished from home – despite how popular zoom has become – it isn’t going to be accomplished from home. If we’re going to answer the call to missions, we must be willing to go – but where should we go?

Where should we go?

Luke 24:46-47 Everywhere

In the two accounts of Christ’s commission recorded by Luke, we find our answer.

In Luke 24:46-47 we read, “Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.

To all nations, beginning in Jerusalem. What does Jesus mean by that? I don’t believe Jesus’ desire was for the disciples to create a church denomination that was committed to planting a church in Jerusalem and then from that church sending out a church planting team to one of each of the known nations.  

I don’t think “Peter and John were to be found sitting behind a desk looking at a map and saying alright – we’ve got one here in Jerusalem and one in Samaria and one in Judea, and that bloke Philip met is our guy for Ethiopia and Paul, well he’s a machine that one, he’s singlehandedly handled the Roman Empire and planning to go to Spain next, so by my calculation we’ve only got so and so more churches to go and then we’ll be done.”

I don’t think Jesus was giving his disciples a specific formula or a code for what they must accomplish in order for him to return. Instead, what Jesus is saying is that we, his disciples, are to take the good news of the gospel everywhere! Not with some wooden definition of who’s a nation and who’s not and whether or not they already have a church but with an eagerness to share the gospel everywhere. Jesus is saying, “I want you to start here and go everywhere with the gospel.”

The universality of the missionary task was creatively summed up in a prayer by one of my kids when they prayed – “Dear Lord, would you please let the gospel spread to the corners of the earth, just like a sandwich.” Now that is prayer prayed by a little girl who knows both the proper way to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and the scope of the great commission.

So the mission is share the gospel with everyone, and we should stop and reflect for a moment on the beauty of this before moving on . . . the beauty that the gospel is to be shared with everyone; that the salvation Jesus offers and the peace Jesus purchased for us are purchased not only for certain types of people, but for all people; that it is not exclusively for the Jews, but also for the Gentiles; that it is not just for the wealthy and well connected, but also for the poor and forgotten; that it is not only good news for people of a particular skin color, or with access to education, or who live in proximity to places of importance, but it is good news for all races, of educated or not, in cities and jungles and frozen tundra.

That is the beauty of God’s one abiding plan – it is good news for the whole world – and it is the role of the disciples to take it there.

Acts 1:8 Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth.

Let’s turn to Acts 1:8, which says, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Here Jesus speaks once again to the scope of the mission. Here again he tells the disciples where to go – they are to go to the city outside their doors (Jerusalem) as well as the surrounding regions of Judea, where Jerusalem is situated, and Samaria, the area just north of Jerusalem, and to the end of the earth.

Each of these locations helps us to define the missionary task, but not because they are code for specific places we are to go with the gospel (what is our Jerusalem? Our Samaria?). The primary role this statement serves is as a thesis for the book of Acts – a description of how the book of Acts is going to play out. They are a description of the early spread of the Gospel – as it would begin in Jerusalem (Acts 1-7) then spread to the surrounding region of Judea and Samaria (Acts 8-12) before Paul and Barnabas set out on the first missionary journey to begin to take it to the ends of the earth (Acts 13ff).

But that isn’t to say it plays no significance in shaping our understanding of where we are to go with the gospel or our understanding of the missionary task because as we read Acts, we see certain characteristics of ministry being done in Jerusalem and in Judea & Samaria and the ends of the earth that help us further define where it is we should faithfully go with the gospel.

Jerusalem

Take Jerusalem to start – what would it have meant for the disciples to go to Jerusalem with the gospel?

It meant taking the gospel to the Jews, so the gospel was to go to the people who shared the same culture as the disciples. It was for those who were familiar with the Scriptures and the Law and the Temple practices. And it was for those who were familiar to the disciples.

