Hello, Mercy Hill Church.
It is good to be with you both with those of you who are in this room and those who are in the campuses. Just to let you know a little about where I'm coming from, my wife and I were appointed in 1991 and we were part of an experimental program with the IMB trying to figure out how to do creative access work among unreached people groups in restricted access areas, which is a fancy way of saying we were trying to figure out how to do what we'd never done before and had no idea how to do. So our job description was pick a people group of at least 10 million. We picked one of 13 million Muslims. Figure out your own way in.
Figure out your own language learning program and learn it. Figure out a comprehensive strategy to get the gospel to these people. Recruit the resources and then implement your strategy and good luck because we don't know how to do that. And those were wonderful days. So my wife and I went to the field as the Soviet Union was collapsing.
We went into one of the stans and got our work going. We had both of our children our first term and all you need to know about health care in that part of the former Soviet Union is we went to Pakistan to have our kids because it was such a step up. So both of my children were born in a little mission hospital up in the Himalayas in the same town where later they would find and kill Osama bin Laden. So that's their sort of their claim to fame. Grew up over there.
They both love Jesus and actually still like us and we're very grateful for that. I ended up being steadily demoted from being a front liner to being what's now the quote of a cluster leader to being a regional leader affinity group leader. I'm now a vice president. Fortunately for me there's only two steps in the org chart lower than me and that's executive vice president and president and they're both significantly younger than I am. So I think I'm safe.
I think I've dropped as low as I'm going to have to go. What I want us to do this morning is what I want us to do is to look at Luke chapter 24 verses 44 to 49. This is a story you know very well. We're looking at the evening of the first Easter. So Luke 24 beginning with verse 44. Then he said to them, these are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you that everything written about me in the law of Moses and the prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures and said to them, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things and behold I am sending the promise of my father upon you but stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high.
Let's pray for you going further. Father we want to express our gratitude to you for the amazing privilege we have and that the Bible is in our language and it's in our hands. We have access to the perfect revelation of your truth. Father we confess that we need you.
We need you to understand it and we need you to obey it. So we pray that your Holy Spirit would do his work. We pray that he would work in us, that he would open our minds to understand what Luke has recorded for us here. But we pray also Father that you would warm our hearts, that we would love your truth.
The enemy knows it better than we do but he hates it. Give us a love for your truth and we pray that you would also give us wills that yearn to obey it. We pray this in Jesus name.
Amen. Our tendency is to view scripture as though it were this grab bag of stories, rules, few poems, some inspirational texts, just this useful stuff that we can then reach into the bag, pull out what we need at any given time and completely ignore the context that exists around those particular texts. We fail to see it and treat it as a connected narrative, as in fact one story. We also have a tendency to see missions as just one more agenda item for the church.
It's a special interest for a few people, that's fine, but the rest of us are sort of off the hook and we can ignore it and just leave that to those people crazy enough to get involved in that, for the few, the proud, the slightly unhinged. And we think that we do missions based on just a few isolated proof texts drawn from that grab bag. But the reality is that the Bible is one story. It is one consistent narrative with a beginning, a plot line, a direction, and it's going somewhere, it has an end. And missions is woven all the way through that story. It's not just at the end of the Gospels. Really, you can trace the mission God has given us from Genesis to Revelation. And this text makes it clear that that is exactly how Jesus saw both the Bible and the mission that He's giving His people. So let's look at this text.
You know the context. So Jesus rose again after having died on Friday. They rested on Saturday. He rose Sunday morning. The women went to the tomb to finish up the burial procedures. His body wasn't there, but the angels told them that He'd risen. They ran back, told the apostles, who thought the women were crazy. I mean, people stay dead after they die.
That's the norm, right? Well, two of them decided to check it out, Peter and John, and I think it's very interesting that John makes a point of letting us know that he got to the tomb first, that he outran Peter in getting there. And again, they see nothing. They're not sure what is going on.
