Our Purpose - Week 5

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Good morning, everyone. Good morning, big guy. It's the baptism guy, right? Actually, I'm a mission guy.

The baptism is just a perk of the job, and I love doing those. But even this summer, I got to teach them VPS and do some missions with the little ones that are in their VBS. And one of the kids went home and was trying to explain to his mom like that I was there. Like, oh, you know the guy looks kind of like dad.

And he's always saying, missions, missions, missions. And that was me. I'm the missions, missions, missions guy. So I've been so excited as soon as the series announced, and I saw that we're doing our purposes and its salvation.

Family, freedom, growth mission. I was like, oh, I hope I get to do week five. And by the grace of God and pastor Clint. I get to.

So I'm so excited to be here. So excited to be doing this. And I've been dwelling on this message. And just to quote my leader, my pastor, my friend.

I have so many notes. But let's pray. Heavenly Father, we just pray over this time, over this message, over this word that your word would go forth. That you would soften hearts, that you would open minds.

That you would make us like putty in your hands, Lord, to be shaped and molded into the vessels, to accomplish the things that you have set before us. That you have plans and purposes. And you have plans and purposes for us as well. Amen.

Amen. I know this maybe isn't the exciting week for a lot of you. And a lot of ways this can feel like, oh, I got all these amazing things from the Lord. I get salvation.

I get family. I get freedom. I get growth. And then, oh, now I got to do something in return.

Now it's like time to pay the piper. That he's not all this for me. Now what can I do for him to repay the favor for all those things? But that is not the heart of mission at all.

We really want mission to be this joyful expression. It's not something we have to do. This is something that we get to do. And it can be scary.

And what I really want to do this morning is answer three objections that you might have. Just as soon as you hear the word mission, I really fear that some of you just check out as soon as you knew that that was the topic today and be like, that part of this is not for me. But that is not at all true. You may say, I'm not qualified.

I'm not ready. Or, honestly, I'm not interested. And so this morning we're going to address all those. Beginning with this, this disqualified, the disqualified, the discounted, the discouraged.

It's often said that God doesn't call the qualified. He qualifies the called. And we see this again and again throughout scripture. We have a man that said, who am I?

What if they don't listen to me? I am slow of speech and tongue. This man was a murderer who was not a good speaker. The Lord used him to become his mouthpiece, to become a prophet, to free an entire people from enslavement.

Another man said, my clan is the weakest, and I am the least in my family. It's like big, middle child energy. But God used this man. He made him a general.

And he made him a hero. And then the one son that wasn't even considered is they were wanting to anoint a new king. And they put together this family. And they brought all the sons.

And they just forgot one invitation. They didn't even invite the youngest son to be evaluated, to be prayed over, to be anointed or even considered for the position. After this, this man did become king, one of our greatest kings that we've ever seen in history. And it was called a man after God's own heart.

Of course, I'm talking about Moses and Gideon and David and scripture, getting those stories we see it. And it's so clear in 1 Corinthians 1, 26, brothers and sisters, think of what you were when you were called. Not many of you are wise by human standards. Not many were influential.

Not many were of noble birth. But God chose the foolish things of this world to shame the wise. God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. God chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things and the things that are not to nullify the things that are.

Said that no one made those before him. It is because of him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us the wisdom from God, that is our righteousness, holiness, and redemption. Therefore, as it is written, let the one who boast, boast, in the Lord. His strength is made perfect in our weakness.

Hallelujah. The weaker you are, the more useful you are to the Lord. In T. Wright, one of my favorites says, when God wants to change the world, he doesn't send him the tanks.

He sends in the meek, the mourners, the merciful, and the peacemakers. Amen. So whether you've disqualified yourself in word or indeed, or others have spoken things over you that have said that you're not good enough, if the enemy's been whispering those lies into your ear, I just again want to reiterate that you are qualified. If you are in this family, and I don't just mean like Mission Church, but if you're in the family of God, you are called on this mission, God's mission with us.

