Kick-Starting a Plan to Reach the World, Part 3

When the resurrected Lord appeared to His disciples in Galilee, He gave them their final marching orders. Jesus told them to go and make disciples of all the nations. Sometimes we read those familiar words in Matthew 28 and assume that Jesus was speaking to evangelists or missionaries. Today on Insight for Living, Chuck Swindoll reminds us that the great commission of Jesus applies to us all, and he's explaining how this exciting role can be implemented in our spheres of influence today.

Let's pick up the study that Chuck called Kickstarting a Plan to Reach the World. You are going to be my witnesses telling people about me everywhere, but it doesn't stop there. This eighth verse is wonderful in that it gives an outline of the book of Acts. You'll testify of me, you'll be my witnesses first, in Jerusalem. That's where they were. Right here in the city, start where you are. Great principle of evangelism. You don't have to go to a mission field to begin to be an evangelist.

You start right where you are. You'll be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, and Samaria. To the end of the earth, ever been to a place in your travels when you felt like you had reached the... if it wasn't the end of the world, you said you felt like you could see it from there? I had a friend who went to the very, very, very base of the continent of Africa. They stood with his feet getting wet on the waters as they washed up on the shores, and he said, I realized I had never, ever been so far from home in all my life. And he wrote, it was like being at the end of the earth. To him, that would be there. To someone else, it would be in the depth of a country that's dark. Or a remote island whose name you can hardly pronounce. The end of the earth, meaning you take the message everywhere.

Everywhere. Your Samaria would be the people that you would not normally have anything to do with, or your parents wouldn't, who taught you wrong because they taught you to be prejudiced. Or your friends, who were racists, and they passed that along and you imbibed it, maybe. And you realize God means business when he's touching you in an area of your own struggle.

You got to deal with it. Because when you have the heart of a true witness, nobody is out of bounds. Nobody is a gutter drunk. Nobody is worthless or on the page of a black book.

Nobody is unforgivable. That's what it means by the ends of the earth, you name it. And wherever God may lead, however he may open doors, you go there, you speak of him there. You're involved with him there. You represent him there. Your world may be rather limited, admittedly. You may not travel much, but you have extensive part of your own world.

It includes that as well. That's what he means here when he says to the ends of the earth. Now watch closely. You've got the point. Now look at the event that would clarify the whole thing.

Verse 9. After saying this, listen to me. It was over. No more instructions.

No more asking questions and taking notes and dialoguing. It's over. And they're listening to him and suddenly they are... And we read, while they were watching, he was taken up and into a cloud and they could no longer see him. This is a great time for me to say this is not mere black print on white pages. This is an event that was life changing to men in transition.

Discycling, that's over. The baton of apostleship, it's theirs. Every one of them had a baton. Every one of them engaged in the relay.

And as they stand there with that baton, they're looking up. Don McMahon gave me a book several weeks ago entitled Command and Control. It's an insightful book on the development of the Titan missile. It takes you back into the era of the early to mid 40s when the whole experimentation related to the atom and the atom bomb, the splitting of the atom, the development of the bomb.

Regardless of your conviction, I don't care. I'm not about that. I'm talking about the book that goes back there and then it led to a defense system that was developed, the day under Ronald Reagan, as these Titan missiles were sunk into massive holes in the earth. Are you aware that some of them stood seven to eight stories in length in the ground covered over with a warhead on top, a nuclear warhead, intercontinental ballistic missiles.

It's the story of those who built them, serviced them, and made their mistakes in the process as well as succeeded in other ways. It does something to you when you read the story of those powerful weapons that could wipe out a city, and they were proliferating in our land to defend us from countries that had them and were proliferating there. And it was this Cold War standoff.

And I look back to my life in the 70s and 80s and I remembered where we were and what we were doing and how little of this I was aware of or at least in detail. And now I'm reading in detail about these massive missiles. It tells of one that lifts off. It says it was like a seven-story silver bullet with a roar so loud you couldn't hear anything else. And one of the writers said he was amazed when he saw it for the first time that there were those men who were willing to place themselves on the point of one of those rockets to go into space and we called them astronauts. And he said as I stood and watched it, it was frightening as this soulless tube lifted from the Earth into the sky.