Fast forward just a little bit. That afternoon, you have two disciples, and we don't know who they are, on their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus. It's not far. It's only about eight miles, and they're walking. And as they're going along, Jesus suddenly joins them. They can't recognize Him. They don't know who He is. And He confronts them and says, what's wrong? I mean, you guys are obviously sad, discouraged, depressed. What's your problem? To which they say to Him, seriously, are you clueless?
You're the only one who doesn't know what's been happening of late. And He actually calls them foolish and slow of heart to believe. He then proceeds to give them the best Old Testament lesson anybody's ever had. He walks through the Old Testament and explains in every part of it what He sees in there regarding Himself. Well, they recognize Him when they get home, and He breaks the bread. He disappears.
They race back to Jerusalem. He shows up there. They make sure He's real. He has them touch His wounds.
He eats something in front of them, and then He says the words that we just read. There's quite a few things that we learn from this passage. One thing we learn about the resurrection is that quite clearly the disciples were not expecting it. I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories out there that say it's something the disciples made up. They were in absolutely no frame of mind to do that. In fact, it took a lot just to convince them that it actually happened. They had no category for it.
This was not something they were remotely inclined to make up. Second, we learn that His resurrection body was a real body. He wasn't just a disembodied spirit, and we will not be just disembodied spirits either. Our destiny is not just to float around on the clouds.
Our destiny, like Jesus, is to have a real body that just happens to be free from the corruption and decay of a fallen world in which we will live in the new heavens and the new earth forever. But even more, we learn a great deal about how Jesus understood the Old Testament. The text we have that we just read reinforced the lesson from the road to Emmaus. Jesus regarded the Old Testament as pointing to Him and being about Him, and He regarded every part of the Old Testament as being about Him. He mentions here the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. Those were like the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible that Jesus would have used. That's how they grew the texts together. His grid for interpreting it was all of it pointed to Him, and we should follow that.
Well, what did He mean when He said it's all about Him? So, there was a time when I wish that recorders had existed back in those days, and someone like one of those guys on the road to Emmaus had switched his on and recorded that for us. What I've realized is that, in essence, they did, because the rest of the New Testament treats the Old Testament the way Jesus does here. In the rest of the New Testament, we learn what Jesus taught His followers about the way the Old Testament is designed to point to Him. So, let's look at it. Let's look at the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.
First, the Law. You know the story of the first five books of Moses. You know that God created everything, and He created it all good.
It was perfect. We know that as the climax of His creation, He made a man and a woman, Adam and Eve, and they were fully capable of walking with God in perfect obedience and being totally righteous. We know that Satan showed up on the scene in the form of a serpent, and that under his temptation, they disbelieved God, and in consequence, they disobeyed God and did the one thing He told them not to do. We know from the Law that the results of that act of rebellion were universal and catastrophic, and that everything bad in the world flows from that. It's because we rebelled against God that there is sin and sickness and death and war and crime and all of those things that are the consequence of our turning our backs on God and doing what He told us not to do. We also know from that that sin, that rebelliousness, was passed on to all of Adam and Eve's descendants. We know that when God judged them, He didn't just say, okay, so you're going to live with the consequences of your rebellion.
He gave a faint hint, just a little promise, that there would be a seed of the woman, a descendant of the woman, who would eventually crush the serpent's head, even though his own heel would be bruised. We move on and we see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Abraham, an idol-worshipping pagan whom God called and chose and promised to bless, but also gave him the amazing promise that through him, all the families and all the nations of the earth would also be blessed. He repeated the promise to Abraham's son Isaac and Isaac's son Jacob. Jacob himself then blessed his children at the end of his life and made a promise to one of his sons Judah that the scepter would never depart from Judah.
Again, we're not quite sure what it means at this point. We know that the people of Israel end up in Egypt. They grow into a nation. They're oppressed by the Egyptians. God delivers them powerfully through the ten plagues and through the Red Sea. He takes them to Mount Sinai and there He gives them His law. And the law of God is not a list of rules God came up with one night because He was in a bad mood and wanted to make our lives miserable.
