Why Missions?

Thank you so much. It's so good to be here. Hopefully you can hear me now. Yeah, so we just got in on Wednesday night. I said a little bit earlier to some folks, I just have this sense of unreality.

A week ago, I was in the Middle East in our church that meets in a basement, and then a week later, here we are, and it just feels a little unreal, like I'm in a dream and maybe I'll wake up. But so I'm so glad to be here. I'm so thankful to Salt Church and to Brother Leon asking us to come and talk. And as he said, he asked me to talk about missions. And so I said, sure, I can talk about that.

And we're going to back up and we're going to ask, what are missions? If you're new to the church, maybe you've never heard of this. If you've been around the church for a while, you know you have that word, but you've got some ideas about it. But do you really know what is what's in your mind? What's in Jesus's mind?

Is it the same thing? Let's find out today. So what are missions and what's a missionary? And even more importantly, why? Why do we do these things?

So that's what I hope that, well, not hope. We're definitely going to talk about that this morning. Hopefully, we'll leave with a better idea, a biblical understanding. And that's my objective today. I hope that you will leave this place with a biblical understanding of what missions are and why we do them.

That's my first objective. My second objective is actually more important to me. It's nearer and dearer to my heart. And that's that you will leave here having your eyes opened even more to see the beauty, the beauty of God's mission in the world, the beauty of Jesus, and even more the beauty of this term we're going to use a lot called the kingdom of heaven. So my desire is that you'll leave here with having caught a vision for that.

So today's passage, I'm going to read a passage from the end of the book of Matthew. Matthew is one of the books. It's the first book in the New Testament. It's one of the four gospels. And gospels just means the recording of the life and work of Jesus.

So it's the very last four verses of Matthew's story of the life of Jesus. And we'll see that all throughout Matthew, this idea of the kingdom of heaven, of Jesus being great and beautiful, and of his mission are going to come up. So what are missions? What's a missionary? I think everyone, if you have any idea, you might think it's someone leaving a country, going to another country.

Leon referenced that. And thus far, that's right. But then let's run through a few case studies and see if these are missions. Is going to build an orphanage in Guatemala missions? Lots of churches and stuff.

Do it? And the answer is, well, maybe, but not necessarily. How about digging a well in Africa? Maybe. Not necessarily.

How about supporting the rescue of women from sex trafficking? Maybe, but not necessarily. You're getting it. And how about helping the poor? Particularly in other countries.

Maybe, but not necessarily. You guys got it. All of these things are good and many of them, actually all of these, we are commanded to do in the Bible. So these are not unbiblical things, but they're not necessarily missions with the core of how Jesus defines missions in today's passage. So let's read the passage.

It's going to be on the screen, I think. And if not, it's in your Bibles, if you've got one on your phone or in your, oh, there it is. It's Matthew 28 verses 16. It's harder to open with holding the mic though. 16 to 20.

Then the 11 disciples went to Galilee, this is after Jesus died and rose again, to the mountain where Jesus had told them to go. When they saw him, they worshiped him, but some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age.

Okay. So the key point of this verse is that Jesus tells his disciples to go and make disciples. And we'll find out later what that means. We're going to look really closely at that passage to try to understand it well. But I want to stop and give you a little illustration from our work.

We work with Afghan refugees in the Middle East. And I know these two women, we'll call them Mariam and Sarah. That's not their real names, but we'll call them that. And they're Muslim women. They're from Afghanistan.

They have not come to believe Jesus yet. They are not Christians. They are Muslims. So there's still some ways for them to go. But they both participated in two separate translation storing projects that we did in which they learned four oral performance, nine or so stories from the Bible, and they were exposed to 30 more.

And yeah, they did a great job. They learned the stories really well. And they both told us, Mariam and Sarah told us separately, that they wish everyone in Afghanistan knew those stories about Jesus. And they said, if everyone in Afghanistan knew these stories about Jesus and learned from them, then Afghanistan would not be like it is today. Which is a powerful testimony, right?

And they've got a long way to go. They don't have it all figured out. I mean, they're not believing Jesus. I think if they had it all figured out, they would, but they're not there yet. But they understand one of the core aspects of this passage today.

You see in this passage, Jesus basically says three things. He says that he is the Lord of everything. And then he says, because of that, we are to make disciples and that he'll be with us, helping us the whole way. And not fully, they're not fully grasping it, but they're getting this. Thank you.

This first idea that Jesus is the Lord of everything. He has this kingdom, and it is good, and where his kingdom is happening, where his ways are happening, things are good. They understand that a little bit. They need to understand it some more. But they understand that when they say, if Jesus' stories were in Afghanistan, Afghanistan wouldn't be in the mess that it's in.

