Essentials: Mission Statement Part 1
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Pray for Afganistan Church ??? maybe
Introduction
Video: He’s Still Risen
Christians have been inspired by the gravity of this simple truth for generations, so I invite you to consider it again. The Grave is Empty…He Is Risen. And if you just recently put you faith and trust in Jesus then this may still be at the forefront of your thinking, but for those of us who have longed believed this we may need to hear these words fresh and new this morning THE GRAVE IS EMPTY…HE IS RISEN!
This is the greatest news that has ever been spoken since our first parent’s Adam and Eve sinned and then were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. They ate the fruit and it did indeed bring death just as God said. And for generations the grave spoke nothing but fear and death to all humanity, but then...Jesus.
He become like us but then lived very not like us. The perfection of his life placed him in a position where death could not touch him, but still he humbled himself unto death even the worse death that depraved human minds could invent…being executed on a Roman Cross. Again not because He deserved it…but but because we did. He took our place. He took our death. He took our sin. He took our punishment and he died in our place and was buried in the grave...But God released him from the horrors of death and raised him back to life, for death could not keep him in its grip. (Acts 2:24)
And now for all who place their faith in Jesus Christ the grave in every way remains empty…because He is Risen. It has no power over us any longer because Jesus destroyed it’s power and will one day destroy it’s existance. In our Faith we no longer Fear because for those who trust in Jesus, death is only a doorway into life perfected, not something to fear but something to be hopeful and responsive toward. Death has lost it’s sting and now we can live free from the fear of death because we have been given this incredible gift of New Life by Jesus Christ. The gift is not only a future life, but a life where we can grow in a right relationship with God and tell others the good news that we have in Jesus.
And does this reality still capture us? Does it still captivate us? Bring us joy and motivate us to rejoice and look for someone else to bless with this great news that Christ is Risen! It should, because it is the greatest news that has ever been told, news that has the power to change any and ever life that it touches.
This is the Life-giving message of Jesus Christ.
Tension
This summer we have been working through our Declaration of Faith in a series that we entitled “Essentials”. We took a look at the many different doctrinal positions that “We believe...” to be “Essential”. I so wanted to do this series because of the great joy that I have to look out at all of you and I see many of you who have been here long before me and many others who are new since I began as the Pastor here. And I wanted to get us together on a degree of common ground when it comes to what “We believe...” as a Church.
In addition to our Declaration of Faith, we also have something else that drives us together and that is our Mission Statement. This is most commonly written around here as “Communicating... the Life-Giving Message of Jesus Christ” because we believe that sharing the message of Jesus Christ is not just about giving people information but it is about seeing that information bring them to new Life in Jesus. It not just informational but transformational. So we want to communicate this life-giving message of Jesus in every way we can.
And one of the things that we all learned this past year is first of all...how important good communication is... but also how there are many different ways of communicating something. Did you notice how all of the sudden...things like video chat have become a weekly if not daily communication tool where two years ago it was - at best - just something to dabble in once in a while for fun.
And I don’t know about your experience with these things, but in my world there was often a needed learning curve when it came to effectively communicate in this and other new forms of Communication. (mute button / camera angle - nostrils) The same thing is true when learning to communicate the life-giving message of Jesus Christ.
Up to this point, everyone of the statements that we have gone through this past summer were here when I arrived, but this past year we changed the wording of our Mission Statement in hopes that it would help us learn how to communicate better.
So even though we are still using the same condensed version of “Communicating the life-giving message of Jesus Christ” we moved this past year to change the longer version to say that: Our Mission is to Partner Together to Proclaim, Grow, Serve and Rejoice in the life-giving message of Jesus Christ.
You could say that we have simply brought more detail to our “Communication” plan by including these 5 different ways in which we are striving to make the “life-giving message of Jesus Christ” known.
And because you are such dedicated students of the Bible, I already know the next question you are going to ask…Where in God’s Word do these 5 ministry areas come from? (I know, it’s like I can read your mind and I am so glad you asked).
We are going to take some time to look at where in Scripture we take these five ministry areas from and then look at just one of them to day and get after the rest o them next week.
So open your Bibles up with me if you will to Matthew Chapter 22, page 828 in the Bibles in the chairs. I will pray and then we will dive in to the foundation of our Mission statement.
Let’s pray.
Truth
We can find each of these 5 ministry areas through out the New Testament teaching for the Christian Church, but we will take a look at them from two of the Great things that Jesus said when He was here on earth. In fact we typically refer to these two statements of Jesus as “the Greatest Commandment” and “the Great Commission.” From Matthew chapter 22 we will find:
1. The Great Commandment
1. The Great Commandment
Here in Matthew Chapter 22 Jesus is being repeatedly targeted by representatives from the two most significant Religious Leadership groups of the time. We talk about them a lot, as well we should because they represent so well the two opposite sides of how you can so easily get religion terribly wrong!