The law of God is a description of what it means to live as those who are in the image of God. It's a description of how you live reflecting His character and representing His rule on earth. But because He knew that they were rebels, sinners, He also gave them a tabernacle and priests and sacrifices, sacrifices that drove home the point that the wage of sin is death but that the penalty can be paid by a substitute. Well, eventually He brought them to the very edges of the Promised Land. So what did Jesus think of and what did the apostles teach about the connection between that story and Himself? The apostles called Jesus the second Adam. He was the Adam who was faithful where the first Adam failed. He faced temptation and was obedient where Adam went the opposite direction. He was, in fact, the second Adam who was the founder of a new human race.
He is the seat of the woman who crushed the serpent's head. Jesus is the descendant of Abraham through whom all the peoples on earth are blessed. Jesus is the descendant of Judah from whom the scepter will never depart. Jesus is the Passover lamb. Jesus is the permanent great high priest and the guilt offering that actually takes away sins forever.
The blood of bulls and goats can't do that but the blood of Jesus can. Jesus is the one who kept the law we should have kept and then bore the curse we should have borne as a result of that. Jesus fulfills everything in the law. Well, what about the prophets?
The prophets includes the historical books in the Hebrew Bible and you know the timeline there. Joshua takes the people into the promised land. After Joshua dies, there's a series of judges and things just go from bad to worse. There's this vicious cycle where the people rebel against God.
He allows their enemies to oppress them. They cry out to God for deliverance. He raises up someone to deliver them, a judge.
They fly straight sort of for the rest of that judge's lifetime and then the cycle just continues all over again. Basically the story of the book of Judges is that we cannot be left without adult supervision. Actually saying that, in those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.
We need somebody to rule us. And so God raised up kings. First the king they wanted, Saul, tall good-looking guy, and then the king they needed, David, a man after God's own heart. And David defeated their enemies. He ruled justly according to God's law.
He provided the conditions for people to flourish. But David was still a sinner. In fact, he grievously rebelled against God. And David was a mortal man and he died. And the subsequent history of the kings, you have that same cycle recurring.
Every now and then you have a good king, but then you have kings who were absolutely horrible in the things that they did. And the rebellion against God just went on and on until finally God brought sort of the ultimate sanction against them of conquest by their enemies and deportation to Babylon. But as all of this is going on, God raises up another kind of person, a prophet. Prophets were spokespeople for God.
And most of what they did in their prophecy was call people back to faithfulness to God's covenant. But at the same time they also spoke of a day to come. There would be a day of the Lord, a day in which God himself would step onto the scene of human history and make things right.
It would be a day of terrible judgment, but it would also be a day of deliverance. And the day of the Lord would be the day of Messiah. Messiah just means anointed one. And there were three kinds of people who were anointed in Israel, prophets, priests, and kings. And so there would be one who would be the ultimate prophet, the ultimate priest, and the ultimate king.
So how does that play out in the understanding of who Jesus is? See, Jesus is a descendant of David. God promised David, a descendant of Judah, that he would always have a son on his throne. And apart from Jesus, that promise was broken, but in Jesus it is completely fulfilled.
He is the ultimate king whose perfect reign will never end. Jesus is the ultimate prophet. He doesn't just speak the Word of God. He is the Word of God. And looking at him, we know exactly what God is like because he is God in human flesh.
And we also know exactly what we're supposed to be like as those who reflect the image of God. So Jesus is the promised Messiah. He is the suffering servant. He is the Lord of the coming day of the Lord.
And this is key. We also find out in all of this that the Messiah, this one in the day to come, will be the one who fulfills God's promise to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob to gather the nations, the peoples of the earth, into the people of God. And Jesus is the gatherer of the nations. Then going to the Psalms. The Psalms are the hymnbook of Israel. They show us the connection between theology and worship because the content is rich in who God is and what he has done. And specifically in the Psalms, we find out that the Messiah to come is not just going to be Messiah for Israel.
He's going to be the Messiah of the world. Psalm 2, the promise of the Father to the Son, ask of me and I will make the nations your heritage, the ends of the earth your possession. Psalm 22, all the ends of the earth will remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you. And the point of all this is what that Psalm just said. It's worship. Jesus is the one who would summon the worship and praises of the nations. And so Psalm 67, may God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us. Sounds pretty good, right? We want God to bless us.
