The Work of the Kingdom
Well, I haven’t been here in a couple weeks and it is good to be together with God’s family and worshipping together. I am hoping you are in the mood a hear some of God’s word. So that is where we are going to turn now. I am going to invite you to follow along as we look at Matthew, starting at the 9th chapter, verses 35 through 38. (Matthew 9:35-38)
35Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and sickness. 36When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37Then he said to his disciples, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.”
God’s word for us this morning. I invite you to join me as we pray once again.
Lord God, Thank you for your word, thank you for the way it speaks to us. And Lord we ask that by the power of your Spirit that you would indeed quicken our hearts to hear what your Spirit has for us this day. Lord that is what we are asking, in your name. Amen.
Well I haven’t been here for a couple weeks because I was on a retreat last week and all the guys that went with us had a great time and all the rest of you guys will be invited to join us next year. Before that we did a little thing called “Community Days of Service” and that is where I want to start today. I want to simply ask a question, how many of you participated in our “Community Days of Service” two weeks ago? Raise your hand. Fantastic! That’s wonderful. That’s what we want to be about. We want to continue to grow that. That is something that will continue as we move through the years as an annual event. Now, out of that, how many of you that served, how many of you thought that you were witnessing on that day? Raise your hand. O.K. And for those of you who raised your hand, how many of you actually had a chance to verbalize your faith in some way as you were serving. O.K. I say that not to shame us, not to guilt us in any way, but really to kind of set the stage for us, because what I want us to do is to start thinking about how we witness to our faith and how we are able to express it and how those things fit together. That is what we want to look at today. O.K. Because often when we read a passage like this, I don’t know about you but I know when I read that passage, there is always this kind of twinge that builds up in me. It is like, O.K. I have to go door-to-door, I have to walk up to complete strangers and I have to share the gospel with them. And if I am not doing that I am somehow not being faithful to Christ to go and make disciples of all nations. I think that is what many of us were taught, that is what many of us were told to practice, and as a result I think there is a lot of guilt around it because we haven’t done a good enough job.
Right after college I went to a youth worker’s convention. In that convention I was able to hear Bill Bright. Bill Bright was the founder of Campus Crusade for Christ. He shared an impassioned message about the need to share the gospel and to use a track that is called the Four Spiritual Laws and be able to use that from memory. Well, after he finished I felt guilty about not being able to do a better job and I thought: Now is the time. I am going to start doing something different. Well that afternoon I was in the pool at the hotel where this conference was and I was swimming. I saw this guy sitting on the edge of the pool with his legs in the water and I thought: here’s my chance. So there began this conversation of how do I do this? I thought I am just going to go up to him and say: Hey, how’s it going? Then I thought: Oh, that is a stupid way to start. What am I going to do? You know, wait a sec, O.K.: Jesus loves you and has a great plan for your life. No. that’s silly. I had this running dialogue in my mind for like five minutes. Eventually I just got up the courage and said: I have to do it. So I go over to him and honestly I don’t remember what I said. I was very nervous but it turns out that he was at the conference, too. Who would have thunk it?
You know, isn’t that the experience for many of us, you know this idea of this conversation that goes back and forward in our head. I think that is because we are starting at the wrong place. I think we have that process backwards. I think when we start talking about our faith that should be our last step, rather than the first step. I think that the result is that there are many people who don’t know Christ, don’t want to know him, because of the way we have approached this whole business of witnessing. Take a look at this video and see if this rings some bells.
(start video)
-Some people stop by dropping off papers and try to come in and talk to us.
-Well I have been approached several times.
-Not recently. No.
-Some evangelist on T.V.
-I just feel very uncomfortable with evangelism.
-First thing they ask me is, Am I saved? Do I love Jesus?
-Everybody is doing it and you are going to go to hell.
-They know I am wrong and they tell me that I am going to go to hell.
-I happen to be Jewish and I also find it very intrusive when anyone tries to push their views on me. I’ll be glad to sit and discuss this with anyone.
-If it is pushy, in your face, it turns me off big time.
-They come to you like, We must save you
-They come with that whole purpose in life giving you their views.