But familiarity isn’t always for good reasons. Remember some of the folks the disciples knew in Jerusalem were their opponents. It was they who had secretly arrested, falsely accused, wrongfully condemned, and crucified the disciples’ Savior. It was from fear of such people that, just a few days ago, the disciples were hiding from behind locked doors. But familiarity with their opponents wasn’t to stop them from going to the city with the gospel – and as the book of Acts unfolds, we see Peter and John doing this very thing – and suffering at the hands of these same leaders, but not in a way that gospel advance is slowed or stopped.

So what might we infer from the call to go to Jerusalem?

We might infer that the gospel is to go to those who are near to us and who are like us. It is to go to those who share our own culture. It is to go to those who speak our own language and who grew up in our neighborhoods and who run our city governments. It’s to go to those who might say, “You live on Lorraine street, no way, I grew up on Lorraine Street” or “You go to Grace Church, yeah I know Grace Church, I was there for my son’s cross country meet once” or “You graduated from Naperville North, so did I, what year where you there?”

And we’re to do so even when we face local opposition – an opposition we’ve been largely spared in recent history but that does not mean we will never face it in the future.

Why might this feel like a challenging task?

This can sound intimidating, not because this group is so foreign to us but because they are so familiar. We know these people. We see these people. We know the cultural climate that has produced their skepticism. We have a good idea as to why they have rejected Christ. And if we try to share the gospel with them, and it doesn’t go well, chances are good that we’ll see them again – and how will that go? Will we wave? Will we say hi? Will we hide behind the Watermelon stand until they leave the store?

But on the other hand, we KNOW these people. Could that knowledge be our greatest asset in reaching them? We live near them – could it be that this proximity gives us the benefit of being able to play the long game with them? We share a language and culture and history with them – can we use what we know and share with them to more effectively reach them with the gospel?

These reflections come out of my own experience as someone who has been on the mission field and then returned from it to do minister as a pastor. 

While we were on the mission field, communicating the love of Christ to our neighbors was a difficult task BECAUSE  we were so different from them and they from us. We weren’t able to speak to them in their heart language of Arabic. We were just beginning to learn their culture. Their history was supercharged with longstanding hatred and prejudices and it felt we were always offending someone when we said anything along those lines. In short, ministry was slow going and had many hurdles in the way towards building trust and seeing the gospel take root. 

So when we moved back to the States and we bought a house just down the street I was struck by the idea that if I sought to be a missionary to my neighborhood in Warrenville in the same way as I sought to be a missionary in Jerusalem, I had so many more skills to reach my neighborhood now 0 the skills that I had longed to have when I was overseas. And so do you.

Sometimes we can get so bogged down in the differences we have with our neighbors that we take for granted everything we have in common. Let’s take what we have in common with them and, in a sense, begin reaching our city for Christ.

Judea & Samaria

Jesus also says that the disciples were to be witnesses to Judea and Samaria. These were the regions that were around Jerusalem. And as we look at the story of Acts, we see that taking the gospel to regions required the disciples to go to people who were near them in proximity but different from them culturally.

For example, to go to Samaria meant going to the  people that the Jews had long avoided. They were an ethnically mixed people, the product of Jews who had intermarried with the foreigners who populated the land after the Assyrian exile. In addition to being ethnically different they were religiously divergent, claiming that that God was to be worshipped on their Mount Gerazim rather than in Jerusalem and rejecting all but the first five books of the Bible. At best there was general dislike between Jews and Samaritans but it would be more accurate to say there was hatred – and yet Jesus was telling the disciples that the gospel was to go to them.

Similarly, the ministry done in Judea in the book of Acts highlights the disciples dealings with people who were different from them. Luke tells us of Philip’s miraculous meeting with a Eunuch from Ethiopian and Peter’s being called by God to bring the gospel to Cornelius, a Gentile Roman soldier – both of whom receive the gospel when it is shared with them. 

What might we infer?

Drawing from the example we see in Acts, we might infer that Jesus intended the gospel to go out to those who live near us but are different from us – whether it be ethnically different, religiously different, or culturally different. Who might this be for us? It’s a bit of a sticky question because we have to first define who WE are if we’re going to determine who is different from us. And generalizations always fail to define everyone among us. But, assuming we understand this, let’s give it a try.