He stared until he said the tale of it was over Mexico as it soared on. And when I read this, I thought of that. I thought of these simple men, never seen the inside of a seminary, never been to a serious Bible school in their life, never ran with a sophisticated crowd, they're just guys with a baton and a calling that says take my message, I'm gone. And they're staring.

And I'm actually like you, I think what did they think? Well, you know they thought much because they're staring. They're what we call spellbound. They've had him with them all along and now he's gone.

They're on their own. Well, as much as you can be with an omnipresent God and the promise of the Holy Spirit that they're hanging onto. But look at what the Lord does.

Verse 10, I love this. As they strained to see him rising into heaven, two white robed men suddenly stood among them. Now, they're called men because they look like men. Angels manifest themselves in various ways.

They can be animals, they can be humans, they can be gigantic, they can be small, whatever. In this case, they're like men. In this case, they're wearing white robes and they have something to say to these stargazers. They say, men of Galilee, why are you standing here staring into heaven? Jesus has been taken from you into heaven. But someday he will return from heaven in the same way you saw him go.

Look at that promise. Just as you've seen him lift off, he will come back. We don't doubt the lift off.

Why would anyone doubt the coming back? In fact, you live in the light of it, in the hope of it. And the point is, you have more to do than stand and stare into heaven. You've got that baton. You have a calling. Remember, Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the remotest, the end of the earth, witness for me. I pulled a John R.W.

Stott's book on Acts off my shelf and found these helpful words. There was something fundamentally anomalous, and the word means different or irregular, about their gazing up into the sky when they had been commissioned to go to the ends of the earth. Now follow Stott.

Listen to this. It was the earth, not the sky, which was to be their preoccupation. Their calling was to be witnesses, not stargazers. The vision they were to cultivate was not upwards in nostalgia to the heaven which had received Jesus, but outwards in compassion to a lost world which needed him.

It is the same for us. Curiosity about heaven and its occupants, speculation about prophecy and its fulfillment, and obsession with times and seasons. These are aberrations which distract us from our God-given mission, to which I say amen and amen and amen. Christ will come personally, visibly, gloriously. Of that, we have been assured.

Other details can wait. Meanwhile, we have work to do in the power of the Spirit. My, truer words are never spoken.

You know our problem? It's what I call that vacuous uncertainty. No two weeks are the same. This is the Lord's day, the day I'm speaking. You have no clue what Monday holds.

None. Not a person here can guarantee anyone else what will occur on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon. It's uncertain.

And some are so caught up in the worry of uncertainty, they've forgotten the promise. That when we take his message, he will honor it. He will use it.

He will make it effective. Oswald Chambers in his book, My Utmost for His Highest, writes, Naturally we are inclined to be so mathematical in calculating that we look upon uncertainty as a bad thing. Certainty is the mark of the common sense life. Gracious uncertainty is the mark of the spiritual life.

What an insightful comment. To be certain of God means that we are uncertain in all our ways. We do not know what a day may bring forth. This is generally said with a sigh of sadness. It should rather be an expression of breathless expectation.

I love that. Living our lives on tiptoe, never knowing what a day will bring, only knowing that God, our sovereign God, is in charge. Opening doors, presenting us with glorious moments of opportunity. When the door opens, watch.

And it closes. And when it opens, we go through. We speak. We serve him faithfully. We make him known. Rather than grieving over the closed doors, we look for the open opportunities.

And they're all about us. Which brings me briefly now to these three lessons I learned from what we have discovered today. Number one, to embrace an uncertain future, God's promise must be remembered. Remember his promise? I am with you always. I am with you always. He is with you on Monday. He is with you on Wednesday. He will be with you on Thursday afternoon. I am with you always, and in light of that promise, uncertainty doesn't bother us.

I have the Savior with me, and Christ and I go together through this journey, whatever it may bring. Here's the second lesson. To implement an effective plan, the right people must be engaged. You learn that when you run an organization. Wrong person in the wrong place can mess up the whole outfit. But you get the right people in the right seat on the right bus going in the right direction.

It's fabulous. These were 11 right people who had been prepared as well as they could have been, and now they were left with the baton. They're ready to run that relay. To implement an effective plan, the right people must be engaged.

Now the third you would anticipate. To reach an ever-challenging world, Spirit-led power must be involved. We dare not do it in the flesh. We face the future in the power of the Spirit. We build this church in the power of the Spirit. We face tomorrow in the power of the Spirit. We represent the Savior in the power of the Spirit. By the way, you may feel strangely out of all this because you don't know Jesus. All of us talk about Jesus and the transition and when Jesus was there and when he left and would be coming back.