And you say, that's great, but I'm just not ready. I'm not there yet. I'm not developed enough to be doing any type of mission with God. I mentioned baptism.

So he's been enjoying the baptism over the last few months. Like, you probably don't know if you can tell or not. I'm not going to cry a lot in those baptisms. In a lot of it's the testimony, in the stories that they tell and the power that there is, in the testimony that God's written on these people's lives, the ways that he's transforming them.

And some of the most powerful testimonies we get are the super fresh ones. The ones where they're like, I gave my life to the Lord two weeks ago or three weeks ago or last month. And there's already so much power, sometimes even more power, in those fresh testimonies. And we see that throughout scripture even God just calls these people out maybe sooner than others where how young the disciples were all those things.

But I think a lot of times it's just our natural inclination is Westerners when we see this list of salvation, family, freedom, growth, and mission. We almost see it as a process because we're a people of process. That's how we understand things. Like step one, salvation.

Step two is family. OK, they'll become part of the family once I'm in there. Then I'll start finding freedom. Then I'll start to grow.

And then when I've done all those things, I can go on mission. And this can be the case. It's usually not so cut and dry. We're complicated people.

We don't always do things in order. And we are a people of process, but we serve a relational God. So I just want to take some time to look at all five of these from a different land. So look at them instead of as a process, as steps to becoming something as relationships.

And how we're transformed in the way that we have relationships. Salvation is very clearly our relationship with our creator. The most important relationship with the way we have. So yes, this should be where we start.

Romans 5, 10 through 11 says, for if why were God's enemies, we were reconciled to him through the death of his son? How much more having been reconciled shall we be saved through his life? Salvation opens the door of relationship with our creator. It allows us, as Pastor Clem said, to have full access to that God of the universe.

That we can worship him. We can spend time with him. We can be with him. And it's completely transformed from when we were lost.

Centers to when we're saved by the grace of Jesus. We can have that relationship. Family. Our family represents our relationship with the family of God.

That's what we're talking about when we say family. We're not just talking about family ministry, but we're saying that when you can become saved, when you enter into the body of Christ, you become a part of this family. Ephesians 2 19 says, So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you're fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God. Some of us didn't have great families growing up.

And then when we enter into this kingdom thing, it takes a little adjustment time to know that we have brothers and sisters in Christ. We get a new family. It's such a blessing from the Lord. It clearly represents family.

Of course, the first thing we think of is relationship. Freedom. This signifies our relationship with our past. It is for freedom that Christ has set us free.

Stand firm then and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery. This changes our relationship with our sin, with our flesh and with the enemy. As we leave those things behind, we have a new relationship with the enemy. He's our adversary, not just tearing us down, not just tormenting us, but when we resist the devil, he will flee.

That relationship is completely different when we're in the body of Christ. Growth, Colossians 110. Then the way you live will always honor and please the Lord, and your lives will produce every kind of good fruit. All the while you were grown, as you learned to know God better and better.

This is our relationship with ourselves. And this dramatically changes. We enter into the body of Christ as we drink that spiritual milk and graduate onto the meter of things of the Lord. We grow and stature spiritually.

I think we've all seen that. We all have lost friends that have never entered into the kingdom and they're not much different than they were in high school. You don't see a lot of growth in them. You don't see a lot of development in them.

I know that I'm a different person because of the grace of God, because of that spiritual milk that I've been partaking of for decades now. Mission, our relationship with the world. How then can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard?

And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can anyone preach unless they are sent? As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. We have a new relationship with the world.

We have a responsibility. We have a mission to not just be blessed, but to be a blessing. To not just have a testimony, but to share a testimony to encourage others that see them come in to the kingdom of God. Now that we've looked at these in a little bit different of an order, that it's not necessarily processed with relationships, I can do what I do a lot of times and mix things up and do them a little bit out of order and talk about them in a different way.