We could begin by considering whether our church reflects the diversity of our surroundings. Our zip code is made up of 63% White; 24% Hispanic, 4.5% black, 8% other and the trends reflect that the white population will decrease over time while the other three increase. So we might ask ourselves, what are we doing to bring the gospel to everyone in our city? Is the Hispanic population in Warrenville on our minds – do we long to see the gospel take root in their community? What could we do to reach them?

We could add to the Hispanic community the refugee communities around us or the low income communities or the incarcerated community up at DuPage County Jail or the special needs community or the community at the DuPage Convalescent center.

The point I’m making here is certainly not to suggest that we ought to create a program to reach every community that is different from us in our area but it is to say that we must guard ourselves from overlooking communities that need the gospel simply because they are different from us.

Why might this feel like a challenging task?

In some ways, this might feel like the most intimidating of our assignments because of the obvious reason that these people are different from us. They may come from a different culture. They may have had experiences we can’t relate to. They may speak different languages, though chances are good that they or someone in their family also speaks English. They may be slow to trust you and wonder why you’re showing an interest in someone like them.

But if we look at it another way, we could marvel at the ways the Lord has brought the nations near to us and how we have the opportunity to reach them via a short car ride rather than a trip around the world. We could marvel at how cities can have so much diversity in so many ways and seek the Lord to lead us in who he would have us pursue with the gospel.

To be a church that is faithful to the great commission – we must be faithful to bring the gospel to those who are near to us but different from us.  We need to do so with wisdom. We need to go in ready to learn, and listen, and build trust before we assuming we know the ways they need to change. We need to play the long game – and by God’s design – we can, and that without having to move to another country.

End of the Earth

Finally, Jesus says that the disciples will need to take the gospel to the end of the earth. The book of Acts describes the beginning of this, as Paul took the gospel to the Roman world and to people who were far away from home and far more different even from those found in Judea and Samaria. While the Ethiopian Eunuch and Cornelius, the Centurion, and the Samaritans all had an understanding of the God they were hearing about in the gospel – we see Paul in Mars Hill surrounded by God’s and teaching the people about the unknown God to whom they had made a shrine. So we can see that the command to take the gospel to the end of the earth was a command to take it to people who were far away from where the disciples lived and far more different from them than anyone they’d encountered thus far.

What can we infer from this?

We learn a few things from the call to go to the ends of the earth.

We learn that the means by which our faith is to spread is not by calling all who are curious to one central location, it was not to establish a holy city where Christians would come to congregate, but rather it was to spread through messengers who would be willing to take the message of salvation to the end of the earth.

We learn that no matter how much work there is to be done with people who are near to us, we must never allow that work to keep us from praying for and raising up and sending out some from among us to take the gospel to a people who are far away.

And this might not make sense to us at first. John Piper in explaining why this might not make sense uses the analogy of two sinking ships. He says, what if there were two ships at sea and both were sinking and you had a boat by which some could be saved and your boat was near one of the ships but far from the other. Why would you take your boat and leave the drowning people you are near in order to go save drowning people far away?

And here is his answer: Because God promised Abraham that he would become the father of many nations (Romans 4:17). Because the prophets prophesied of a day when all nations would worship the Lord. And because it is God’s goal, as John testified to it in Revelation, to gather to himself a people for God from “every tribe and language and people and nation” (Rev. 5:9).  

So the reason we leave those who are nearby to witness to those who are far away is because the very heart of God is not only that the most number of people would come to worship him but that people from every tribe and language and people and nation would worship before his throne. 

As John Piper explains, “. . . God’s will for missions is that every people group be reached with the testimony of Christ and that a people be called out for his name from all the nations. . . . It may be that this definition of missions will in fact result in the greatest possible number of white-hot worshippers for God’s Son. But that remains for God to decide. Our responsibility is to define missions his way and then obey.” [1]

Why might this feel like a challenging task?