Why? That your ways may be known on earth, your saving power among all the nations. Let the peoples praise you, O God.
Let all the peoples praise you. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy. And then Psalm 96 that you heard read earlier in the service, declare his glory among the nations, his marvelous works among all the peoples. The point of all of this is a worship service.
That's where we're headed. I don't know if you realize this, but even the point of evangelism and missions, we are recruiting for the choir. We're recruiting for the choir of heaven. We are going to make up the worship team and we're going to enjoy that forever because the point of all of it is that God received the praise and glory that is due his name. And that happens through a global Messiah who has accomplished a global redemption. So as far as Jesus is concerned, all of this is fulfilled in him. He is what all of these things in the Old Testament were pointing to. And he says here very clearly that the Old Testament taught the basics of the gospel. He says, thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, which means that the atoning death of Jesus was written, that the resurrection of Jesus was written, that salvation, the forgiveness of sins in Jesus was already written.
So God had been preparing for it from the very beginning of time. But he also said thus it is written that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations. The task of missions is written in the Old Testament. It's the fulfillment of what God was up to from the very start and the task of missions is inseparably connected to the atoning work of Jesus.
He died and yes, his death saves me, but he died to save a people from every tribe and language and people and nation. And your salvation in Jesus cannot be separated from God's intention to redeem a people for himself from all the nations. Now, there's one more crucial point that needs to be made from this text and that's the role of the Holy Spirit. Jesus immediately brings it into the picture, brings the Holy Spirit into the picture. He calls him the promise of my Father being clothed with power from on high. Peter figured out on the day of Pentecost that that's what Jesus was talking about and he preaches a sermon in which from the Old Testament from Joel chapter 2 in which he says what's happening now is fulfillment of that promise of what the day of the Lord would be like.
So it fits the Old Testament storyline. The day of the Lord, the day of Messiah is also the day of the outpouring of the Holy Spirit. See, the Holy Spirit wasn't just promised by Jesus during his days on earth. The Holy Spirit had been promised by God the Father centuries before. And the point here is that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of missions. He is given to empower proclamation.
Forty days later, Jesus is going to say the same thing. Acts 1, 8, you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. The Holy Spirit is given to make you a missionary.
That's why you have him. Now, a lot of our focus on the Spirit is on the gifts of the Spirit, especially on the supernatural and the dramatic. Sometimes, and quite importantly, our focus is on the fruit of the Spirit, which are the true marks of his presence.
I mean, when the Holy Spirit's in someone's life, that person is being remade into the image of Jesus, and the fruit of the Spirit is simply a description of his character. But in the Gospels and in Acts, the focus is on the Spirit as the power for proclamation. John 16, when he's talking about the role of the comforter, the role of the encourager, he's going to make that connection that the Holy Spirit is going to empower them to witness.
In John 20, Jesus says, as the Father has sent me, I am sending you, and then he breathes on him and says, receive the Holy Spirit, because those two go hand in hand. Shows up in Acts 2, where the point was demonstrated, the Holy Spirit's poured out, and an incredible evangelistic sermon is preached that results in 3,000 people from all over the known world coming to faith in Jesus. Acts 431, after the apostles have been persecuted really significantly for the first time, and they are warned never to preach again in Jesus' name, and they go back to where they're staying, and they don't ask for protection.
They ask for boldness. And we're told that they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continued to speak the Word of God with boldness. It shows up in Acts 6 and 7. Stephen was filled with the Holy Spirit and preached an amazing evangelistic sermon right before he's martyred. Acts 13, it's the Holy Spirit who says to the assembled elders of the church at Antioch, set apart Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them, and then they are sent out on the first intentional missionary journey. The Holy Spirit is the spirit of evangelism and missions, and one of the keys to knowing whether or not a person or a church is a spirit-filled person or church is there a passion for missions.