On one side we have the very Liberal Sadduccees. They held the most political power because they played nice with the Roman Government and let things slide when it was to their advantage. They could do this because they used religion only as a means to accumulate great wealth and power for themselves here on earth. This was driven by the fact that they did not believe there was life after the grave. This life was all there was…so if you have to bend some rules some to make life more comfortably then…sure…why not.
Their counter part the Pharisees very much so believed in the after life and these two groups would go around and around debating the merits of each view. One day the Sadduccees decide that they should confront this new popular Rabbi on where he stood. So starting in verse 23 of chapter 22 they lay out this elaborate hypothetical question in hopes to show everyone how “illogical” it was to believe in the afterlife.
Long story short…they pointed to where the law commanded a man to take his brother’s widow as his wife so she would be cared for and not destitute since her husband was now gone. Then they asked what would happen if a whole string of brothers died and then the wife just kept getting passed on from brother to brother until they each had this woman as their wife for a time. When they all met up again in this “supposed” afterlife? Whose wife would she be? And they thought they had Jesus cornered in an unanswerable hypothetical scenario that they had produced from their intellectual brilliance. Listen to how Jesus responds:
29 But Jesus answered them, “You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God.
Wow! Talk about a direct answer and rebuke. They thought themselves so smart because they were formally educated and they could talk Torah with the best and brightest intellectuals and Jesus just flat out says…you don’t really know what your are talking about when it comes to these things. You are applying earthly boundaries to heavenly things and it doesn’t work that way. So He goes on to use Scripture to explain how things are when it comes to heaven, marriage and eternal life.
And then it says in verse 33
33 And when the crowd heard it, they were astonished at his teaching.
But the crowd was not the only ones listening because we read in verse 34
34 But when the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together.
Unlike the Sadduccees, the Pharisees were very careful to obey the law of God…(whenever someone was looking)…and they believed that their virtuous life would bring them the best set up in the after life because of how great they were at obeying the law here on earth. Of course that meant that they needed to serve as the morality police and remind everyone else how they did not nor could not measure up to the rank of “Pharisee”. So one of them decided to test Jesus...
35 And one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?”
These men were always arguing over which commandment was greatest because they wanted to be the greatest at excelling at the greatest commandment which would make them the greatest. And so Jesus gives them his view on the greatest commandments and it was not what they were expecting...
37 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. 38 This is the great and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. 40 On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Don’t misunderstand what is happening here, Jesus is not replacing the Old Testament Laws that these Pharisees loved to argue over, He is just saying that their focus is all wrong when it comes to why they obeyed the laws they obeyed.
The Pharisees kept careful track of the boundaries of the law in order to show themselves to be powerful and important and Jesus is saying that is the wrong motivation to obey God’s law. Everything written in the Law and everything spoken by the prophets was given so that we could learn how to love God with everything we have and how to love our neighbor like we already do ourselves.
In these verses we find two of our 5 or our ministry methods...
“You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.” (Worship /Rejoicing)
“You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Service/Serving)
(If you are filling out your note page…this would be a good time to fill in some blanks)
And then the second “Great” passage is what we often call
2. The Great Commission
2. The Great Commission
We have talked about this often this past Summer and we will be again as we move into our series on the early Church in a couple of weeks so I won’t spend a lot of time on it again this morning...
but just to help us remember this is after Jesus accomplished his mission to live his perfect life, die in our place and then rise again and appear to hundreds of people. The Gospel of Matthew ends with these words...
18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
So along with the two in the “Great Commandment” we have the other three here in the “Great Commission”.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, (Evangelism/ Proclaiming)
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, (Fellowship/Partnership) where someone publically aligns themselves with Christ and His Church.
teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you (Discipleship/Growing) in our knowledge of and obedience to Jesus as our King.
So we didn’t just sit down and think…hmmm…I wonder what we should be doing as a Church? No, we take our Mission directly from the Great words of Jesus.
And these things are not entirely unique to us as a Church, many Christian Churches use similar if not the same language. If you were a part of our Teen Ministry Meeting last Sunday then you heard about how I learned that these same 5 ministry areas are essential even back in my youth pastor days.
And since last week we spent the whole message on the idea of Partnership, I won’t tackle that again you can go online and watch or listen to that if you wonder how that works... but with the time we have left this morning I am going to handle just one more of our 5 and then we will spend next week handling the last three.
So first of all…Our mission is to Communicate by:
Proclaiming the life-giving message of Jesus Christ (Gospel)
Proclaiming the life-giving message of Jesus Christ (Gospel)
This might be the most recognizable form of “Communication” out of the five. To just proclaim the life giving message of Jesus Christ.
We typically call this “Evangelism”, and as important as “Evangelism” is…did you know that this word is not in our English Bibles. The closest that we get to it is the three times when the Bible calls an individual an “evangelist” but the word evangelism is not in there.
