This weekend we kickoff our series, Living Life on Mission. This series is based on a book, written by Tim Harlow, you can purchase for $5 at our welcome center. For the next 6 weeks, our small groups will tackle “what” living our life on mission looks like.
Today I want to talk about making your life matter. Suppose you were reading the classifieds, and saw an ad: “Account executive needed, minimum five years’ experience, must have knowledge of the industry. Come work for a fantastic, fast growing company with great pay and great benefits.” Would you call the number? [source: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek, Kindel E-book, Location 1324.]
Early in the Twentieth century, the English adventurer Ernest Shackleton set out to explore the Antarctic. Shackleton described the Antarctic as “one of the last unknown fields in the world still unconquered.” His plan was to cross the entire south polar continent. He would begin at the frigid Weddell Sea (below South America), and end across the pole at the Ross Sea (below New Zealand). In his own words, the 1700 mile expedition would be “the biggest polar journey ever attempted.”
On December 5, 1914, Schakleton and crew of 27 men set out on their journey. But the crew never reached Antarctica. Their ship became trapped in ice. The pressure of the massive ice floes smashed their 350 ton ship like a walnut in a nutcracker. The crew watched in horror as their ship sank in the frigid waters of the Weddell Sea.
But these weren’t ordinary men. They boarded their three lifeboats and took refuge on a small island. Shakleton left behind all his men but five, and braved 800 miles of rough seas to find help. Not a single man died. Nobody ate anybody. And nobody committed mutiny! [source: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek, Kindel E-book, Location 1299.]
You might wonder, how did Shackleton find such extraordinary men? Simple. He ran an ad on Springfield-Help-Wanted.com of course! Actually he ran an ad in a New York Paper that read: “Men wanted for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in case of success.”
Nothing against being an account executive… but something tells us there is more to life than “great pay and benefits.”
One of my favorite Bible passages talks about power of God’s grace to save us. But “why” does God saves us? Ephesians 2:10 says: “For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works which God prepared in advance for us to do.” God has hard wired us to do good works, to live life on mission! And that means we won’t be very satisfied until we begin doing what he’s prepared for us to do.
A question we need to ask is, “Are we looking for something nice and safe? Or, do we have courage to discover what those great works of eternal destiny might be?”
Jesus Ate Mission for Breakfast
I was reading in John 4:34 where Jesus says, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to finish his work.” All I can say about this verse is that Jesus ate mission for breakfast, ate mission for lunch, ate mission for dinner… He was animated by this tremendous sense of mission. He began his public ministry inviting Peter, James, John to become “fishers of men.” He ended his public ministry the same. Reminding his disciples that our mission is people.
In Matthew 28:18-20 Jesus says, “Go and make disciples of all the nations…” The Greek word for nations relates to cultures, ethnic groups, people groups. Do you realize the extent to which the world population has exploded in recent years? Your life will never be short on significance because the world will never be short of people!
But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Consider Jesus’ final words to his disciples in Acts 1:8, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
It’s true that there is a worldwide scope to the mission of Jesus. I don’t know that any missionaries go to Antarctica, but they do go to the Southernmost tip of New Zealand, South America! Wherever people are to be found, there you’ll find the mission of Jesus. Jesus’ mission is for every culture, every people group. . . every tribe, tongue, and nation. In Matthew 24:14 Jesus promised, “And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
But notice where Jesus says our mission begins. It doesn’t begin half-way across the world. It begins right where we are. The apostles were “in Jerusalem.” And Jesus commanded them to start living on mission from where they were already planted. We’re the wealthiest nation on earth. Our nation has done more to fund the worldwide mission of the church than any other. But we gotta take care of business in our backyard as well. The mission starts in our neighborhood. And there is no more relevant question than “Do you know your neighbor?”
One reason Jesus was always on mission is because there are people everywhere. Everywhere he went, there was a life that needed to be touched. In John 4:35 Jesus admonition to his disciples is they only needed to open their eyes, and look at the vast fields, that are ripe for harvest. Relationships—that’s where our search for significance begins and ends. There are good works God has prepared for us to do.
