I invite you to take your Bible and turn with me to Matthew, chapter 24. It’s on page 829 in your pew Bible if you’re using it. We’re in this chapter because this chapter contains the theme verse for our rapidly approaching Mission Conference, the theme of which is, “Finish the Mission.” Before we read that verse and begin thinking about what’s coming, let’s go to the Lord in prayer.
Father, we come before You this morning asking that You would, because of Your goodness, send Your Spirit to our hearts, apart from whom we have no hope. The one who speaks cannot make sense of Your Word. The ones who hear will neither make sense of it nor love it as it is to be treasured. So by the power of Your Holy Spirit, would You please minister to our hearts? Shape us by reorienting our loves through the power of Your Word wielded by Your Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name, amen.
Matthew chapter 24, verse 14. I encourage you to memorize this verse over the next days and weeks. Jesus says:
“And this gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come.”
“Finish the Mission” – this is what we’re about. And to help us think about this theme and this mandate that’s been set before us, I’d like to set before you three pictures – a picture of a chef, a young woman, and a builder. Briefly – a chef who is preparing this lavish meal, more courses than can be numbered, more extravagant than you’ve ever tasted before, and yet no banquet is scheduled, no guests are coming, but he keeps on cooking. Odd picture, I know! A young woman who’s planning a wedding, and it’s a royal wedding, fit for a princess. All kinds of people, plans, details, food, venue, you name it! She’s planning it, but no wedding date is set and no vows are exchanged and no marriage is launched, but the wedding planning continues. Third picture. A builder is constructing a house. It’s a massive house, a mansion really, and it is awesome, but no one’s closed the deal and no one’s moved in and it’s still just a house, not a home, but the construction continues. Strange pictures, don’t you think?
But if we’re not careful, the way we think about the mission of the church can unfold in a very similar way. We listen to sermons about mission, we pray for missionaries, we hold conferences and talk about mission. We go on short-term mission trips; we sometimes go on longer mission trips. We make pledges to give money, we sacrifice, we actually give, we send money, send people. We do mission because we think that’s what we do as a church. We do mission but we don’t think about the completion mentality that mission requires, to finish the mission, because there is a target, there is a goal for all our mission endeavor and I believe this church, rather this verse, makes this goal, this target, very clear.
What I’d like us to consider this morning is one question – What will it take to finish the mission? How do we have to think about that and why? Jesus answers the question that His disciples pose in verse 3 of Matthew 24. “As He sat on the Mount of Olives, the disciples came to Him privately saying, ‘Tell us, when will these things be and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?’” Verse 14 is the core of Jesus’ answer. He gives lots of details, tells them lots of what to expect, but the center of His argument is this – this Gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed to all the world, throughout the whole world, as a testimony to all peoples, and then and only then, the end will come.
So what lies at the center of finishing the mission? What creates within us a completion mentality? Because you see, it’s an important question! That end point is not just a “the end, we’re done.” It’s really a new beginning, because when Peter talks about that end in 2 Peter chapter 3 he says, “Since all these things will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be?” Answer, “You ought to live holy and godly lives as you look forward to the day of God and speed its coming. That day will bring about the destruction of the heavens by fire and the elements will melt in the heat but in keeping with his promise, we are looking forward to a new heaven and a new earth, the home of righteousness.” Here’s what we’re reading – that end point toward which the entire mission endeavor is moving, the goal of all of our Gospel witness, the mission of the church is targeted to an end that is really a new beginning where finally what we were made for, what we’re being redeemed for, will burst forth into our full and unhindered and unending experience. This is what we’re moving toward. This is what the mission of God is targeting.
So back to the practical question – What creates within us a completion mentality when it comes to the mission that’s been set before us? What creates within us a desire and a motivation to finish the mission? I think there are two answers, both of which grow right out of this verse. One, it’s a sharpened vision of our Gospel identity, and two, a sharpened vision of our Gospel mission. Identity and mission. And let’s be very clear about this, and we’re talking deliberately first about the identity and then about the mission and it only works in that order. Our tendency is to reverse it, as if to say, “If I do well at completing the mission or for pursuing the mission, then I’ll have a good identity. I’ll feel good about myself when I’ve done good at my mission.” The problem with that mentality is most of us have more failures then we care to admit and the consequence is, our identity crashes and burns. It can never be that order. It always and only is this – we sharpen our vision of our Gospel identity which fuels and empowers our Gospel mission. Parenthesis – if there’s not a whole lot of evidence of Gospel mission in your life, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve not wrestled carefully with your Gospel identity. You might know it in your head, but it’s not sunk deeply into your heart where it is your most priceless treasure. So let’s see what it will take for that identity to become our great treasure so that it will fuel our Gospel mission. Alright? Are you with me?
