Mission

The mission given to the church by Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, is to go and to make disciples.

Today we are going to conclude this introductory sermon series profiling my favorite things. I hope this has been a little bit fun and helpful to you. I have enjoyed sharing with you some of the things that I like the most. I’ve also enjoyed your feedback on those things I have learned from you who also enjoys jazz and classical and nineties grunge. I have found out about the best breakfast places in town, which is great. Everybody’s come and told me those. And of course soon I shall be able to smoke meat, which is also great. So if you don’t know what I’m talking about, by the way, you’ll have to go back and look at some of the other sermons in the series to learn more.

Today, we’re going to conclude with the doctrine of Scripture that is closest to my heart. It’s an aspect of ministry that drives me more than any other. But before we look at it, let me share with you two other things that I love. They’re both activities, and when I share them with you, you’ll see why I saved these two activities for the final part of this series. The first is fishing. I love to go fishing. It’s one of my favorite things to do. On a beautiful day I can sit out on a lake for hours, both at the beginning of the day and at the end of the day and just enjoy time outside. Mostly I fish for bass, small and large mouth bass. I have also caught plenty of bluegill over the years. I have caught some lake trout and on one very memorable occasion, to my children especially, I caught a catfish. That was that was an exciting moment. Michigan, of course, has many wonderful inland lakes for me to fish on. But now I am in the land of 10,000 lakes and I am so excited to be able to go out on all the many beautiful lakes of Olmstead County! It’s going to be.. hold on a second. I’m getting a call from Kyle Satterblom … What’s up? What? There are no … but it’s the land of 10,000 islands. Well, I think the search team could have told me that. Right? Change of plans.

The second activity that I really very much enjoy is acting. I enjoy stage acting. I’ve been doing that for a long time in my life. Most of my life, I’ve been in dozens of productions over the years. I’ve been in shows on some of the largest stages in theatres in Michigan. Theater is my art. I do not paint, I don’t draw, I cannot sing. So you’ll never see me in a musical. But I really enjoy creating characters. That’s my art. And I have to choose very carefully which shows that I’m in. They’re not all good. I can’t be involved in everything. But I do want to say this: just know that in the future, if you ever come to a show that I’m in, just understand I am not there to simply portray the Christian characters. So it’s a theatre which reflects the brokenness of our world. So if I’m in a murder mystery and I did it, I’m not advocating murder. All right?

I’m looking forward very much to getting to know the theater community here. And my involvement in this community has always been for two reasons. One, because I really enjoy that art form, but also because I want to build relationships with people that may be very far from Jesus. It’s so important for me and for you and for all of us to be involved in the community, not just to simply be around other Christians all the time, but to build those relationships throughout our community so that we can be the missionaries in Christ that we are called to be.

And that’s the doctrine that we’re going to look at today, the doctrine of mission. The mission given to the church by Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, to go and to make disciples. In the opening line of that wonderful book written by John Piper, ‘Let The Nations Be Glad’, he writes this: “Missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” What he’s saying is humanity is made to glorify God. That’s the purpose of all this. The purpose of all of creation is to magnify the glory of God, and that is certainly true of the pinnacle of God’s creation, human beings made in his image. We are on this earth to fulfill our purpose, to lift and to proclaim the majestic glory of God in worship. And because not all people everywhere do this, not all the people everywhere even know they are made for this, we are called into the mission of making disciples who will glorify God. Missions exists because worship doesn’t. Or at least it doesn’t yet. And that’s why we go.

So this morning, we’re going to explore the mission in a simple and profound verse of Scripture. It’s II Corinthians 4:15. Paul is in the middle of an argument. We just heard verses 1-18 read. And there’s this larger argument he’s doing, that he’s describing the ministry of the church. And it follows, this verse that we’re going to look at – we’re just going to look at the one verse today. But it follows the description of the church as jars of clay carrying around the Gospel in our fragile bodies, in our short lives, enduring the suffering that comes with preaching the gospel and with helping people. And so Paul is describing this. He’s saying, look, this gospel is inside of me. I’m fragile, I’m broken. But because of that, because of my brokenness and my fragility, you can see the gospel at work in me even better. And in the middle of that argument, he says what it’s all for. He said, you know, we’re doing all this work that’s really hard. It’s breaking us down. It’s crushing us and perplexing us. But we’re not destroyed. And here’s what it’s all for. Here’s why we do all the hard work of being the Church at Calvary. I want us to never forget why it is that we are the Church. I want us to never forget this. It’s a verse with a very simple structure.