And of course, I'm preaching on mission. So I want mission to be the focus and just keeping in mind that not only is mission the end goal, but maybe it's what helps you unlock something in the other four relationships. Over 20 years ago, I started coming to Life Mission Church. Do you ever say something?

You're like, wow, that makes me sound really old. You said that. Just this week, I was in the office and care of my coordinator. She goes, you know, when you say something that makes you sound old, it makes me sad.

And I said, I don't care if you think I love the egg salad sandwich at Gallagher's Coffee House. And that's what I said that makes you sad. So we're all getting older, right? When I first started coming here, I don't know if you've heard my story, but I was, I'd grown up in the church but I'd walk away from him.

I had claimed to be an agnostic at the time and I was living that lifestyle just in the sin. And I came to church for all the wrong reasons. And God used a lot of these things to stir things in my life. But again, I tend to do things backward even in my role as a mission pastor.

Mostly what I'm teaching people is to do what I didn't do. Like, don't do what I did. Learn from my mistakes. That's kind of a message that's pretty common for me.

And even in this, there's a little backwards in that I was receiving the word and salvation opportunities and people were speaking to my life and the family was incredible. And I was already starting to experience some element of freedom, but I hadn't take that leap to recommit my life to Jesus. And one of the big things that did it for me is two, two men that I knew. So we would just have fun together.

And I'd actually stopped drinking at this time, but he called me late when I was on my home for work. And he said, Jacob, can you come over? And I was like, yeah, it's pretty late. I have to be working early.

I'm not really drinking anymore. And he goes, oh, it's not like that. And I was like, oh, what do you mean? And he said, I need to be saved, but I've never said a prayer before.

And he's like, I need you to come and teach me how to pray. And so the seeker agnostic, Jacob, goes over to his house, grew up in church. I lead him through the Romans road, verse by verse. And I lead him through the same prayer.

This is not a formula for how you should do things. Learn from Pastor Jacob's mistakes. The next week, literally, this was in weeks of each other. A guy at work says, and we're still in the old building.

This was over 20 years ago. He says, hey, where do you go to church? He just asked me. And I told him where I went to church.

And then that Sunday, they were crowded over there, almost standing room only. It's hard to get in and out. And I see his bald head, the white shining off of it as he comes forward at the altar call. And I was just in this weird place in life where I went to him on Monday.

And I said, Antonio, did you go to my church? Indignant. I was weird. And he said, yeah.

And then I was like, did you give your life to the Lord? And he said, yeah. He's so excited. He can't even see that I'm being a jerk, which is good.

It's good. Great to God, right? And so same thing. Both these guys are said, hey, we're saved now.

We know you know the Bible. You come teach me the Bible. They want to start a Bible study. So I did what you do.

I made a meeting with Pastor Steve. And in that meeting, Pastor Steve does what he does. He asked me a bunch of annoying questions. And then I ended up going home and rededicating my life to the Lord that night.

And so it was backwards, right? I didn't get saved and then worked my way up to mission. I was on mission. I didn't choose.

I didn't volunteer. And that led me to my point of salvation. God is good. And just thinking about that relationship, when we think about the people we love most, the ones we hold most dearly, we can picture their face or whatever it is.

But when I say that, picture the one person that really just means the most to you in the world. You might just see their face. You might see you're just sitting on the couch. But there's a good chance that you see an activity.

You see a teacher teaching you art, your coach showing you how to box out, or a mom teaching you how to cook. You how to activities with the people that you love. And that there's almost no greater way to build relationship with people than to do something with them. To do the thing that they love to do and begin to love it yourself.

And we see this just again, like well, then the people we love, whether you're married or your parents, you tend to love the teams that they love and love doing the things that they do. And God does love to do the things that you love to do. But in any healthy relationship, you should reciprocate. And I promise you, the things that God loves to do are so much better than the things you love to do.

They're better than golf. They're better than baking sourdough. They're good. But there are more rewarding things in this world.