- Gospel Identity
Number one, a Gospel identity. Jesus says, “This Gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the whole world.” He’s really specific! He doesn’t say, “The Gospel.” He doesn’t say, “The Gospel of the kingdom.” He says, “This Gospel. This thing that I’ve been talking about and showing you and demonstrating. This Gospel.” Of course you know that the Gospel means “good news” but it’s the good news about the kingdom, the kingdom about which Jesus had been preaching from the very beginning of His ministry. Right after He was baptized, went into the wilderness for forty days, He begins His public ministry. In Matthew 4:23 we read, “He went throughout all of Galilee teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the Gospel of the kingdom, healing every disease and every affliction among the people.”
What is the Gospel of the Kingdom?
Why is it “the Gospel of the kingdom”? Slow down and think with me about this! Whenever we think about a kingdom, we have to think about the King who rules over that kingdom. One author put it this way. “A kingdom is the governing influence of a king over his territory, impacting it with his personal will, purpose, and intent, producing a culture, values, and lifestyle that reflect the king’s character and his desire for his kingdom.” Meaning, it’s a place where the king’s reign is supreme and pervasive, where his character is revealed through his reign, his desire is embraced by his subjects, and his purposes are accomplished. This Gospel of the kingdom we’re talking about is the good news that there’s a rightful King with rightful authority that brings all things under His reign. He’s making all things new! He’s bringing healing and reconciliation to every area of our brokenness and it is pervasive. Not just brokenness between us and God but brokenness between us and the people among whom we live, brokenness between us and our environment, brokenness that we feel within ourselves because none of us is entirely one thing. We’re divided; we’re conflicted. The good that we want to do we don’t end up doing. No, the evil we don’t want to do, that’s what we keep on doing, isn’t it?
This King, with all authority, is coming to make all things new in this kingdom. It’s actually the fulfillment of the prayer that He thought He taught His disciples, and through them He teaches us to pray, “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” It’s good news that we have a good King who loves us, and not just forgives us, but remakes us, reshapes us, and makes us new from the level of the inside out, not just changing our behavior but changing our loves as He changes our allegiance. This is a good King, and it is good news that this kingdom is coming to my heart, it’s coming to yours, and it’s spreading to all of creation as He shapes new desires within us. At the core, that’s really what discipleship is about. When Jesus commanded His disciples and commanded us through them to “go into all the world and make disciples of all nations,” really this is what He was talking about – the kingdom spreading, creating new disciples, marked out by new loves, not just new behavior. This is what His Holy Spirit has to do.
The Beauty of Christ
If you were here last Sunday, you heard Doug Kelly speak about this! He talked about the beauty of Christ. If you weren’t here, I strongly encourage you to listen to the message. It was magnificent, because at the core, to summarize his message into one sentence what he said was this – what you find most beautiful will be what you worship, and what is your greatest beauty will change you to the core. We all have an appetite; we’re hard-wired for beauty. It’s that, that we pursue, and what we most fear is the loss of what we find most beautiful. The Gospel of the kingdom means God is reshaping what we find most beautiful. If you read all of Jonathan Edwards’ writings, one scholar did a study to see what words did he use most frequently to describe Jesus. Do you know what the two words were? Excellence and beauty. That’s how he described the Lord Jesus. To the extent that He becomes our greatest beauty, we will be changed to the core.
Brian Sorgenfrei was preaching about this some years ago at Mississippi State. He’s our RUF campus minister at MSU, son of the church. I can’t vouch for his illustration because I don’t live in his home, but you’ll have to take his word for it. You can listen to his sermon online. But he said this, illustrating using his wife. He said, “My wife loves to sleep and she is great at it. She sleeps hard…” I wonder if Mark’s here! “She sleeps hard, she sleeps long, she sleeps to the very end of the possible time of sleeping, gets up at the very last minute; she loves to sleep! But there were several seasons in her life where she began to function on just three or four hours of sleep and did it joyfully.” Do you know why? Because something more beautiful came into their experience. God blessed them with a baby girl, and then another, and then a baby boy and in each of those seasons what she found most beautiful, sleep, was surpassed by a greater beauty – her love for these babies who were precious to her, who were her treasures, and she joyfully functioned on far less sleep than she used to find most beautiful.