And so that brings us to our first point, right? Jesus is the Lord of everything. And it's closely related to this term called the kingdom of heaven. And in Matthew's Gospel, his short little book in the Bible, it's used, depending on how you count, around 48 times, which is a lot for it being a really short book. And this term is also in the other Gospels.

Mark's story of Jesus' life and Luke's story of Jesus' life, though there it's kingdom of God, but it's the same thing. The New Testament scholar, Dick France, I'll refer to this guy a few times, he has this to say about this kingdom of heaven idea, this kingdom of God. He says, the phrase, the kingdom of God, therefore, points not to a specific situation or event, but to God in control, with all the breadth of meaning that that phrase could cover. And he goes on to describe this, and he basically says that the kingdom of heaven, or the kingdom of God, is wherever God has his way, where his will is done, and where his purpose is fulfilled. So basically, Mariam and Sarah are saying that they want God's kingdom in Afghanistan, right?

They're saying, I want God's way to happen in Afghanistan. Because we maybe don't know what God's way looks like, but we know what it doesn't look like. It doesn't look like murder. It doesn't look like crime. It doesn't look like sexual exploitation.

It doesn't look like broken lives, or addiction, or a poverty, or disease. That is not what God's kingdom looks like. And for Afghanistan, God's kingdom would look like not nine out of ten women facing domestic abuse. It wouldn't look like women not having the right to go to school or work. It would not look like the Taliban in control.

That's what it wouldn't look like. And they say, if Jesus was having his way, it wouldn't be like this. And in Jesus, God's kingdom, more and more is invading this world. And for a lot of you, you've probably seen this in your life. How many of you guys have a testimony?

You've been around the church long enough to know what a testimony is, right? Basically, a testimony is a story that follows a formula. My life was this way. It was bad. Then Jesus, now my life is this way.

And it's probably not all the way good, but it's a lot better than it was before. So, before Jesus, your life was in shambles, maybe. Maybe you had a drinking problem. Just, you had a problem. Things were broken.

Things were breaking down. Or maybe you just had a hard heart and you weren't kind. And your relationships were just messed up. You went from relationship to relationship to relationship, leaving carnage. And your life was just messed up.

But then Jesus, right? You found a reason and could deal with your problem, and you didn't need to drink too much, or Jesus forgave you and was patient with you, and somehow you started being forgiving and patient with others, and your relationship started being not so destructive. That's a testimony. What that is, is God's kingdom starting to take root in your life, because Jesus's kingdom, it is here, but it's not all the way finished. It's not going to be finished until Jesus comes back one day and wraps up human history, when God's kingdom is everywhere, all the time.

So, we also, if you know, maybe you memorized the Lord's Prayer when you were a kid, or if you did a catechism, or one of those classes, or a confirmation thing somewhere, it starts, Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done. Because we're asking God's kingdom to come, and this doesn't mean like the kingdom we have over in England, right, with Elizabeth and the new guy and stuff, and they've got the palaces, and I can't even remember, I always confuse him and Phil, Charles, Charles, it's not like that with the parliament buildings and all that stuff. What we're asking Jesus, what we're asking Jesus to do, isn't to set up that sort of stuff. We're asking Jesus to have his way in our lives, in our situations, in our spheres of influence, in our neighborhoods, in our communities. That's what we are asking for.

And to ask that we're not denying God's sovereignty, right? He can wrap up even the bad things into good. And we're not denying that. But bad things being redeemed feels a lot different than just bad things not happening and good things happening. And that's what we're asking.

We're saying, God, we want just your good things to happen in this world. We want Jesus's authority to be made manifest around us. And I'm going to take a little bit of an aside here, right? So this is a message on missions. And for a lot of people in our contemporary American or just Western culture, we have this postmodern idea that it's wrong to change someone's beliefs, particularly in other countries.

That it's colonialistic, imperialistic, that it is just wrong and bad. Why would you go to the indigenous and change their religion? That's a horrible idea. And if you don't believe that there's God's kingdom, which is actually real in the world and changing lives, then, you know, if it's all just the same, then maybe there's some validity to that. But the truth is that God's kingdom is advancing in the world and it's changing lives.

It's changing the world. And we want that for other people. I want your good. I want my good. And you know what?

I've experienced Jesus's good. He forgave me. He redeemed me. He gave me good. He gave me the Holy Spirit, and now I'm seeing the fruit of the Spirit in my life.