And if we can go along with our father and see what he's doing and do them with us, we're going to grow so much more. Family, this again can be an obvious one. Like if you've ever done a mission trip with our short term outreach, wow, wow, that was awesome. And you've experienced this when you go on mission with people.

And it could just be serving in the coffee bar. It could be serving in life mission kids. But you bond with those people at a different level. We see this in the military.

Even as they go on mission, they are bonded to those people at a different level. And we live in the kingdom of God. We also live in another kingdom. Let's see some right on.

Representing the cheesecake. And we understand this. We understand that relationship. Even as we were missionaries, I remember getting so excited when I would just see someone like in a KU jersey or something.

And this instantaneous bond, like, oh, I love this person. I don't know them. I don't know their name. But I'm going to go talk to them.

And we have something common we can speak about. I got twice as excited one time. I was in the airport in Kentucky. It just got bounced out of the tournament early.

And it was like that week. And I was so excited to go talk to that guy too. But for different, less godly reasons. And we can be passionate about the cheese.

But when we think about it, a lot of times we see people being more passionate about the chiefs than they are, God's kingdom. You don't hesitate to spend your time or your money or your energy on the chiefs. It's not a tough decision. No one has to twist your arm.

You're excited to do it. You're excited to scream until you can't talk the next week. And is it because we love Patrick Mahomes more than we love God? No.

No, I don't think anyone would admit that. Is it because we're more excited about a super bowl than we are the return of Christ? No. I would say it's because we are more engaged and interested in the mission.

That we are so excited about that game and we feel like we're apart, whether it's screaming or wearing your lucky chiefs underwear or sitting on the right seat in the couch. And we think we have an impact on that game. You don't. Just so you know.

And then we can have the opposite mentality with Jesus. We're like, do our prayers matter? They do. Those are giving matter.

It does. Those are going matter. It does. Freedom.

Pastor Clint said, true freedom is not about what we are free from. It is about what we are free to do. I think a lot of us are walking around like dogs that don't realize that we're off leash. That the chain's been broken.

We've been conditioned our whole lives when we lived under that yoke of slavery of sin that we got so used to it that even though it's been thrown off, we still walk around with that weight. We still walk around like we only have so much chain before we get jerked back. But freedom in a lot of ways is a little different in that. And then the growth I want to like contrast it there specifically.

Like Jesus isn't slowly doling out freedom to you. Little bits at a time. You have freedom. The work is almost always in ourselves and in our mindset.

And scripture says to be transformed by the renewing of your mind. And it's just realizing that I am not on that chain anymore. Like the enemy has been thrown off, he's been cut off. But we need to walk in our freedom in one of the best ways we can walk in that freedom is to go on mission.

Freedom multiplies. You are blessed to be a blessing. Our testimony is hope to those that are still enslaved. Broke, this is the, I think probably the most obvious one.

Like a princess in his workshop, we will grow. We will learn by doing, in fact, according to the national training laboratories, you learn more by doing it in almost any other way. So if I were to demonstrate something to you, you are two and a half times, you're going to learn two and a half times faster and better by doing it yourself than watching me do it. If you were to read something as opposed to doing it, you're seven and a half times more effective in your learning and you're growing by doing it yourself and just to read about it.

Here's the kicker from the guy speaking a lecture. If you're to listen to a lecture or just hearing about it, hearing about mission, hearing about growth, you will learn 15 times more about being on mission than listening to me today. 15 times more effective to do it than to just hear about it. That means that if you go and serve at Kansas City Dream Center for half a day, you'll get 100 times more out of it than the 30 minutes you have with me this morning.

Amen? And then if you go on an eight day, 10 day mission trip, like, you might take my job. It'll be amazing. I'm not interested.

You might not say this to the pastor, Jacob, the mission pastor, but I know something you think it. You have these objections in your heart. It's not what I'm called to. I'm passionate about this.

There's so much need here. But it's not, it's really not optional. And honestly, if you came to life, mission, church, you're probably in the wrong place. And it's not our fault.