This week I want to get you thinking about why mission matters.
Mission Matters because People Need Real Truth
A few weeks ago I finished reading a book called “The Magic of Reality” by Richard Dawkins. The premise of his book is that we can only know what is real in one of three ways. (a) We can detect things directly with our five senses, (b) We can detect things indirectly, using special instrumentals such a telescopes or microscopes, or (c) we can detect things by creating models of what may be real, and then testing these models, to see if they successfully predict and make sense of all we see.
Dawkins would say we have absolutely no reason to accept “supernatural” explanations for life. . . The “magic” of reality only appears to be “magic.” There is a natural, scientific explanation for how everything came into existence even if were too lazy to try and explore it. I’m not going to take on Richard Dawkins this morning!
Let me just make this observation… from the youngest age the same message gets drilled into people’s heads… “there isn’t a creator, there isn’t a good God, there isn’t a great God, there is no God, there is only eternal matter, all of creation has been shaped and formed by irrational, impersonal forces of nature, there is no eternal purpose, no greater meaning to life than what you make of it yourself, there is no such thing as good or evil (not in the ultimate sense)… on and on it goes folks!”
I’m not going to pretend it’s easy to respond. But it’s our most pressing opportunity to stand in the gap, and hold out the truth of God to people who are walking in darkness. You can think of the Word of God as a “model of truth.” The Bible presents a model, it proposes what is true about God and true about Life. We can take a model and test it, and by faith, apply it to our lives, and see if it makes sense out of everything we experience. Jesus held out the words of life to his disciples—he helped them make sense of life based upon his knowledge of God. We know the word of God is true because we’ve tested it, because it’s been our salvation a thousand times over. But now we must convey knowledge of God to others… this is our mission.
Mission Matters because People Need Real Grace
The first four books of the New Testament present Jesus’ life, his ministry, his relationships, even his conversations in stunning detail. Jesus wasn’t just sharing truth about God in relationships… he extended real grace, real love, real forgiveness, mercy…
I don’t think we can understate how offended, how angry, or how hateful people are becoming. When a person fails… doesn’t measure up… isn’t good enough… commits a crime… struggles with addiction… aborts a child… struggles w/gender identity… has a different skin color… associates w/the wrong people… has a disease or disability… comes from a different culture… practice a different religion… It’s simple. Jesus opened his arms to help people find their way back to the Father.
In his Book, What’s So Amazing About Grace, Phillip Yancey shares a modern version of the Parable of the Prodigal Son.
A young girl grows up on a cherry orchard just above Traverse City, Michigan. Her parents, a bit old-fashioned, tend to overreact to her nose ring, the music she listens to, and the length of her skirts. They ground her a few times, and she seethes inside. “I hate you!” she screams at her father when he knocks on the door of her room after an argument, and that night she acts on a plan she has mentally rehearsed scores of times. She runs away.
She has visited Detroit only once before, on a bus trip with her church youth group to watch the Tigers play. Because newspapers in Traverse City report in lurid detail the gangs, the drugs, and the violence in downtown Detroit, she concludes that is probably the last place her parents will look for her. California, maybe, or Florida, but not Detroit.
Her second day there she meets a man who drives the biggest car she’s ever seen. He offers her a ride, buys her lunch, arranges a place for her to stay. He gives her some pills that make her feel better than she’s ever felt before. She was right all along, she decides: her parents were keeping her from all the fun.
The good life continues for a month, two months, a year. The man with the big car—she calls him “Boss”— teaches her a few things that men like. Since she’s underage, men pay a premium for her. She lives in a penthouse, and orders room service whenever she wants. Occasionally she thinks about the folks back home, but their lives now seem so boring that she can hardly believe she grew up there.
She has a brief scare when she sees her picture printed on the back of a milk carton with the headline “Have you seen this child?” But by now she has blond hair, and with all the makeup and body-piercing jewelry she wears, nobody would mistake her for a child. Besides, most of her friends are runaways, and nobody squeals in Detroit.