It’s not hard to come up with reasons for why many consider this to be the most difficult element of Christ’s commission to fulfill. The calling to leave our families and friends and homes and culture to go to a place where everything is foreign and where we must begin from scratch relationally and linguistically and spiritually and culturally with the people we aim to serve.

If we’re to do this well, we must take the enormity of the task to heart and not expect to make lasting change by taking short cuts. We must give ourselves to the task of learning languages and cultures and histories so that we might build trust and create inroads for the gospel. We must commit to long term missions and respect the time that is required for trust to be earned and ground to be gained for the gospel. We must learn to do ministry that effects long term and lasting change in the hearts of individuals that then spreads and reproduces among others within their community, and not ministry that aims to produce quick numbers that look good back home but do not last.

Conclusion on this Point

So between the commissions we receive from Jesus in Luke’s two books we can clearly see that our calling is to go everywhere with the gospel – and that includes at least to the people who are near us and similar to us, people who are near us and different from us, and people who are far from us and so different from us we may not even know how to begin with bringing them the gospel but who’s very existence causes us to seek God’s help to provide a way to share His good news with them.

How do we plan to get it there?

How do we plan to be faithful to our Lord in taking the gospel to at least these three spheres of individuals? Another way of saying that is, “What is our philosophy of outreach at Grace Church?”

To answer that question, I’d like to share three elements of our philosophy of outreach that help us to be responsible, as a church, with carrying out the great commission.

The first is simply to say that we are committed to doing both local outreach and global outreach. If we’re to be faithful to Jesus – this must be the case. This doesn’t mean that we’re doing either one of these perfectly or that we have no room to grow in these areas. By God’s grace we are engaged both locally and globally and we must continue to be and may it be that we never grow tired of asking the questions “Are we being faithful to bring the gospel to our neighbors?” and “Are we being faithful to bring the gospel to the nations?”

The second way we aim to be faithful to the great commission is by making our primary means of local outreach something we call “organic outreach”.

This concept comes from the book that we’ve been studying as a staff entitled “Organic Outreach” by Kevin Harney, a book that you can find in our library.[2] It’s one of the books I read this past summer as I was trying to answer the question for myself of how should we do local outreach. And what really caught my eye was a chapter in which Harney explained that while many churches prioritize outreach by having an outreach committee, this was not an approach he recommended.

I thought, hmmm, I wonder why not? As I was considering starting a local outreach committee myself. The problem with outreach committees, he explained, was that when you have an outreach committee that heads up your local outreach ministry you communicate that outreach is just one ministry among many that your people can choose to be engaged in. So for the person involved in children’s ministry – they won’t feel compelled to do what the outreach ministry is doing because that’s not their ministry. For the person in the choir, it only makes sense that they would prioritize choir practice over the whatever the outreach ministry is doing. Can you see the problem?

We can’t set up outreach as one ministry among others. So what should we do? Well, instead of laying the task of outreach before a volunteer committee, we’ve brought it into our staff meetings. Every month we discuss outreach with our ministry leaders primarily asking two questions: How can we become more engaged in outreach personally? And how can we lead our ministries in such a way they reach out not only to church members but also to reach the lost?

By asking these hard questions – and they are hard, there is accountability – we hope to infuse a heart for outreach in ourselves, in each ministry leader, and in our ministries – children, youth, sports, worship, preaching, men, women, AV ministry, our office ministry – with the expectation that by doing so, the Lord will cause that heart to spread from ministry leaders to ministry volunteers and from ministry volunteers to ministry participants and from ministry participants to classrooms and dog parks and conference tables and jail cells and coffee shops and basketball courts and street corners and river walks and to the ends of the earth.

That is how we aim to do outreach organically. It doesn’t mean we can’t develop organized efforts that target particular groups as our sports ministry and special needs ministries already do, but it does mean that we won’t use those ministries to check a box and excuse everyone else in the church from asking – what do we need to do to reach the lost in our area?