We put it on the sign as we drove in. It's hard to miss. It is our vision to see lives and communities transformed by revealing God's presence and purpose. That's our vision.

But even more important is God's vision. Isaiah 6, 3 says, the seraphim cry, holy, holy, holy is the Lord almighty. The whole earth is full of his glory. In Numbers it says that surely as I live the whole earth we'd be filled with the glory of the Lord.

Psalms says, made the whole earth be filled with his glory, amen, and amen. God has a vision for creation. And he reiterates it throughout scripture to see the earth filled with his glory and revelation. We see in the end every tongue, tribe, nation, praising his name.

This is his vision. What he is working towards all of our purposes, our mission statement, our mission is to that aim, to see lives and communities transformed by revealing God's presence and purpose so that the whole earth would be filled with his glory. The mission can be flexible. There can be different missions that point to the same thing.

But the vision is immovable. And whether it's this church or your company or your business or your family, some families have a vision statement, everything should be pointed at that vision. And different missions can get you there, but the vision stays the same. We can see this throughout scripture.

Again, through three men, the first Adam and Genesis 128. God commands humanity to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Again, to fill the earth with his glory. Abraham and Genesis 12, 2 says, I will make you into a great nation and I'll bless you.

I'll make your name great and you'll be a blessing. Bless to be a blessing to all nations. And finally, disciples, and us in Matthew 28, 19. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and the Holy Spirit.

And teach them to be everything I've commanded you. And surely I'm with you always through the very end of the age. This is a vision of multiplication without limits. This is his vision and his mission through his disciples.

We are now instruments of serving in this mission to see his vision come to pass. St. Augustine said, you are the body of Christ. In you and through you, the work of the incarnation must go forward.

You are to be taken. You are to be blessed, broken, and distributed. That you may be the means of grace and vehicles of the eternal charity. You are his hands and feet.

You are who he's chosen to do his mission to accomplish his vision. This is for everyone. Again, that lack of interest. It could be birthed out of even the one I hear from time to time.

Why do we go to the nations when there's so much need here? My notes say, don't be snarky. I wrote that note to myself. It is my inclination to roll my eyes.

Again, it is a question I answer a lot. I've seen poverty. I've lived poverty in America. I've experienced homelessness.

I've been hungry in America. I've been to Skid Row. I've been to the homeless Kansas City. There's poverty here.

I don't want to deny that. I'm not saying we're going to forsake that at all by any stretch of the imagination. But when we moved to the Horn of Africa as a family, we immediately got this picture that there's just a difference. We were there two years after famine in the Horn of Africa where 258,000 people over the course of the year started to death.

Half of them under the age of five. An unimaginable level of poverty. That even today, when we're not in a global famine, 26,000 people die every day from starvation or a treatable disease. And I would wager really close to zero of them are in America.

Not just physical need, but spiritual need. Many of these are dying without any reasonable access to the gospel. 43% of the world's population are 3.57 billion people, have no churches, no scriptures, no Christians to share with them. That's such a big number.

One concept we work on in missions we talk about sometimes is the percubals versus the finishable. That's to say that there's a degree of there's things that we can chase after, but we have a hard time visualizing them. There's things that we know that we can get done. Sharing the gospel with 3.57 billion unreached people is unimaginably high number.

And it's impossible for other logistical reasons as well, because some of those people will pass away today. And new ones will be born tomorrow. It's this endless goal that not just globally, but even in our city and in our country, there's always more people to share the gospel with. And there's a limited time frame to do it in.

But what we can do, a finishable objective, is there's 7,662 unreached people groups. So they live in a place they have a language. We can't plan a church as the global body of Christ in each one of these. We can get the gospel to them and trust the Lord to bring the increase.

It is a steady target, isn't it? A achievable target. Scripture, there's 7,100 languages in the world. And we've been working a lot on Bible translation over the last five or six years.