When the gospel is preached and the church does its job, three things are going to happen in succession. Grace is going to extend. Thanksgiving is going to increase. And God is going to be glorified. So let’s explore these three steps together. And for each one, I have a challenge for us, Calvary, as we head into this new season of ministry together, let’s start by looking at the verse: For it is all for your sake, so that his grace extends to more and more people. It may increase Thanksgiving, to the glory of God. Now, before we get to the three steps of ministry, Paul says that it’s all for your sake. And of course, he’s talking to the Corinthian Church. The “your” is the Corinthian people, the Church in Corinth. And he’s saying it’s for the sake of the church. But what is the ‘it’ there? What is he talking about? It is all for your sake. Well, if you look back up through chapter four, it’s clear that Paul is talking about all of the difficulties in ministry that he has endured. That’s what he’s talking about. That it has been done for the church’s sake.

Now, when we hear the phrase jars of clay, we think of a mid-90’s crossover Christian band that made it on to regular radio. Right? Every one of us. Yeah. Rain. Rain on my face. No, that’s what we get going in our head. But when Paul wrote Jars of Clay, when he wrote that down, he was thinking of all the difficulty that came his way because of his commitment to the gospel, and how he wouldn’t be able to endure all of this were it not for the fact that Christ was at work in him. He says we who live are always being given over to death, for Jesus’ sake, so that others will see the life of Jesus at work in us. And then what will happen is that people will see this life at work in us, and they will then become part of that life. They’ll become part of the church, too. And so Paul’s summarizes this whole ministry with this great little phrase. He says, “Death is at work in us, but life in you”. That’s a very stark and a very beautiful way to describe the sacrifice of bringing Jesus to other people. And this just isn’t true of Paul. This is true of all ministries.

Church, the reason that we sacrifice is always for the sake of the church. The reason we preach the gospel is because we love other people and we want to see those people enter into the Kingdom of God, to enter into the Body of Christ, to see the Church built up. The reason we think long and hard about people groups in the world that have not yet received the gospel and have no church: then we send people to go to those places and they sacrifice their very physical lives to plant churches in those places. The reason we do that is for the sake of the church. And if your initial thought on hearing that from me or even on reading that here from Paul, is that well, shouldn’t the things that the church does be for the sake of God and not the church?

Well, then these next three steps are going to help you close the gap there, because it turns out that ministry, for the sake of the church is actually ministry for the sake of the Lord. And here’s how that’s true. The first thing that happens when we do ministry and when we do it very well is that grace extends to more and more people. I love that phrase. You’ll probably hear me say it again sometime. I love that phrase that grace would extend to more and more people; what a wonderful description of the Christian Ministry of Jesus.

There are two pieces to it. First, there’s the grace, and then there’s the grace extending to more and more people. You might call all of ministry the extension of God’s grace. That’s what it is. So two things here. The first is that when you think about what God’s people should be sharing with the world, you can summarize that with the word grace. That’s what we’re about. That’s what we share. We are grace, people. Grace, by the way, is getting something that you don’t deserve. or it’s also the opposite of what you deserve. You can get something that you don’t deserve or you can get the opposite of what you do deserve. And both of those are grace. Right at the very heart of Christian salvation, the core belief that sets Christianity apart from every other worldview in the world, every other religion in the world is that we get salvation and life that we do not deserve. We do not deserve it. And actually, the salvation and new life is actually the opposite of what we do deserve. It’s not just that we don’t deserve it. We got something instead of the thing we do deserve. Our sins deserve punishment. Our rebellion against God deserves condemnation from God. That would be justice. But God in his grace accomplishes his justice by punishing and condemning Jesus on our behalf. Jesus, God Himself, goes to the cross on our behalf and takes the just punishment of our sins. He takes our deserved condemnation on the cross.