After a year the first signs of illness appear, and it amazes her how fast the boss turns mean. “These days, we can’t mess around,” he growls, and before she knows it she’s out on the street without a penny to her name. She still turns a couple of tricks a night, but they don’t pay much, and all the money goes to support her habit.
When winter blows in she finds herself sleeping on metal grates outside the big department stores. “Sleeping” is the wrong word— a teenage girl at night in downtown Detroit can never relax her guard. Dark bands circle her eyes. Her cough worsens.
One night as she lies awake listening for footsteps, all of a sudden everything about her life looks different. She no longer feels like a woman of the world. She feels like a little girl, lost in a cold and frightening city. She begins to whimper. Her pockets are empty and she’s hungry. She needs a fix. She pulls her legs tight underneath her and shivers under the newspapers she’s piled atop her coat. Something jolts a synapse of memory and a single image fills her mind: of May in Traverse City, when a million cherry trees bloom at once, with her golden retriever dashing through the rows and rows of blossomy trees in chase of a tennis ball.
“God, why did I leave,” she says to herself, and pain stabs at her heart. My dog back home eats better than I do now. She’s sobbing, and she knows in a flash that more than anything else in the world she wants to go home.
Three straight phone calls, three straight connections with the answering machine. She hangs up without leaving a message the first two times, but the third time she says, “Dad, Mom, it’s me. I was wondering about maybe coming home. I’m catching a bus up your way, and it’ll get there about midnight tomorrow. If you’re not there, well, I guess I’ll just stay on the bus until it hits Canada.”
It takes about seven hours for a bus to make all the stops between Detroit and Traverse City, and during that time she realizes the flaws in her plan. What if her parents are out of town and miss the message? Shouldn’t she have waited another day or so until she could talk to them? And even if they are home, they probably wrote her off as dead long ago. She should have given them some time to overcome the shock.
Her thoughts bounce back and forth between those worries and the speech she is preparing for her father. “Dad, I’m sorry. I know I was wrong. It’s not your fault; it’s all mine. Dad, can you forgive me?” She says the words over and over, her throat tightening even as she rehearses them. She hasn’t apologized to anyone in years.
The bus has been driving with lights on since Bay City. Tiny snowflakes hit the pavement rubbed worn by thousands of tires, and the asphalt steams. She’s forgotten how dark it gets at night out here. A deer darts across the road and the bus swerves. Every so often, a billboard. A sign posting the mileage to Traverse City. “Oh, God.”
When the bus finally rolls into the station, its air brakes hissing in protest, the driver announces in a crackly voice over the microphone, “Fifteen minutes, folks. That’s all we have here.” Fifteen minutes to decide her life. She checks herself in a compact mirror, smoothes her hair, and licks the lipstick off her teeth. She looks at the tobacco stains on her fingertips, and wonders if her parents will notice. If they’re there.
She walks into the terminal not knowing what to expect. Not one of the thousand scenes that have played out in her mind prepare her for what she sees. There, in the concrete-walls-and-plastic-chairs bus terminal in Traverse City, Michigan, stands a group of forty brothers and sisters and great-aunts and uncles and cousins and a grandmother and great-grandmother to boot. They’re all wearing goofy party hats and blowing noise-makers, and taped across the entire wall of the terminal is a computer-generated banner that reads “Welcome home!”
Out of the crowd of well-wishers breaks her dad. She stares out through the tears quivering in her eyes like hot mercury and begins the memorized speech, “Dad, I’m sorry. I know . . .” But he interrupts her. “Hush, child. We’ve got no time for that. No time for apologies . You’ll be late for the party. A banquet’s waiting for you at home.”
Mission matters because people need real truth, and real grace, and they need to know real life is available in God.
Mission Matters because People Need Real Grace
In John 3:16-17 the apostle John summarizes Jesus' Mission a different way. The "WHY" is this: "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him."
Jesus prayed that we might open our eyes and see the opportunities all around us to touch a life for Jesus.