So where do we get this word “Evangelism”? Well take a look at the Greek word that is repeatedly translated “Gospel” in our English Bibles. What does that look like to you? In fact it is pronounced
εὐαγγέλιον (e-van-gelion) def: gospel; good news; message of God’s salvation
εὐαγγελίζω (e-van-gel-eezo) def: to proclaim good news, to proclaim the gospel
The English word gospel is derived from the Anglo-Saxon term “god-spell”, meaning “good story,” “good news” or “good telling.” which is what the word evangelism menas
But as I said, the word “evangelism” is not in our English Bibles, but the word “evangelist” is, if only in three places. In Acts 21 we can read of Phillip the Evangelist and in 2 Tim 4 we can read where Paul is encouraging Timothy to be an evangelist and lastly it is found in Paul’s letter to the Church in Ephesus where he has it in a list of positions that God gave to some people in the Church. He says there:
11 And he gave the apostles, the prophets, the evangelists, the shepherds and teachers, 12 to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,
What is interesting to me is that in all three of these places it sounds like this “evangelist” gig is not exactly for all the saints but just for a few of them. Phillip was called to be one, so was Timothy but is there a Biblical call for every one of the Saints to also be an “evangelist”? We wouldn’t say that about these other roles of “apostles, prophets, shepherds or teachers.
I do believe that God gifts certain individuals with a special gift and passion for evangelism that not all people have, but I don’t think that means that the rest of us have to miss out. We may not be called to be the kind of evangelists that packs out a football stadium or can seamlessly walk up to strangers on street corners, but every believer has been called to be prepared to give an answer to someone who asks us about our faith.
1 Peter 3:15 says
15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,
There may be people in your life that you are uniquely positioned to share the good news of Jesus with that the next Billy Graham won’t. They know you. They see you. They watch your reponse and how excited you get about participating in things that are designed to grow your faith in Jesus Christ. Things like going to Church reading your Bible and spending time in prayer. When they see that these thing are important to, even when you think no one else is watching…they will ask.
And so we want to be a Church that shares the message of the Gospel every week here, but we also want you to be prepared to be able to do this to the very best of your ability when that moment comes. So we provide resources like these 6 tabbed Bibles, prompt cards and bracelets where you can walk someone right through God’s plan for salvation using just 5 different colors and words.
We start with our biggest problem...
SIN
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
Sin is a recognition that things are not as they should be in this world. That is not hard for people to see that the way that God made things to be has been tainted and we have contributed to this.
The second word is:
DEATH
23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
One of the biggest things that is wrong with this world is that people die. It is our Sin that earns us death, but Jesus has dealt with death. The grave is now empty for those who trust in Jesus!
LOVE
Why would God do this? Why would He give us this gift - what could possible motivate Him?
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
God has given every one of us a taste of it in how we each experience love from another person. That love may be flawed - in fact it is definitely flawed in some way, but we can all still recognize love..or the lack of love in our situation. This is one of the ways that we carry the image of God with in us. But God’s love is not flawed as ours often is, it is not self-serving but self sacrificing, so that even when we did not deserve it… Christ died for us.
How do we access this free gift of God? The answer to that is by...
FAITH
We receive the free gift of grace through faith. Through trusting and believing in Jesus Christ as our Savior and submitting to Him as our King
8 For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, 9 not a result of works, so that no one may boast.
The last word is
LIFE
9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved.
All of us can be prepared for this kind of response, either by memorizing the Colors, Words and Verses so they are so second nature to us that we can just go off book in conversation and then ground our statements with the Scripture we have memorized or by having these resources at arms reach so that we can always be ready to give an answer for the hope that we have.
In this way we will be “Proclaiming the life-giving message of Jesus Christ”
Gospel Application
And the beauty in all of this guys is that we really cannot get this wrong. We are only responsible to Communicate the message, we are not responsible for how they respond to it. That is above our pay grade. That is God’s job not ours. The only way we can get it wrong is if we are not honest about how the good news of Jesus Christ is good news for you. Is it truly “Good News” to you or is it just “news”.
That would not be Evangelism, but just relaying information without the transformation power of God working through you. But if you simply share what you know of the good news of Jesus because it has captivated and transformed you then you can’t do it wrong.
Just tell them how the Grave is empty for you because you are trusting Jesus to rescue you as your Savior and you have given him your allegiance as your King because He has conquered death on your behalf.
Landing
Let me close with these closing verses from Romans
13 For “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.” 14 But how can they call on him to save them unless they believe in him? And how can they believe in him if they have never heard about him? And how can they hear about him unless someone tells them? 15 And how will anyone go and tell them without being sent? That is why the Scriptures say, “How beautiful are the feet of messengers who bring good news!” 16 But not everyone welcomes the Good News, for Isaiah the prophet said, “Lord, who has believed our message?” 17 So faith comes from hearing, that is, hearing the Good News about Christ.
The only way to come to faith is through hearing the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ as the crucified and risen Savior