-Their conversations are usually so one-sided
-They go out with zeal to share this truth that we do not have rooted in our own person. They are painting a false picture of what nice people do
-You start to be the opposite of what people call, if you want to say, Christian
-there is this perception out there in the marketplace that a lot of people are doing this. But statistically it is not true. Very few people participate in this because it is not doable for them.
(end video)
Alright, so what I want us to do is to consider a different approach, a different approach to being the good news of Christ to our world. If telling others about our faith then is the last step rather than the first step, let’s take that and let’s begin to work backwards from there and see if there is a more natural flow about sharing our faith. With that I want to start with a story.
It is a story about a woman named Teresa who was driving a dented Toyota and was in line at a Taco Bell. You see, she was a single mom with one kid and lived check to check on a welfare check. She was ten days away from getting her next check, but she was out of money and here is what she says: She looked under seat cushions, under the seat in the car and in the glove box and all she came up with was a grand total of $4.58. It had been a hard week, she was thinking, and well, there was no way they were going to make it through to the next check so why not go out in style. So they went to Taco Bell. When they got to the drive through window she said I was never so shocked in all my life, the guy standing in the window had a big grin on his face, (now I don’t know if that was the big shock…) had a big grin on his face and he said, “This is your lucky day. The people in front of you paid for your entire meal and they said to give you this card.” The card read I hope this small act of service shows you God’s love in a practical way. “But I have to tell you,” she says, “what they did for me and my eight year old son was no small act of love, it was huge. We were in exactly the right place at the right time to receive this touch from God when we needed it most.” She goes on to say later on that, in fact, she went to church for the first time that next day.
Jesus when he was with his disciples he washed their feet and he said “I am washing your feet… as an example of how you are to live, to do what I have done.” Before that he said, “I have come to serve, not to be served.” So service I believe is the door that opens to verbalizing your faith, because when we serve, it does a couple of things for us. One of the things I think it does is it creates relational connections when we serve. It creates relationships because we are serving someone. It puts us in relationship with them and when we are in relationship with them it creates a more inviting atmosphere where faith can be seen and where faith can be received. I think that that is one of the things that service does.
One of the other things it does is I think it also puts us in the position of being lower than the one we serve. It puts us not in a position of power or of dominance but rather in a position of humility. So when we are serving in that kind of a lower position I think it makes what we do and what we say more open to be received.
Whenever I think of this kind of idea as a beginning place for service, I always think of the quote from Jim Rayburn. Jim Rayburn was the founder of Young Life and he said, “You have to earn the right to be heard.” It is a great line and I think that is exactly what service does. Service helps us earn the right to be heard. I think that is why service is one of those keys for our vision statement. Where you see it says share our abundant grace in our communities, you could substitute in there, service. When you serve you are doing that.
So working backwards, we need to serve before we verbalize our faith. Before we serve I think then the next step is we must bring love. Now love and service are very closely tied together. But I think love is what serves as our foundation. In 1 Corinthians 13, Paul in that very great love chapter says that “if I speak eloquently like angels in heaven, but have not love, I am like a banging cymbal.” It would be as if I were to sit in with the band and play the drums. It would be ugly. See love is what motivates us to serve. Love is what motivates us to speak and that love comes directly from God. Love is what motivated the Father to send the Son, his love for you and his love for me. But love only motivates us when we receive it from God, when he pours it into our life to the point where it begins to overflow around us into the people in our lives. So God pours it and he fills us to overflowing. We are not designed to hoard it but rather to let it flow out of us.
I want to give you an example of a woman who first let love kind of overflow in her life and what it kind of looked like. It is a story of a woman named Lynn and she met another woman named Gail at a Christmas party at their husbands’ office. As they did a little small chit-chat talk, they both realized they were stay at home moms. As the story continued Gail had just moved into the area and had three young children all under the age of three. (How many moms want to sign up for that?) Well that was kind of Lynn’s reaction too. Lynn said, “I have one under four and I am going crazy. I can’t imagine how she is getting through.” She said, “I was getting warn out just thinking about it.” Then she said, “That is why I didn’t think about it after that conversation.”