I have this testimony, and I want that testimony for other people. So God's kingdom is the response, the Christian response, to the postmodern cultural pushback against this. Because we're not just trying to change people's culture and religion. We're trying to see God redeeming and making good all people's cultures and religions. And so, well, I just want to stop here for just a second and say that the foundation, or the why of missions, is the beauty of God's kingdom, that life and salvation is found nowhere else, and that is changing the world.

And so, I think I might have forgot to mention this, but in this passage we see the why of missions, which is God's kingdom. We see the what of missions. What do we do? That's point two where we're coming to. And then we're going to see the how of missions at the end.

So, let's get into point number two. So, to go back to my buddy, the New Testament scholar, Dick Franz, he said that what I just described is Jesus' universal sovereignty. He said, all authority in heaven and on earth is mine. Everywhere I'm the king, is what he said. So, his universal sovereignty calls for a universal mission.

If Jesus is the king of everywhere and everything, then his work needs to happen everywhere and in everything. And when I was reading this, I've read this passage lots of times over my life, but I've never really caught this. But another New Testament scholar, Leon Morris, helped me see that Jesus says, I'm the king of everything now, so, and you're expecting something. You may not know, I didn't notice that I was expecting something, but if I'm the president of America or the world or whatever, which is a funny thought. But if I was the president, you elected me, I'm getting sworn in and I'm having my press conference or my speech and I'm saying, okay, I'm the president now.

So, I'm going to do this executive order and this executive order. I'm going to overturn that last administration's this policy or that policy. I'm going to do these things because I'm the boss now. That's what we're expecting. But that's not what Jesus says.

Jesus says something really interesting. He says, I have all this authority in heaven and earth. Therefore, hey, you guys go and make disciples of all nations. There's implications for his disciples. And it's not just any old disciples or it's not just the 11, right?

The 11 at the beginning of this passage who are with him. That's all of the disciples of Jesus, the big apostle guys minus Judas who killed himself. It's for all of us. It's for all of us because it's, well, Jesus' universal mission because of his universal sovereignty. And also, the 11 guys were there.

They didn't need to write it down. Matthew wrote it down for us. It is for us. And so, let's look really closely at what this universal mission is because it's something, if we think of ourselves, if we claim... To be Christians, or followers of Jesus, or disciples of Jesus, we are supposed to obey this.

So it says, therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. Okay, so if you remember from your high school English classes, there's some verbs in here. Verbs are action words. There's six of them. There's go, make, baptizing, teaching, obey, and have commanded.

Have commanded, that's compound. But, so we've got these six verbs, and by understanding these six verbs, we can understand this verse. So the first two, go and make with its object disciples. Go and make disciples. These are two commands.

This is what Jesus is telling his disciples to do. You are to go, and you are to make disciples. So hold on to those things, because that's what we're supposed to do. And then, he has these two ing words, baptizing and teaching. And in this context, they're participles, which is a big fun word that you probably forgot from high school, and that's okay.

They're basically working to describe what are you doing when you're making disciples. How are you making disciples? What does disciple making mean? It means baptizing people. So if you've ever seen that, you know, they sprinkle water, you dunk somebody, and then dunk somebody in the water and pull them out at churches, and then teaching them.

Well, teaching them what? That leads us to the last two verbs. Teaching them to obey. What to obey? All the things that Jesus has commanded.

Okay, so that's what disciple making is. In short, it's finding people who don't know Jesus, telling them about Jesus, when they believe Jesus, putting them in the water and pulling them back out, and then teaching them to obey Jesus. Okay, now, teaching them to obey Jesus is a big thing, and we're kind of bad at it, particularly in the Western church, but everywhere, because sometimes he asks us to do uncomfortable things. So I really like to use this term. It's called obedience-focused discipleship.

Basically, we've got to be doers of the word and not just hearers of the word. The problem is we all really like knowledge, right? We feel so happy when people come, and maybe they look at our bookshelves and think, wow. Or we're in a church context like this, and we have a Bible verse memorized, and we just pull it out, you know? I didn't need to Google it or even flip through this thing.

I knew it. The Apostle Paul in the New Testament says that knowledge puffs up, makes us proud, gives us big heads, and there's nothing wrong with knowledge. I'd rather you have Bible verses memorized than not memorized. It's a good thing, but when it's divorced, when knowledge is divorced from practice, it's more. More harmful than helpful.

And the apostle, not the apostle, this is the guy James, he wrote a book in the New Testament. He said this phrase, don't be hearers of the word only, but be doers. And he said, because if you're like a hearer, but not a doer, he basically says you're an idiot. He gives this picture. I mean, it's a little bit harsh, but if you look at the picture, the picture is, I don't know what other conclusion you're going to come with.