That’s what happens as we come into the Gospel of the kingdom, as it reshapes us and remakes us. Rico Tice, the author of the “Christianity Explored” materials that we use here in the church that talk about what the Gospel really is, tells a story about Prince William, second in line to the throne of England. Of course you know that he got married in April of 2011 to a young woman that he met at university, an attractive woman who is worthy of being his wife, but Rico asks a puzzling question. He says, “Imagine if Prince William went about finding his bride in a slightly different manner! Imagine if he went down to the worst part of Soho, London, a place that you wouldn’t go at night and maybe not even during the daytime. He went there into a brothel where he found a woman who sold herself for the pleasure of others, living in squalor, in brokenness, and in just above poverty. And what if Prince William walked into that room where she was, took her by the hand, got down on one knee, looked her in the eye and said, ‘I want you as my wife and I will not take ‘No’ as an answer! He pulls her out of the brothel, takes her to his home, he clothes her in a royal wedding dress, royal jewelry, they walk to Westminster Abbey and arm in arm they process in, they exchange vows, and they turn to face the congregation, the whole world, and he smiles at her and he says, ‘This is my wife whom I love. All that is mine is hers. All that I am destined to inherit, she inherits. She is royalty; you treat her as royalty.’”
You think, of course that could never happen! But it did! It happened in my life. If you belong to Jesus, it happened in your life, didn’t it? When Jesus came into your brokenness and your squalor where you had sold yourself to the pleasure of any number of other things or people, living for their approval, living for your comfort, living for your ideas of what would make you happy. He took you by the hand and He said, “I take you as My bride and I refuse to take ‘No’ for an answer.” He pulled you out of that place, He brought you into His fellowship, He clothed you in the garments of His righteousness, royal jewels, and He says, “You are Mine, I love you. All that I am destined to inherit, you inherit. You are royalty.” Do you find that beautiful? Do you? Do you find that excellent? You see, that’s your Gospel identity and when that sinks from the level of your understanding to the treasure of your heart, it will change you to the core, radically. You’ll wonder what happened.
Victor Hugo, the 19th century novelist, once wrote that life’s greatest happiness is to be convinced that you’re loved. See, a clear vision of your Gospel identity leads you to being absolutely convinced that you are loved, and it reshapes everything and Jesus becomes beautiful, He becomes excellent, He becomes your great treasure. What creates a completion mentality? What motivates us to finish the mission? Well it starts here by reorienting everything around, “Who am I really in Jesus? What value has He set up on me? What status is mine as royalty?” and then and only then does that Gospel identity move you toward Gospel mission. The identity is declared; the mission is commanded. The mission is implicit in the verse that we’re looking at. “This Gospel of the kingdom will be proclaimed throughout the world as a testimony to all peoples and then the end will come.” It’s implicit there, but it’s explicitly stated in Jesus’ great commission, the last command He left with His disciples and with you and me when He said, “All authority” – hear the language of a kingdom? “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations.” There is it again, “all nations.” Make disciples – not just changing people’s behavior but working in such a way that Jesus becomes so beautiful that their desires are changed by that Jesus, and the power of His Spirit. “Baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you, and surely I am with you always to the end, the very end of the age.”
Practical Aspects of Ministry
What would it take for us to finish the mission? Well let’s speak practically for a minute! If you look at what we’re invested in as a congregation, we have sent people to the mission field, people from our own congregation have left Mississippi, left the United States, and gone to other nations to minister to other peoples, people groups. We have 44 missionaries, 6 partnerships, 9 church planters, 16 campus ministers and ministries, 12 ministries of evangelism and discipleship across the country and world that we invest in toward the spread of the Gospel. That’s great, but it’s nowhere near enough, is it? Last numbers are 7.2 billion people on our planet. 7.2 billion people. And in that number there are roughly 16,000 distinct people groups, what we call here “nations,” people group with unique and distinct languages, histories, cultures, and self-identities; 16,000. There are still thousands of those people groups, nations, that are what we call “unreached people groups,” meaning they have less than 2% of their population as professing evangelical Christians. And missiologists will tell us it takes roughly 2% of a people group’s population to evangelize the rest of them. Thousands yet of unreached people groups. But in most of those groups, there are missionaries at work, there is a Bible translated in their language, there is the presence of a church, it’s just very, very small.