But then she also adds that she was just growing in her relationship with God. She was beginning to follow Jesus and she was just beginning to go through this prayer thing. In the process of that as she was praying, Gail came on her mind. She thought, O.k. I will pray for Gail. So she prayed that God would provide someone to give Gail a day off from her parenting duties, and she thought: man, am I a sensitive Christian or what? Well she finished her prayer and God began to nudge her; began to nudge her and say, “You know what? You are the one that can answer that prayer.” So she kind of thought about that and she wasn’t real excited about that; but God continued to work with her. After a couple of weeks she said, “O.K. I will do it.” So Lynn called Gail and she said “You know I enjoyed meeting you a couple of weeks ago and I want to let you know that I am calling you because I am convinced your heavenly Father loves you so much he wants to give you a day off.” Now as you might expect, Gail didn’t really didn’t know what to do with that and after a few minutes of awkward silence, Lynn goes: O.K. let me get going here. She said, “I’m serious. You pick a day, I will come over, I will take care of your kids at 9:00 in the morning, you can be gone as long as you want, and I will take care of everything.” At that point, Gail, still not quite sure, trying to do the very polite thing, trying to back out said, “Well you know I appreciate it, let me think about it.” But Lynn pressed on. She said, “Just pick a day, really. I will come over. If you don’t pick a day then I am just going to show up one day.” In the end Lynn says, that is how it happened. She showed up at her door. First and foremost she had to convince Gail that she wasn’t a criminal or crazy. She finally convinced her she would take care of the kids. At that point Lynn said, “You know, I don’t care what you do with the day but I have reserved this hotel room for you and if you feel like you just want to get away in a nice place and take a nap, go ahead and use it. If not, that is O.K. Don’t feel you have to use it.” Well Gail left. Gail was gone to 9:30 that evening. When she got home, guess what? The kids were in bed, her husband was watching T.V., and there was dinner waiting for her. As you might imagine, with a smile on her face, Gail said, “Tell me why again you did this.” She said, “Simply because your heavenly Father wants you to know that he loves you.”
Well the story goes that something happened to Gail that day. She realized how much she had been suffocating, how hard it had been for her. So she began to ask for help, ask for help from her husband, and begin to say are there others out there that might be able to help me. Lo and behold, those people began to step up and begin to help her.
Well you would think that would be a great answer to prayer, wouldn’t you? But it doesn’t end there. A couple weeks later, Gail called Lynn and she goes, “One more time. Tell me why you did this?” And Lynn said, “Because your heavenly Father wants you to know that he loves you.” At that point you could hear her crying in the background on the other end. She goes, “I want to know this Jesus.” And that began a friendship with Jesus. She understood that she needed a Savior. She began to follow Jesus and the story goes that about a few months later Gail joined a church and guess what? She started a ministry. She started a ministry designed to give practical help to those with young children.
“We love because he first loved us.” Love is the reason we serve. Love is the reason we speak of what we received. That is why our vision speaks to that. Be filled with his love that is the idea. Be filled with his love so that it overflows out of us into those around us. So verbalizing our faith gives way to service and it comes out of loving. But before that loving can take hold, we have to be in a place where we can love, which means we have to go into the world. Before God saved us, he sent us a Savior, didn’t he? Before Isaiah became a prophet, he was sent. Before Abraham became a father of many nations, he was sent. Before verbalizing our witness, before serving, before showing love, we must go. We must enter into the world. We must enter in as those who bring love, who bring service to our world. Yes there are dangers in the world. Paul tells us not to be conformed to the world. Jesus tells us that he sends us out as sheep among wolves, not a good environment to walk into, but nonetheless we are to go. We can’t let those dangers detour us from our mission to be salt and to be light in our world. So we are not to cocoon in away from the world, but rather to live in it looking for opportunities to love and to serve and eventually to verbalize our faith because we know that that is the progression.