And this is why God is both fully just and fully merciful at the same time. The message that the church now spreads, is that grace? That’s the core of who we are. That’s what we spread. We spread that grace, that God has come to those who will trust in Him and trust in the cross work of Jesus Christ. That Grace now needs to go to more and more people. That message, that grace; it needs to go to more and more people. Paul does not envision a Christian nation; he envisions Christians from among every nation. It’s a cross-section of all the nations that will come to faith in Christ. And he doesn’t picture a kind of ministry that sort of caps off at a certain point, where when you reach a certain number, then we can set the mission down because we’ve done what we need to do. He doesn’t picture a mission that stops growing after certain levels have been reached. If you study both his ministry and the spread of the early church throughout the throughout the regions, you’ll see a focus on limitless expansion. Limitless expansion. They were always asking, ‘where does the gospel need to go’? It doesn’t matter how hard it is, but where does it need to go? How do we get the gospel to these people? They knew that God would use the preaching of His gospel to transform lives.

Now they recognized, they knew that not everybody would come to faith in Jesus when they heard this gospel, but they knew that God would use the preaching of His Gospel to gather his sheep, his people, from among all nations. And that drove them to go. And their focus was always on how far and wide they could get this message of grace, trusting that God would do exactly what He intended to do with that gospel.

Calvary, my first challenge for us is that we must never lose focus on sharing the grace of Jesus Christ with more and more people. We must never lose that. There is a natural human tendency, and I’m sure you’ve experienced this; there’s a natural human tendency built inside each one of us to become content. Have you felt that? To just want to be content? I know I struggle with that. To become complacent, to coast. If you believe, as I do, that we are in a battle for the hearts and minds of a dying world, that the very souls of men and women hang in the balance, and that the mission of Christ is to seek and to save the people of God by His grace from the clutches of sin and death. If that’s what you believe, if that is what you are reading in Scripture, just as I am, and you have brought that into your mind and heart, and you are motivated by that, you’re not going to be content until the war is over and the mission is accomplished. Because that’s what we’ve been called to.

Now, of course, we’re going to rest. I mean, the Bible’s got places for rest in there. God gives a whole day of rest, right? But there’s a way of accomplishing this mission that incorporates this rest, so we don’t burn out. But Church I don’t think the biggest concern for churches today is burning out. I don’t think that’s our biggest problem. I think it’s not really being committed to the spread of grace at all. I think that’s the problem. Extending grace to more and more people is hard. It is hard to do. Because it means you have to go and spend time with people outside the church. It means you have to get outside of the program. It means you have to go and be with people and love people and build relationships with people who are very, very far from Jesus. How else are you going to share grace with people who need it? You have to go where they are. The days of just opening the church doors and expecting that those who need Jesus are going to find their way into a service are over, if they were ever here, which I kind of question, they are over now. The trend in our culture away from Jesus means that the church is required to go and be missionaries in society, as we were always called to be, to go where the Gospel needed to go.

Calvary. I want to encourage you never lose sight of this first step of what it means to be the Church. Because we are people of grace. We are people who have received grace. We are people who are called to sacrifice so that grace will extend throughout the world, throughout Rochester, for the glory of God to more and more people. And when it does, when this grace goes to more and more people, we progress to the next step in Paul’s argument.