And if there's not, there's good reason to question whether it's actually the Holy Spirit of God who's the one at work. So to summarize this, Jesus saw the entire Old Testament pointing to Him, and He also saw the entire Old Testament pointing to the day of global mission. The Great Commission was not a bolt out of the blue but rather the logical conclusion of the entire Old Testament. And then the entire New Testament is a missionary story. From Acts on, what we have is the story of them obeying what Jesus told them to do. They took the gospel as far as they could and it was still going out when the Bible ends, and we are in that same period of history right now. It's a story still going on and we are part of it.
Well, what should we do about that? What should believers today here do about what Jesus has said here? For one thing I would strongly commend to you, interpret the Bible the same way Jesus did. See it as a connected narrative. Pay attention to the plot line when you're interpreting any part of it. See it pointing to Him, and see it equally pointing to global mission.
But then most critically, I would encourage you to obey what He says here. This is the point of this point of human history. The point of right now is not who's in the White House, it's not what's going on militarily or economically or culturally around us. A million years ago from now when we look back, those are going to be footnotes. And what's going to matter is the advance of the gospel.
And brothers and sisters, the job is not even close to being done yet. The reality is that well over half the world's population has no access to the gospel. And the population of the world is exploding. The year I was born there were 2.8 billion people on earth. Today there are 8 billion people on earth. Of those 8 billion, 4 billion have no access to the gospel at all.
None. Of the other 4 billion, although they might technically have access, most in practical terms, have none. As best as we can tell, the world's about 7 percent evangelical, which means about 7 percent of the population of the world, when they die, will be reconciled to God and go to heaven.
And the rest will face the judgment that we all deserve. And the solution to that problem is the gospel and the gospel alone. And that 7 percent is concentrated right here where we live. We have amazing resources.
When God called me into missions, it was hearing a missionary speaker who told me for the first time about unreached peoples and also said, look at it this way, about 90 percent of the full-time Christian workers in the world are in North America ministering to the most evangelized 7 percent of the world's population. So if you see 10 people carrying a telephone pole and nine are at one end and one's at the other, which end do you go to to help? Most of us join the nine. There's a desperate need for the one.
But let me also add this. As intimidating as it may seem to think about this, the power of God to save is equally valid everywhere. The Lord called us to a 13 million person unengaged unreached people group who are made up of Muslims. When we got there, we found one believer. Humanly speaking, everybody told us it can't be done.
It's impossible. Well, within a few years, we had about 8,000 followers of Jesus among our people. The gospel can save.
Humanly speaking, it's impossible, but the gospel can save. The Bible says that unbelievers are dead in their trespasses and sins. And as best as I can tell, dead is dead. And a dead Afghan is no more dead than a dead American.
It takes a miracle in both cases, and God is in the business of raising the dead, and He can do it as well in other places as He can right here. So we need to take this seriously. It is incumbent on every church and every believer to obey what Jesus has said in one form or another, to be engaged in giving the gospel to the nations. So what should that mean for you? I would like to say, first of all, that if you're not a believer, what it means for you is that you need to repent and believe. Let me remind you of the gospel that is preached in this church. That's the gospel that we find in God's Word, and that gospel says that there is a God, and you're accountable to Him.
He knows everything you think, everything you say, everything you do, everything you feel, and His standard of judgment is His own perfection. He cannot coexist with evil. The problem is that every one of us is a rebel against that God. Every one of us has sinned against Him.
Every one of us has offended Him. None of us love Him with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength, or love our neighbors as ourselves. None of us, every human being on the planet, if judged justly, would be sent to hell. But rather than leave us to what we have earned for ourselves, God did something amazing. He became one of us in the person of Jesus, who did live the perfect life we should have lived but haven't, and then died the death we deserve to die in our place. He paid the penalty for our sins. He bore on Himself the wrath that we deserve for our rebellion against God. He truly died, but then He conquered sin and death by rising again. He ascended into heaven, sits at the right hand of His Father, sent out His Holy Spirit, sent His people into the world with this message that everyone who repents and believes, that is to say, who doesn't 180, who lays down their arms in their rebellion against God, who surrenders to God, and who puts their trust in Jesus and in Jesus alone, everyone who does that will be reconciled to God, will have their sins forgiven, will be adopted as His child, and will be guaranteed eternity of infinite joy and glory in His presence.