So my question to you is, as you live in your world, where God is nudging you? Where is God nudging you? For someone it is collection boots to give away to those who have none. For others it is sending a bouquet of flowers to someone who they know needs it. What is sticking in your thoughts that you just can’t kind of shake? One of the things that has been on my heart lately is Feed My Starving Children. Maybe it came out of the things two weeks ago but for Les and I that is the place we are starting. It is not big, but it is where we are starting – that we are going to serve once a month. Two hours, that is such a small amount to give but it makes such a huge difference. What is it for you? With this idea of being open to God’s prompting, to God’s nudging in your life, and with that, I want to tell you the story of Sondra.
Sondra is a building maintenance worker in a local church here in the city. She learned all about grace after going through an Unidos en Cristo weekend. As a result of that her prayer was Lord how can I make a difference? What do you want me to do? And that was her prayer. What do you want me to do? She said that God spoke to her. God spoke to her and said “I want you to create a place for women, a safe place for women, not just any women but women that are coming out of rehab treatment whether it is from drugs or alcohol, or whatever.” She didn’t know how she was going to do it. She didn’t know what that meant. So she began to kind of share what God was laying on her heart. Before she knew it, God had dropped a house into her lap on the north side of Minneapolis. Yah, it needed some work and, oh by the way, you need a couple of women to live in it. God provided, this summer, a group of youth from Youth With a Mission to do the rehab necessary on it. There were two women who wanted to be a part of it because they didn’t want to be in the typical halfway houses that are sometimes just as bad as being on the street, or where they came from. These women are helping pay for that house. And Voila! The first Sober House is born.
Sondra said she wanted to provide a place where women could get help from the inside out. As she was faithful to God, God was faithful to her and he gave her two more houses, that is how she puts it. As people came and helped support it; I mean she is not a woman of great means. She has had a hard life herself. She is not making money off this. She is just trying to help some women. She is in the process of trying to furnish those other homes. If you have some things you would like to donate, I told her I would say that. So if you want to, I can let you know and I can put you in touch with Sondra.
But simply she said, as our scripture said, she wants to be a good shepherd to these sheep. She wants to help them get out. Sondra is simply being salt and light willing to go into the world and rely on God to provide. And that is what part of our vision is about as well, when it says to follow Jesus as Lord. That is what Sondra is doing here. She is taking Christ’s Lordship in her life seriously and stepping out.
So before we verbalize our faith, before we serve, before we love, even before we go, the starting point is prayer. That is where Jesus asks us to start in our scripture. That is where Sondra started. The Lord says pray for harvesters to go out, you and me, to go out. I think prayer is critical because prayer is where we are strengthened for the work that is before us. It is where we receive God’s heart. It is where his passions become our passions. Prayer is that place where I think God most clearly and directly speaks to you and me. It is where we get directions on where to go, how to serve, who to serve, how to love and when to speak. So witnessing for Christ begins on our knees, not with our mouth. Witnessing is a process. It starts with praying and then it goes to going out, then it is loving, then it is serving and then it is finally telling. Every step of that is critical. Think of it as links in a chain that have to go to bring someone to Christ, everyone has a link in that process. Some people may have a link or two, but all those links have to happen to bring someone to Christ. When we skip over those steps I think we do a disservice to Christ and we actually make the saving grace of the gospel harder for people to receive. They become more distrustful and skeptical of you and me as followers of Christ. We saw that in the video.
So it is about sharing our faith, witnessing with our lives. So the question is is your life attractive? Is your life attractive enough to those who don’t know Christ? So attractive that people are willing to say: tell me why you are doing this.
So let me leave you with the words of Francis of Assisi who simply said, “Witness at all times, sometimes use words.”
Let’s pray.
Lord God thank you that you have called us to be your harvesters and that is a high privileged calling and Lord I confess that sometimes we don’t get it as well as we should. But Lord we do ask that you would help us, help us start on our knees and then be willing to go knowing that you will provide, as you pour your love into us that we might show them your love as we serve them. And Lord, in that, may your Spirit use all of those things to soften their hearts to the point where they say “I want to know this Jesus.” Lord that is our hearts today. Lord, nudge our hearts for what is next for us. We ask that because you are Lord over all and Lord of the harvest. In your name we ask that. Amen.