You know, my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving. There’s a bonus thing. Thing? I like my favorite thing. I love Thanksgiving. I think it’s a great holiday. And it’s not just because I get to see my favorite football team throttled mercilessly now on national television every year. I mean, who wouldn’t want that, right? It’s because I think focusing on Thanksgiving and thankfulness to God for what he’s done might be the most worshipful thing we can do. To say thank you. I mean, why not have a holiday where we can do just that? Here, Paul says that the spread of grace is going to increase Thanksgiving, which is a way of saying that it will create new worship. When you spread grace to others, it’s going to create new Thanksgiving, and it’s going to do it in two obvious ways. If you share grace with people who don’t yet have it, some of those people are going to be transformed by it. They’re going to be transformed by this incredible grace. Their spiritual eyes are going to be open. They’re going to repent of their sins. They’re going to follow Jesus. They’re going to become worshippers of God in a way that they were not before, and they’re going to be giving thanks to God for that. So there’s an overall increase in the number of people who are giving thanks, and that’s one way Thanksgiving is going to increase. But there’s another way. And the other way is that each individual person will thank God more, whether it’s the person that extended the grace or whether it’s the person who received the grace. Have you ever noticed how much your heart rejoices and how much your worship is built up when you share grace with someone else and they’re transformed by it? When you, minister for the glory of God, how you are built up in Thanksgiving, worshipping God has a doubling effect. Thankfulness builds upon thankfulness. And what you end up having is an expanded Thanksgiving and it makes the church broader in number and deeper in enjoyment of the Lord. Now you might be thinking, well, why would Paul concentrate on this? Why would Paul put it like this, that that Thanksgiving would increase? Wouldn’t it be more compelling at this moment to say something like, as grace extends to more and more people, wholeness will increase, human flourishing will increase, happiness will increase.

God’s grace, after all, is a gift to sinners. Why? Why does Paul concentrate on the effects that we have in worshipping God, instead of focusing on those things that benefit us, why concentrate on that response? Well, it’s because the kind of thankful worship that we’re talking about here can only come from a person who is found the truest happiness. That’s the only way it can come. When the Lord saves us by His grace, what He does is He gives us hearts that yearn for him. Hearts that yearn for him. He shows us we are made by him and for him. As Colossians tells us, we are designed by God to have bottomless, endless joy in our Creator. And everything we experience in His creation is meant to be a way of enjoying the Lord, and it’s God’s grace that restores us to that joy. You wouldn’t have it otherwise, but then your joy flourishes because you have this grace from God. And the result is that we are now in a relationship with the Lord where we can worship Him. So the increase in thankfulness here is a result of our happiness in the Lord. You could say that the Thanksgiving Paul’s talking about here assumes the happiness. You wouldn’t be thanking God if you weren’t joyous in the Lord, just like it would be if you were to give a kid a bike on Christmas, right? Christmas morning you give a kid a bike. They’re so excited about the bike. And then they come and they say, Thank you. Thank you for this. I wouldn’t thank you if there wasn’t an incredible joy inside.

The Christian enjoys a gift that is greater than any other gift. We are set free of our sins. You had sins that were bearing down on you, a burden that you had to carry. And God in His grace, came and lifted those off you, gave you this gift you do not deserve. We’re forgiven by the Lord. We’re restored in our souls, including our hearts and our minds. We can see the world the way we’re called to see it. We no longer fear anything. We don’t fear judgment. We don’t fear death. We can get through pain. It’s incredible gift. There is so much wrapped up in the gospel of grace that causes us to erupt in thankfulness back to the Lord.

Calvary, my second challenge this morning is to always remain joyously thankful for the grace of God. Don’t ever assume it. Don’t ever assume the gospel or take it for granted. Don’t lose your first love of Christ or begin to think somehow your efforts of good in this world deserve God’s grace. We don’t deserve anything. Every morning we wake up completely dependent on the grace of God. There is only ever one appropriate response to that grace. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you for what you have done. Thank you for your love that came to me first. That you love me when I was unlovable. Thank you for your forgiveness. I don’t deserve it. I’m with you, but I don’t deserve it. You don’t deserve it. God has simply given us grace. Thank you for redeeming my life. Thank you for letting me be part of your family.