And if you have never made that commitment, that is the most important decision facing you in your life. And I would urge you to repent and believe today. There's plenty of people in this room that can help you, or whatever, or the rooms at your campus that can help you with that.
What about the believers, though? I just want to commend four things to you. Learn, pray, give, and go. First, learn. Learn God's Word and learn God's world. Start reading the Bible with eyes open to see God's global intentions as you read it, and make that part of growing as a disciple yourself.
We define missionary as simply a disciple of Jesus, who makes disciples for Jesus, where Jesus is not yet known. That first part is being a disciple yourself. And you need to be a disciple to be any kind of useful Christian, and the Bible has no concept of a Christian who's not a disciple. There's no such thing as nominal Christianity in the Word of God. So I encourage you to learn and grow as a disciple, and I encourage you to do it in the context of your local church.
That's the instrument that God ordained to walk alongside all of us to help us to grow maturity in Jesus, and in which we walk alongside each other to help each other grow to maturity in Jesus. So go deep and intentional in your local church. Also, though, get to know God's world. We tend to be very local, very narrow in our perspective on things.
God's heart's for the nations, and we tend to not know a whole lot about it. And I would encourage you to get to know the world that God has sent us into. Get a map of the world and put it up on your wall. Read international news and see what's going on. Read news from missionaries.
The IMB website, imb.org, has a ton of information about what's happening globally in the advance of the gospel. Learn about that, and then turn what you learn into fuel for prayer. We talk about prayer not because it's expected, because we're Christians and it's sort of the pious thing you do before and after you start a meeting. We talk about prayer because we believe that we are up against enemies that are too strong for us, but not too strong for God.
We do not wage our war against flesh and blood, but there are spiritual, cultural, religious, and governmental enemies against the spread of the gospel that are stronger than you and me, but they are no match for God. And what that means is we need to be on our knees pleading for Him to do what only He can do, and we cannot. We have seen time and again that in answer to the prayers of God's people, God has done amazing things.
There's a people group in the middle of Afghanistan who are as remote and were as unreached as you could possibly imagine. Several years ago, they were the featured group to pray for on Pentecost Sunday, and a lot of churches and agencies around the world focused prayer on them. And from that day, we can trace an amazing movement of the Spirit of God in which thousands of them have come to faith in Jesus, and it starts with the prayers of God's saints focused in on it.
God, for reasons we don't quite understand, is pleased to do what He does in response to prayer. There was one time I was evacuating a couple of people for medical reasons, and it was not easy to arrange the evacuation. There happened to be a couple of people that my mom had met and knew about and was praying for. Several days later, she called me and said, what was going on with so-and-so and so-and-so at this time? It was four o'clock in the morning for me. God woke me up and had me pray for them. It was the exact time I was working to evacuate them. God does amazing things in response to prayer, and I think the reason He does is because He gets all the glory from that.
I mean, it was really clear that it was not my cleverness that got them out of that country. It was the Spirit of God, and it was, of all things, the Spirit of God that was connected somehow to the prayers of my mother in the middle of the night, halfway around the world. Be a person of prayer. I would encourage you. You guys send out a lot of missionaries. By the way, 2024, you are the biggest missionary-sending church in the Southern Baptist Convention. You sent out more than any other church in the SBC last year. You are responsible for them, and you are responsible for laboring in prayer for them. I hope this church ends up full of bloody knees, because you are on your knees interceding for them and praying that God would empower them to do the work He sent them to do. So learn, pray. We also will mention that there's a need for resources, so give.
Now, you guys do. Thank you. I'm very grateful for the support that you give through the cooperative program and the Lottie Moon Christmas offering. It enables missionaries with the IMB to focus on being missionaries and not on being fundraisers.
