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“Our Mission, Should We Choose To Accept It..."
Intro (talk about moving to James next week, general stuff…taking a second this week to talk about what God’s doing here at MCBC, and what he is calling us to move towards)
Pray
[picture here]
You all remember that old show “Mission Impossible?”
For those of you unfortunate enough to miss out on the era of great shows, I encourage you to youtube it and watch it.
It isn’t quite as action packed as the modern movie versions of it, but it is a great old show.
It is based around this agent, Jim Phelps, who leads a team each week on a seemingly impossible mission.
They are all a part of a covert group that is tasked with bringing peace to the world by subverting all the evil that pops up in it.
And each and every week, as they are told their mission, on a cassette tape by the way, the same message - “should you or any of your IM force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.
Good luck, Jim.
This tape will self-destruct in five seconds.”
[maybe a story to setup the rest?
something transition]
And they were off.
One of the most striking parts of that show was Peter Graves.
You see, he always looks so calm!
He doesn’t look like the mission is impossible at all.
He looks like he knows that everything will be great as long as he sticks to his training and does his job.
Well the same can be said of us too!
We sometimes look at this life, especially the Christian life, as Mission Impossible!
But it isn’t!
In fact, it is pretty easy, we just tend to forget our training, and then we complicate it with a bunch of other stuff that need not be there.
So this first week after Easter, I thought it appropriate to remind us all of our mission, should we choose to accept it.
picture
While this text doesn’t explicitly say it, it does imply that there is a mission to be carried out by all believers.
We are to be Christ’s “witnesses” in this world.
But what does that look like?
What does it mean to be a witness?
How do we even do it?
While this text [Mission impossible story opening....then textual tie in - then love God love neighbor tie in…what does that mean?
What does that look like?]
Well, I think the answer is pretty straight forward!
It is also fundamental to all that we are as Christians!
So much so, that I made sure it was in all our logos, and bulletins.
It is tied to our doorposts, and written on our foreheads, and our hearts!
I talk about it constantly, because frankly, so did Jesus!
Love God, and love your Neighbor.
I want to, today, talk about that in light of this text and in doing so, hopefully I can help us all to move closer to succeeding is this “mission possible.”
Love God
Getting in the word - This seems pretty straight forward, really.
But it isn’t as easy as it sounds for us.
Our text today reminds us that there is more to knowing God than just reading!
The audience, the person the author of Acts, which is likely Luke, addresses this volume to is this guy Theophilus.
Well that person is us, right!
Theophilus literally means “God lover!”
So to love God means that we get in His word and read it like it is the one thing that can connect us to someone we love more than anything!
This is our loved ones story!
This is what they are all about, and we have to get into it and know it for ourselves.
We can’t just take the stories for face value, we must digest them and apply them to our lives.
That is what we are about here.
That’s hard, I know.
And we fail at it - I know I do from time to time.
But even when we fail, we get right back to work trying again!
That is what Mount Calvary is about.
Getting in Prayer - After God presents Himself to us, and after we get to know Him in His word, we must talk to Him.
Our text today reminds us that God will baptize us in the Holy Spirit.
That Spirit, it is the mode through which we communicate with God.
It fills us, it binds us, it flows through all we do and say and think.
Like a marriage, it is the thing that keeps us on the same page.
Kate and I, just like every married couple, have moments that we are perfectly in sync, moments when either one of us will make the right decision for both of us.
And then there are other times, the times when I make a decision…just kidding.
But seriously, there are other times when we need to talk.
We can’t just go willy-nilly.
We have to discuss things and work them out.
That is just marriage.
Likewise there are things that we would only know about each other if we were to actually sit down and talk - seriously talk.
Not just cursory, “good mornings” and passing conversation.
But that intentional talk that you have with someone you value more than anything.
That is prayer.
That is why it is important.
To love God, like our companions here on earth, we must pray to Him and have a conversation with Him.
Getting involved in Faith - The way you pull all of this together is pretty simple.
Just get involved in faith.
Get to work doing what God is doing in your communities of faith.
That starts in your personal life, which flows out into your home life, and your work life, and your church life!
Listen, we are blessed here at Mount Calvary to be able to do so many great things to help show our community we love them, and that God loves them!
We have to get involved!
That doesn’t mean more work, necessarily, but it does mean increased investment in things that matter!
I can’t tell you how many times I sat and wished that my daughters would go play outside, or stop being hard to get along with over the past several years.
I would pray for it.
I would think of ways to react to it to better remedy it.
But it wasn’t until I made the difficult choice to remove from our lives the things that stood in the way of God’s peace transcending our lives that there was actual change!
It wasn’t until I fixed the environment, made the situation ready for change, that change occured.
It is like gardening.
If you go out into your front yards and throw out some tomato seeds and some lettuce seed and maybe some corn seed, or a whole potato even, something might grow.
There might be a little movement, a little growth, and a little success.
But not much.
It isn’t until you plow it up, and amend the soil that you get a great garden!
There has to be a change of the conditions of the soil to make it work.
Likewise, we must change the conditions of our lives, our situations, our families situations, in order to see the growth we want to see.
We can’t just wake up some Sunday’s and go to church and expect our families, or our own, spiritual garden’s to thrive!
It doesn’t work that way!
We have to change the conditions, the environment of our faith.
We have to invest in that soil!
We have to nourish it!
We have to feed it!
We have to put some time into it!
If we would just take that plunge, church.
Life gets so much better.
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