And now they're saying by the year 2033, we're going to have God's Word almost completely in every single language in the world. How will we have? This is why we have a priority on the unreached and on the finishable. It's not at the expense of the others.

But in this next year, I know it seems we're not too qualified to be in the year, but we're planning budgets and calendars. And we're so excited that we're going to be seeing more local efforts with our partners right here in our city. And I want you to be a part of those. We're seeing we're going to start doing national trips or trips within the US to minister to our country, our Judea as it was in a great condition.

And we're going to start sending teams of people to unreached places in a way we never had before. We're so excited for those things. But we need you for each and every one of those. And so they're playing.

So I've got to wrap up. A lot of you will pray for the Chiefs today. I just want to take some time. Today has just happened to be, again, orchestrated by the Lord of the Today is the National Day of Prayer for the Persecutive Church.

And so this is in these places that we're talking about, the ones where there's very little to no gospel, there's no churches. But there tends to be some believers there. And if there is in a lot of these parts of the world, they're heavily persecuted by the government, by their families, by communities, by religious leaders. It can look like a lot of different things.

We have a lobby table out there with lots of materials, a prayer guide to begin praying for the Persecutive Church to stand shoulder to shoulder with our brothers and sisters all over the world that have counted the cost. And their biggest struggles aren't comfort but condemnation of being persecuted, being beaten, in prison, and even murder. So this morning I want to take some time before we go off to do that together, not to just listen to me, but to join your prayers with mine as we pray for these incredible saints in these difficult places in the world. So when we follow, we thank you.

We thank you that you go before us and beside us and behind us and there's nowhere that you're not at work already. We pray for the dreams and the visions that you've already given and the faithful, the missionaries that have gone out to these difficult places and the churches that have been planted and the believers that have been baptized. And we just rejoiced in those things and we thank you for each and every one of those. We pray that these believers would remain faithful and bold in their witness.

You told us to rejoice in our persecuted Lord and that's still hard for us to even imagine. But we know you use our persecution to further your kingdom. We pray that the light of Christ shines through them in these dark places and draws many into your kingdom. We pray for the global Persecutive Church to be strengthened and used for God's glory.

In Jesus name, amen. What a wonderful message and reminder and challenge for our hearts today. In Life Mission Church, everyone has an opportunity to participate as the Lord leads. I was on staff seven years.

I was exhausted with so many opportunities. But remember this, the disciples in the upper room confused, frightened, seemingly lost. And Jesus appears. His first words are peace be with you.

When you hear the message of missions, remember it says peace, peace. I'm not trying to put you on the spot. I'm not trying to make you do something. You're not able to do.

He says peace. And then it says, and he said again to them, peace be with you. This is in John 20. Peace be with you.

As the Father sent me, so I sinned. I want to ask him. I want to close in prayer. So I just want you to stand with me.

I want to bless you. And I want to pray because I've been involved in missions since last millennium. And I taught back many years ago that we all are called to go, to grow, to groan, and to give. So we're all part of missions in whatever way.

And I've got stories for every one of them. So you have a means. You have an opportunity to step into what God's called you to do. And that was a challenge today, Pastor Jacob did a wonderful job.

I'm so glad he's a missions pastor. And that this is his heart. I know I've worked with a lot. This is his heart.

He's missions, missions, missions. But God, this is our middle name, right? So we want to find out how we fit in to God's great call. He has a place for you.

So Father, I pray that we would respond, first of all, with peace that you give us. Not peace like the world gives, but peace that comes from you. And that we would respond to your command that, as the Father sent me, so I sinned you, would help us to be aware of the opportunities right in front of us to respond in obedience by the anointing of the Holy Spirit to be a witness for you. So Lord, I just bless your people with a spirit of wisdom and revelation, a desire to hear and to obey.

So the Lord bless you, the Lord keep you, Lord be gracious unto you, and give you that peace. In Jesus' name, if you want to say amen. Amen, God bless you. Thank you for tuning in to Life Mission Church.

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