He says, you're like a person who goes and looks in the mirror, turns around, and forget what you look like. I don't know what kind of person is going to be like that, but not a smart one. And yet, if we hear something, we learn something from the Bible, we learn something from Jesus and we don't do it, he's saying we're just like that ding dong who looked in the mirror and didn't do it. But we love knowledge and we don't like doing uncomfortable things. And so we don't obey.

But let me give you a little secret. It's in obeying Jesus that we experience life change, that we experience the beauty of God's kingdom. Because what Jesus says to do and what he says not to do, those lead us in the way that life works best. You will not experience the fullness of God's kingdom in your life if you're holding on to the things that Jesus tells you not to do. My earlier example, that drinking problem, it says in the Bible to not be drunk on wine, but to be filled with God's spirit.

If you're having troubles in your life because you're drunk all the time, and you keep being drunk all the time, and you're wondering why things aren't getting better, it's because you've not made any change. But when you obey what Jesus says, you'll experience that, the power and the life of the kingdom. Okay. So we're supposed to find people who don't know Jesus. We're supposed to tell them about Jesus, baptize them, and then teach them to do what Jesus says.

That's make disciples. Okay. So the first one, go. Where are we supposed to go? Well, Jesus answers this too.

He says that these new disciples are supposed to be of all the nations. And nations. And nations here, the word, isn't like our modern nation states that there's like 200 of them. He's not saying I want all these disciples from France and Canada and Ecuador. He's saying instead, this Greek word ethne, from which we get ethnicity, ethnic, and it basically means a group of people who are united by common language and culture and ethnicity.

ethnicity. Ethne. So how many ethne are there in the world then, if there's not 200? Well, it depends on how you count it, because there's different ways where you can define them. You're between 11,000 and 17,000 different people groups in the world.

And Jesus says all of those should have disciples of Jesus. And this is where we get to what missions commonly looks like. So, of those different people groups, 7,000 are what we call unreached. That means less than 5% of those people who are united by culture, language, and ethnicity are Christian of any variety, and less than 2% of them are evangelical. So, a tiny percentage of the people groups, or a tiny percentage of the people of those groups, are Christian at all.

So, it's an un-Christian, not knowing Jesus, not seeing his kingdom advancing culture. That's unreached. So, that's half or so, more or less, depending on how you count, of the groups in the world do not know Jesus. But the really sad number is the one below it, 3,050. These are the people groups.

So, groups of people united with language, ethnicity, and culture who have no active church-planting or disciple-making work being done. No one is doing anything for them to come to know Jesus and experience the fullness of the kingdom of heaven in their lives. But you say, okay, you know, maybe there's some small people groups, you know, 20 people groups. No, they're bigger than that. But, 3,050, that's kind of an abstract number.

So, let's turn that into real numbers. That's 278 million people for whom no one in the world is doing anything to make disciples and plant churches. That's the bottom one, the 3,050, that there's no one doing anything. And to make it worse, it's actually out of balance. 95% of full-time Christian workers are already working in the Christian world.

That means there's 5% working amongst those 7,000 unreached people groups. So, these unreached and unengaged people groups and frontier people groups is another word. Those are the people that Chelsea and I are working amongst and who she'll share a lot more after my talk. And so, Jesus' command is still valid because it has not been completed. There is still a lot of work.

There are still disciples who need to be made of our people groups here in America and of those ones who have no one. And you might feel overwhelmed right now. You probably should. I think that's probably the right response is to feel overwhelmed. And you say, oh, okay, so it's for me, but I'm just a regular guy or I'm a regular woman.

I'm a stay-at-home mom or I just have a normal job. Pastor Leon, you know, that's like his profession, but not me. How can I do that? Well, that's actually, Jesus addresses that in his last point. The task is possible by and only by God's spirit.

So, Matthew's book opens up with a famous verse that we use at Christmas time. It's Matthew 1, 23, and he's quoting the prophet Isaiah. It says, The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Emmanuel, which means God with us. And then the very last, the very last verse, the very last verse. The second half of the last verse of the book of Matthew is in our passage today, and this is this.

And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. So this Gospel of Matthew has these two bookends, or this framework. It starts with God saying, or saying, God is here with us in Jesus. And it ends saying, I am here with you forever in the Spirit. God is with us.

And to go back to my buddy Dick France, he points out that this isn't just to make us feel comfy and cozy. Oh, it's so nice. Jesus is with me. He's with me. I don't have to cry anymore.

He's with me. And it should make you feel warm and cozy, because it is nice that Jesus is with us. But that's not Jesus' main reason for saying this. These few verses are the only things that Matthew records Jesus saying after his resurrection. These are important.