That's all gobbledygook because you don't know what it is to believe in, to have your life guided by your sins forgiven through the Lord Jesus Christ. So let's take care of that. Bow with me, will you?

Just sit tightly right there. If you've never trusted in Jesus, what in the world are you waiting for? If it's thinking the world is going to get better and then you'll have a better opportunity, don't go there. On the authority of the Scriptures, I can tell you it will only get worse. Times will only become more treacherous.

More and more savages will fill this earth. If you want to know power and strength and the ability to go on beyond our times, you've got to go hand in hand with Christ. So just come to the Lord right now in a simple prayer.

Acknowledge that you haven't anything within yourself to impress him, really nothing in your own strength could do that. Tell him that you truly need the Savior and you trust him now. And then you get a hold of us. That we might help you in a journey as you begin a walk that's like no other walk you've ever started. And if you're a believer and not engaged in what we call the mission, the plan to reach the world, you're missing it. In your own environment, your own world, your own occupation, what a privilege it is to represent Christ, to make him known from one day to the next.

He will honor that and give you the power for it. Thank you, dear Father, for the hope there is through Christ and only through Christ. Thank you for helping us see the vision, a vision of the nations being reached through Christ right to the ends of the earth.

A vision that includes overcoming prejudices and racism so that no one is marked off as untouchable or unreachable. Help us to realize that you want to use us just as we are, doing your work just as you have planned. Encourage us with this passionate word from your book as we begin our way across the bridge toward real living. In the name of Jesus, we pray. Everybody said, Amen.

Amen. You're listening to the Bible teaching of Chuck Swindoll on Insight for Living. Chuck titled today's message, Kickstarting a Plan to Reach the World. To learn more about the ministry of Insight for Living, please visit us online at insightworld.org. We know many in our listening family are curious, but perhaps uncertain, about this matter of following Jesus.

To learn more about what it means to follow God, we invite you to check out our website. Just go to insight.org. Let me mention that web address again, insight.org. If you're brand new to this daily Bible teaching program, you probably wouldn't know that Insight for Living is made possible not through the sponsorship of a large church or religious institution, but through the voluntary financial gifts of those who wanted you to have access to Chuck's teaching. In that respect, those who give to Insight for Living have a ministry all their own. You see, when you give to this nonprofit ministry, you're the one who's touching a life with God's grace, not only here at home, but all around the world. Your loyalty and faithful giving, sometimes over the course of many years, has allowed us to reach more people than we ever dreamed possible. Chuck, it's remarkable to look back and realize that Insight for Living has been carried on AM and FM radio stations for more than 40 years. Times have changed since 1979, and today the program is offered through a variety of channels.

That's right, Dave. Insight for Living started more than 40 years ago as a radio ministry, long before the internet and mobile phones came along. Today we're using every digital platform imaginable, and most of them are pretty unfamiliar to this preacher, I can tell you that. A lot has changed in 40 years, but gratefully, God's message of grace never changes. No matter what technology we use, God accomplishes his purposes when we simply expose people to the sweet aroma, his grace.

Let me put some skin on that statement. Because of the financial gifts that listeners like you gave, this year we heard from lonely commuters who rely on us to give them companionship and biblical insight as they travel to and from work. We heard from devoted pastors who trust us as a mentor to teach them how to search the scriptures and feed their own flocks grace-filled messages. We also heard from stressed-out students who live on campuses where their Christian faith and their moral boundaries are regularly tested. We heard from single moms who manage their households and work full-time jobs without any help. And we heard from wives and husbands who have lost their partners through death or divorce. They all tell their own personal stories of heartbreak and brokenness, and their discovery of God's grace, and their reliance upon his word as taught on insightful living.

And by the way, that's where you come in. If you have given to our ministry, you have helped carry this message of God's grace to people all across the world, people who crave it. This Christmas season, I'm asking you to step forward and help someone else unwrap the priceless gift of God's grace. Would you do that, please? You can do it right now by giving generously to Insight for Living Ministries. When all of us, me included, invest financially in this urgent cause, then together we become the fragrance of God's grace to those who desperately need his unconditional love. Let's do this together, and let's do it today. Thanks so much. Getting in touch and responding to Chuck Swindoll is easy.

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