It's estimated that those who raise their own support individually spend 40% of their time doing so. Our missionaries, supported by you and your church, are able to spend all of that time sharing the gospel and discipling believers and planting churches. But we want to send many more, and that's going to take more resources. So I would simply encourage you to have a wartime mentality. That's why John Piper talks about that in Let the Nations Be Glad, and he refers back to World War II. My parents grew up during World War II. I heard the stories that people would very carefully steward their resources so that everything was available for the war effort.
It's like, we can sort of enjoy things later. We'll do what we need to do to support our family, but we're going to make sure that the war effort has what it needs. Well, brothers and sisters, we are in a far more serious war than World War II was. We are in a war for the souls of men, women, and children, and we need to view ourselves not as owners but stewards of what we have and to invest it in things that matter for all eternity. So learn, pray, and give, but ultimately none of that will do any good unless you also go.
And here's where I hope to make you uncomfortable. Most of us think, I will stay where I am unless God does something really, really dramatic to show me that I'm supposed to go somewhere else. I propose that we flip that on its head. The command of Jesus is clear. The need of the world is clear.
The resources to carry out that command are here. So instead of thinking, I'll stay where I am unless God tells me to go, the mindset of every Christian is, I will go where I'm needed most unless God directs me otherwise. And let me clear up three misconceptions. I think a lot of folks think, okay, missionaries are young people. Well, yes, we need young people. We very much need young people. We need healthy young people who can do things that are physically rigorous. But we also need older people.
We have revived our master's program for retirees. See, most of the world has a more biblical understanding of age than the United States does. Most of the world respects age. And I can give testimony. There used to be hair up here, and this used to be red. And when this fell out and this turned white, I was able to be much bolder in my evangelism among Muslims because they had to listen to an old man.
They had to listen to a white beard. And if you still have the physical health, why waste your retirement? Invest it in the spread of the gospel. I think also we sometimes think that missions is just for preacher types.
Well, yes, it is. But most of the places where the gospel is needed most, you can't go as a missionary. But you can go as a doctor or nurse or dentist or medical technician. You can go as an accountant or a business person of any kind. You can go as an engineer. You can go as an artist. You can go as a sports coach.
And I coached the sport of American football at a Central Asian university and won a national championship. It can be done. The point is that whatever skill you have, you can leverage for the advance of the gospel. And then the third misconception to clear up, the third issue to address, is it dangerous? We hear that all the time. Well, yeah, of course it's dangerous. But so what? Before I ever went overseas, I joined the army. And you want to know something? When I joined the military, nobody said, but isn't it dangerous? I was literally signing up to get shot at.
And nobody said, isn't it dangerous? When I became a missionary, that's all I heard. Does that mean then that in our minds, it's okay to risk your life for your country, but not for your savior? Does that mean that national security of our nation is more valuable than the salvation of people around the world?
And I would say no. But the point is that as Christians, the purpose of our existence is to live for him. We're not living for the American dream anymore. We're not even living for comfort or safety or prosperity. We are living to the praise of his glory and for the advance of his agenda in the world.
And that is global missions. And if the worst happens, and we die, we go straight into glory we can't even imagine. So brothers and sisters, let me simply urge this. Before you go to bed tonight, go before God and take your whole life and lay it before him.
Say, I'm yours. I will go wherever you want me to go. I will pay whatever you want me to pay, whatever price you want me to pay, because I exist for you and for your glory.
And then you will have a freedom that you can't even imagine. And you will see what God does through your life. Let me pray for you. Father, I'm grateful to you for this church. I'm grateful to you for the deep, deep passion and heart of the pastors of this church to see the nation's reach with the gospel. I'm grateful to you for the number of missionaries who have come out of this church. And Father, I pray that you would work right now in the hearts and minds of those who can hear me work in those who don't know you to draw them to yourself. And then those who do know you to feel that glorious free sense of abandonment, that we can just abandon everything and be available to you to do whatever you want us to do and go wherever you want us to go. And I pray that you would continue to make Mercy Hill Church a missionary factory that sends people to the nations in a steady stream. And I pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