There’s one more step. One more step here Paul makes. Grace extends, Thanksgiving increases. But then there’s one more thing. Unlike the gifts that we give each other, God’s gift of grace isn’t even just an exchange of happiness and thankfulness. There’s even greater purpose than that. All this ministry is done to the glory of God. All of it. That’s the end for which grace extends and Thanksgiving increases. It is to the glory of God. Now, this would be a very easy phrase for us to quickly read and skip over. It sounds like something that you tack on to the end of a prayer when you’re just about to conclude, doesn’t it? Oh, for the glory of God. Moving on. But he puts it right here. This would be easy to miss, but Church, let me tell you something. There isn’t a more important concept in the Bible. The glory of God. All other biblical ideas and doctrines serve this one purpose. If someone were to ask you what the purpose of the Bible is, there might be a number of things that you could say and you might think to say. You might think the problem of sin and our need for salvation. So you might say, well, salvation is the purpose of Scripture. Or you might think, well, our need to be holy in God’s sight. And so you think that maybe our holiness, our sanctification, moving away from sin. That’s the purpose of the Bible. You might think of the covenants that structure the Bible, or maybe you’d think of the call to spread the gospel to all peoples like we’re talking about this morning with missionary. Perhaps you’ll think Scripture is a book on the need for worldwide missions and focus on that; the need to preach the gospel to all nations. You might think even of the very center of scripture, the center of human history, the cross, and what Jesus did there on the cross. And you say that triumphant work over death is the purpose of Scripture. And all those things are in Scripture. They’re all there. Those are rich doctrinal truths. The cross is absolutely the center of all human history. And what Jesus did there for us is without a doubt the greatest act of justice and mercy that this world has ever seen. But if you ask, what is it all for? Why all of this? The biblical answer is very clear. To the glory of God. Everything that the Lord created, everything that Jesus has redeemed, everything that the Church has or ever will accomplish, has one purpose: proclaiming the glory of God.

Glory is the greatness of something. It’s a measure of the greatness of something. And so to glorify, then, is to declare the greatness of something. Paul is saying, as the grace of Christ spreads to more and more people, to new people, it increases the worship of those people. And the end result is that God’s glory is demonstrated on Earth and in an even greater way. So as the church gets bigger and more people come into the family of God throughout history, there is a larger choir, if you will, a larger group of people declaring the glory of God. And it’s not that God becomes more glorious as people are added to the church, but God is glorious, and the larger church can reflect the greatness of that glory even better. There’s more in the chorus of Thanksgiving.

And that’s what this whole church mission is about. This is why we exist, Church. This is why we’re here. We are in the business of expanding the worship to magnify the glory of God. The reason we share the gospel and use up our lives for the sake of the spread of the Gospel on Earth; the reason people will go to hard places and die to establish disciples and churches in those places, full generations of Christians getting wiped out in a particular country while they do the hard work of spreading the gospel. The reason they do that is to magnify the glory of God.

Everywhere. Worship does not yet exist. Needs a person who loves Jesus. Speaking into the lives of those people. Whether that’s the other side of the world among dangerous people, or whether that’s your friend right here in Rochester who doesn’t yet glorify God because they don’t yet know about Jesus, and God has called you to take that gospel to them.

And so, Calvary, let me close with this challenge. Let us always be a church that is committed to magnifying the glory of God. Because if praising and magnifying the glory of God is our aim, if that is our ultimate aim, to magnify, to lift up the praises, to proclaim Jesus, to sing, to preach, to share, to show how the greatness of God, if that’s what we are called to do in everything that we do, then we will have to be committed to the increase of Thanksgiving. We have to be committed to that. We will have to have a hunger for the fame and the name of Jesus to cause Thanksgiving on the Earth. And if that is our hunger, if we will stop at nothing to see Thanksgiving increase, we will have to be engaged in the tireless work of extending grace to more and more people. There shouldn’t be a person anywhere here in Rochester that does not have a Christian friend who has come alongside of them to love them, to pray for them, to walk with them, and to show them Christ.

When you consider the size of the church here at Calvary and the size of churches in this community and the size of our community and the people that are here, there shouldn’t be a single person who does not hear the gospel proclaimed in their life from a loving friend who wants to see them come to faith in Christ and to join the chorus of the glory of God. And when it comes to the world outside of our community, when we think about missions, when we think about the rest of our nation or the international world, there is no question what we need to be doing. We have to go where the worship of Jesus does not yet exist; to people who have not heard the name of Jesus. The Gospel of grace must extend to more and more people so that it will reach every corner of the earth, to every place where Jesus is not yet known. We need to go there. We need to be about the work of it. I know our church can’t send all those people everywhere, but we can be in support of that kind of work because that’s what Jesus said needs to get done for him to return. We need to be going. We need to be about the work of sharing the gospel with people who don’t yet know Jesus, because that’s the mission that’s been given to us by Jesus.