But here’s the rub – the neediest of the needy, of those thousands of unreached people groups, there are still 506, last count, November of 2015, there are still 506 unreached, unengaged people groups. Meaning that there’s no Bible in their language, there’s no church, and there’s no missionary moving forward to reach that people group with the Gospel. 506 as of last count. And almost every one of those groups is really, really hostile to the spread of the Gospel, meaning if you or I would go there to talk about Jesus with them they’d probably kill us. So what will it take to finish the mission? How does a completion mentality sink down in that context?
I’ll share with you a story, and it’s just a very dim picture of what we’re facing. I have a friend who over the last weeks has been on a mission. It’s been a significant mission because a skunk has taken up residence under his house in the crawlspace, and his mission is to get rid of this skunk; true story. He called me the other day and said, “I’ve figured it out!” He had already boarded up all the holes under the house, he had already put out some kind of repellant, he had already consulted with some other people. Finally someone said, “Just get one of those live traps and put some stinky, greasy cat food in it.” He set the trap and he did all of that, went in the house, and the next morning to his surprise and delight he walked outside and inside this large trap is a live and very unhappy skunk! And he said, “Mission accomplished!” Or is it? Because now he has a very unhappy live skunk in a box made of mesh right outside his door! And finishing his mission is about to become really costly, really dangerous, really high risk.
Now I’m arguing from the lesser to the infinitely greater because what Jesus tells us and what the apostles tell us in the rest of the New Testament is this – the closer we get to finishing the mission, the more costly, the more dangerous, the more risk, the more suffering, the more sacrifice will be involved in finishing the mission. This is where we are now. Think about it! Joseph Song, a Romanian pastor whom we know, was arrested under the time of communism, persecuted, imprisoned, threatened, his family was threatened, and finally was banished from the country. When he left Romania he went to Cambridge to write his PhD dissertation which he published, and I’ve read it – 500 pages. It’s about this thick. The title is, “Suffering, Martyrdom, and Rewards in Heaven.” Toward the end of the dissertation he says this. “Suffering and martyrdom have to be seen as part of God’s plan. They are His chosen instruments by which He achieves His purposes in history and by which He will accomplish His final purpose with man.” Jesus said it this way in Mark chapter 8 verse 34 and repeats it two other times in the other gospels. “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the Gospel will save it.” He wasn’t kidding!
Dietrich Bonheoffer, the German pastor who was executed by the Nazis, wrote this. “The cross is not the terrible end to an otherwise God-fearing, unhappy life. No, it meets us at the beginning of our communion with Christ and follows throughout when Christ calls a man or a woman, calls him to come and die.” If you’ve responded to the invitation to the Gospel, that’s the invitation to which you’ve responded. “Come and die.” The cross is not a beautiful piece of jewelry; it’s a brutal instrument of death! And He says, “Take up your instrument of death – follow.” Paul says it this way in Philippians 1:29, “For it has been granted to you on behalf of Christ not only to believe on him but also to suffer for him.” It has been granted you; it has been gifted to you. Do you hear what he’s saying? The sufferings that you so desperately want to avoid is His gift to you by which He’ll make Jesus more beautiful in your eyes, will make the Gospel more precious as you hold it forth as the only hope of life.
What will it Cost You to Finish the Mission?
Now I realize as I look into your faces it’s really easy to hear all of this and glaze over and say, “That’s for them, not for me.” So let’s bring it back home. Be very, very practical. What will it cost you personally to finish the mission? You? Well of course the obvious thing is, it’s going to cost you some comfort and security as you step outside of your safe friend group, as you reach out to those around you – outsiders, people who have yet to embrace the offer of the Gospel. It will certainly cost you your insider status, because there’s going to have to be a willingness to be misunderstood, even excluded from people whose opinions are really valuable to you. It may cost you an evening where instead of turning on Netflix and watching the most recent episode of your favorite show, you actually jump in the car, drive to the church, and invest in some of the nations who come here every Tuesday night to learn to speak English. And if you and I can hold a conversation, you’re qualified. A couple of weeks back, I sat down with a young doctor who was here in Jackson just for, I think 18 months doing cancer research. Do you know where he was from? Nepal! And here I am talking to a man whose country I don’t think I could get access to, and here we are talking about what’s hard about his life, where is he hopeful, where is he hopeless, what places of brokenness does he wrestle with and how. You have that opportunity! If you can speak English, you can come. It might cost you an evening.