Jesus says, I have all the authority, go do this thing, and I'm going to be with you. He's saying it's only possible for you to do because I'm with you. If Jesus is not with us, we cannot do this job. If Jesus is not helping us, those 278 million people will never have anyone trying to reach them. But with God's Spirit, it is possible.

Jesus said something similar the night before he was crucified. He gave his kind of last teachings to his disciples. And he said in John 15, it's part of an extended metaphor, which we don't have time for today. But he says, I am the vine and you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit.

And this is the key part for us today. Apart from me, you can do nothing. Jesus said that, and that's true. In terms of things that really matter for the kingdom of God, if Jesus isn't helping us, if his Spirit isn't helping us, we can't do it. But thankfully, Jesus is with us.

His Spirit is here. And we have this church, not just this church, but the whole global church to support each other, to encourage each other, to equip each other, and to send each other out to do what Jesus has told us to do. And so to review, we've reflected on how good Jesus is, the beauty of God's kingdom, which is advancing in our world. And it's the way things are meant to be. We've talked about how Jesus is the king of everything, and he's making all things new and beautiful, starting with our lives, the lives of his disciples, and radiating outward.

Then we talked about how Jesus gives us so what to this, the implications, and that's for us to go and make disciples. And the disciples, they're not just people who know stuff about Jesus. They're people who are baptized and are obedient, and that these disciples should be from all people groups. That's the what of missions. And then finally, he tells us how we are able to do this, which is by his Spirit, because he will be with us forever.

And at the beginning, I asked if building an orphanage in Guatemala was missions. Well… Maybe. Is disciple making a part of it? Is telling people about Jesus part of it? If so, yes, then it's missions.

If not, it's a service project, which is a good thing, too. Right? When Paul, one of the people in the New Testament, the guy who went to non-Jewish people to start telling them about the good news of Jesus, when he was approved to do that and sent out, they said, just don't forget the poor. So, in all of our missions, when we are telling people about Jesus, we should be serving the poor, the Christian poor and the non-Christian poor. So, building orphanages in Guatemala is huge and important and making those wells in Africa and rescuing women out of sex trafficking.

Do those things. But don't be confused and think that that's also missions necessarily. Because Jesus has a mission for us. It is his mission in the world to make disciples. And that we can do all these great service projects and feel like we're doing missions, but actually not be.

And it's, the core problem in our world is, starts with our hearts. And we need Jesus to change our hearts. So, that's, yeah, that's basically the core of it, is are we just doing service projects or are we doing specifically Christian missions? Are we being Tom's Shoes? They do great stuff.

They give kids shoes. It's not a Christian mission. It's a service project. You know, are we, remember that song from the 80s, Band-Aid, about the drought in Ethiopia? They don't even know it's Christmas at all.

Yeah, no, I will not sing it for you. But they raised loads and loads and loads of money and made lots of offensive statements. But they, not a Christian mission, though they really helped people who were dying without water. But what Jesus is asking us to do is to serve the poor and to make disciples of Jesus. And this is a universal mission, which means it applies to me and it applies to you.

And I do not want you to be just a hearer of the word, but a, or hearer of the word only. I also want you to be a doer. So, Chelsea will talk to you more specifically about some of these things in her little time. But there's three main ways that you can be participants in God's kingdom in the world. Pray, give, and go.

Right? So you can pray for missions. Pray for the lost. Pray for people who don't know Jesus around you. Give.

Give to your local ministries like Salt Church. And also give to those who are trying to make disciples in other nations. And go yourself. And you think, well, I'm not going to go overseas. No.

Stop and ask the Spirit. Maybe you are. And even if you aren't, even if the Spirit says to you, no, you know, it's not for you to go to the Middle East. There are still loads of people around you who haven't had, they don't have a testimony yet. They haven't experienced.

OK. OK. OK. Thank you. The fullness of life and salvation that is available to them in Jesus around you.

So go to your neighbors, even if you're not going overseas. And so we're going to pray real quick and we're going to ask the Spirit to reveal to us how we are to obey Jesus. Dear Father, thank you for the opportunity to be here. Thank you, Lord, for this great church and thank you, Lord, for your Spirit, your Word teaching us. We do not want to be hearers only, but we want to be doers.

And so, Lord, would you reveal to every person in this place now in these few minutes, but also later as I hope that they meditate on this passage and these thoughts, would you please show them how they are supposed to personally apply this to their lives? How are they supposed to engage in your mission in the world? And Lord, we thank you that you have a mission in the world, that you have not just left us to our own devices, but that your kingdom is advancing and invading our lives and worlds and transforming things. In Jesus' name, Amen.