The third philosophy of outreach I want to highlight is our  philosophy of global outreach, which has many elements to it, but the one I’d like to highlight today is our commit to supporting like-minded missionaries in fewer numbers and at higher amounts financially.

Why would we support fewer missionaries and higher amounts?  

The reason is because we know global outreach is hard. It is work that requires great sacrifice and patience and time. And as such, it is a work that requires great support. And while much of that support is financial, there is also a great need spiritual and relational support as well. And we believe that it is the role of local sending churches to provide much of that support to the missionaries that are sent out from among them.

When we were on the mission field, one of the hardest but most rewarding things we did was send out update letters. It was hard because life was life was already very busy and the work was hard and progress was slow going and you felt like you had to have something to report but it was rewarding in that for days after sending out our email we would be getting replies from loved ones telling us they had read our letter and they were praying for us and they cared for us and it fueled our souls for the days to come.

Missionaries need a church family that they know is behind them. They need people who are committed to praying for them. They need to know that no matter how long they’re gone on their assignment, they won’t be forgotten. They need fellow Christians in their lives who will check in on them and remember their anniversary and care about their kids birthdays.

In addition to this relational support network, they need Elders, spiritual Shepherds, who consider it their responsibility to care for the missionaries’ eternal souls. To keep them accountable. To pray for them. To serve them and suffer for them and counsel them and love them until the day they hand them over to another board of Elders – God willing the Elders who have been raised up by their own overseas ministry – or until they entrust them to their eternal home with the Ultimate Shepherd, beneath whom and for whom all Elders minister.

And so we state that we want to support less missionaries, at higher financial amounts because by doing so we focus our relational energy and shepherding energy to the missionaries we can responsibly care for, and by supporting them at higher amounts, it keeps our missionaries from having to find their support in other places thus freeing them from having to keep in touch with fewer local churches or individuals and thus receive closer and more personal care from us.

How can I help? What should each individual do in response to this message?

Begin Local, Burn Global

• Begin local knowing that in so many ways you are perfectly to reach someone near you

• Begin local because all outreach is eventually local outreach

  o   When you’re called to global missions you are called to local missions in a different location

  o   To do local missions here equips you to do local missions there

• Begin local because being missionaries to those around us is not just what we are called to do, it’s who we are called to be.

  o   As the father sent the Son, so He has sent us. It is so tied to our identity that were we to stop doing so, it should cause us to question if we’re truly followers of Christ at all.

• Begin local with the challenge I gave last week – the challenge to prayerfully engage in one gospel oriented conversation over the course of this series
  

  But also burn global
  

• If God’s mission is to redeem for himself a people from every tribe and tongue and nation and people than that must be our mission too. If that is God’s heart, than it must be our heart too.
  

• Burn global in our prayers

  o   Pick up a Global Partner prayer guide

  o   Pray for particular peoples to hear and receive the gospel

  o   Pray that the Lord would raise up individuals from among us to go to those peoples

• Burn global with our finances – giving towards the sending and supporting of our missionaries

• Burn global by adopting GCD missionaries to stay in touch with and love and refuel their tanks for the sake of their ministries

• Burn global by laying before the Lord your own life saying “Lord, make me ready to go if it is your will to send me to the nations.”

With that our time is gone and I’m sure we have much to think and pray about as well as much to do – so let’s close in prayer and ask the Lord to do this work among us, through His Spirit.

Closing Prayer: Vision Prayer: Ask, seek, and knock, for God to develop us into a community of worshipers that bears much fruit as we live and proclaim the gospel with authenticity and passion.

____________

[1] Piper, John. Let the Nations Be Glad! Baker Books: Grand Rapids, 1993. (Pg. 170)

[2] Harney, Kevin G. Organic Outreach for Churches. Zondervan: Grand Rapids, 2011

NEXT WEEK: Answering the Call to Missions, Nick Conner