It might cost you a little bit more. Instead of buying a new rug or a new gun for your cabinet or a new pair of shoes for your closet, you may have to set that money aside to support a missionary going to one of those 506 unreached, unengaged people groups who are still waiting for a missionary to come and be willing to risk even their lives for the sake of the Gospel. Instead of taking a cruise or that Disney vacation with your family, it might cost you going on a mission trip and explore up close and personal, “What might it look like for me to invest personally in finishing the mission?” Because really, one of the reasons we go on mission trips is not to do mission tourism, as I tongue in cheek refer to it sometimes, but you’re trying on a pair of shoes. You’re looking to see, “Lord, is this a place You might be calling me to serve?” And as I look around I see a lot of young people, and that’s great. Y’all need to think about this. But I’m not targeting just them. In our years of ministry in Romania, do you know who were the most effective missionaries we had on our team? Kim and Carol Whatney. I see my kids smiling. They were the best missionaries we had! They were in their late 60s. Retired military, retired nurse I believe she was. And they said, “You know we’ve got a second career ahead of us. Where can we invest?” They spent years away from their grandkids and their children and the comfort of their home in New Mexico to serve Christ and extend His kingdom in Romania.
It might cost you more. It might cost you your grandkids, where instead of keeping them close to home, passing on the family business to them, you may actually encourage them to go to a place to which you right now don’t have access and you encourage them and you support them to go. Let’s not be so foolish that it might not also cost some of us our lives. Let’s not think it might not happen because Jesus told us, “I’m sending you out as sheep among wolves.” This is the reality. The question is, “Is it worth it?” Is it? I think it was about five years ago I was in this pulpit as a missionary, your missionary, and was telling a story about my mother who I’ve told you is, far and away, was the most godly person I’ve ever known. We were getting on an airplane going back to Romania after a short trip to the States and my mom and dad drove us to the airport. And my mom gave me a hug and she held me close and I felt her body start shaking as she was silently sobbing. She finally grabbed me by the arms, held me out close, and with tears streaming down her cheeks she got out the only word she could get out. She looked me in the eye and she said, “The Lamb is worthy.” She turned around and walked off. That’s the last time I saw my mother with reasonable health and the next time I saw her was an hour before she died and I had returned to bury her. Is it worth it? Maybe the better question is, “Is He worth it?”
We end with the pictures with which we began. Remember the chef, the young woman, and the builder? Hold those pictures in your mind. Jesus has finished His mission on earth. He declared it on the cross when He said, “It is finished.” The book of Revelation tells us there is a day coming when Jesus, now sitting on the throne, will say three words, “It is done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. Behold, I am making all things new.” That day is coming. From the cross, “It is finished” were His words; from the throne, “It is done” we’ll hear. My question is, “What will be your words?” What are your words today? Because you see, there is a day coming when the banquet will be served, the cooking will be done. Isaiah 25 talks about it, right? It says, “On this mountain I will spread a banquet for all peoples, a banquet of choice food and aged wines.” And Jesus Himself said, “There is a day coming when,” in telling the parable He said, “the master will spread his arms and say, ‘Come, for everything is now ready.’” The banquet’s coming. There is an end point. The bride planning for her wedding? Jesus tells us that the wedding supper of the Lamb, the marriage of the Lamb, it’s coming. We’ll be the bride. And the house that’s being built? Jesus told us in John 14, “In my Father’s house are many mansions. I go there to prepare a place for you.” It’s being built and one day, one day with Peter we’ll say we’re looking forward to a new heavens and a new earth, the home of righteousness, and finally we’ll find ourselves truly at home as never before, as you’ve never felt at home in your house.
Finish the mission. Pray that God will give you a completion mentality.
It’s at this point in the service I would normally close in prayer, but I’m not going to do that. I’m going to invite you to sing our closing prayer with me. It’s in your bulletin. This is a hymn that’s new. It’s been reintroduced by Keith and Kristen Getty. It’s sung to the tune of “The Church’s One Foundation” with a chorus that’s added on. The choir has rehearsed it; just followed along with the choir. Let’s stand as we close in prayer by singing this hymn.