Go!
A couple of weeks ago I preached a sermon about the three most important words in the Bible. These words are “God so Loved”. Because of these three words, all people, of all colors, of all cultures has the hope of eternal life in Heaven with God our Father, if people will except Christ as their Savior and Lord.
John 3:16
16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
(NIV)
God loves the entire world. He sent His Son so that all, not just some, could be saved. He sent His most precious Son to this wicked earth to live a perfect life and to teach the way of salvation. God sent His Son to be beaten and to die on an old rugged cross, so that all people could have the opportunity to be saved. God raised His Son on the third day so that we too could be raised in Christ and have eternal life with Him. God so loved us that He did all of this so that we could live with Him for eternality.
After Christ ascended into Heaven, someone had to continue the work that He started. Christ gave the instruction on how to continue His ministry. He said, “Go!” This is the title of today’s sermon.
Matt 28:19-20
19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
20 and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.""
(NIV)
Jesus told His disciples to “Go!” Jesus told them to go and make more disciples. Those new disciples were to go out and make more new disciples. If we were following Christ’s command to “go and make disciples” you would be seeing a great revival throughout the entire world.
I want you to do a little math this morning. Suppose you go out and reach one person for Jesus. Stick with that person for six months. Help, encourage and strengthen him. At the end of six months there are two of you. If you both do the same for another, at the end of the year there will be four. If this continues, at the end of 18 months there are eight; two years, 16. Do you know how many there will be at the end of 17 years? There would be more than the entire population of the whole world – more than six billion. Stop and think about what one person could do.
It is a frightening thing to go out to a stranger and start telling them about Christ. Why does it have to be a stranger? Most of us will have a co-worker, a neighbor or even a relative that doesn’t know Jesus as their Savior. Have you truly tried to witness to them?
Have you been in a store and a complete stranger started talking to you while waiting in the checkout line? Did you ask them if they knew Jesus as their Savior? We pass up so many opportunities, that God lays in front of us. Why do we do this? Is it that we are embarrassed to speak about Christ in public?
Lets see what Jesus had to say about this.
Mark 8:38
38 If anyone is ashamed of me and my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, the Son of Man will be ashamed of him when he comes in his Father’s glory with the holy angels."
(NIV)
Jesus loves us so much that He was willing to endure both physical and emotional pain for us. He loves us so much that He died on the cross and took our sins upon Himself, so that we could live forever with Him in heaven. Doesn’t Christ deserve our devotion and our lives? Shouldn’t we tell others about what Christ did for them and us? We owe our lives to Christ. We have been bought by the blood of Jesus. We no longer belong to ourselves, but to Him.
John 3:17-21
17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.
18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God’s one and only Son.
19 This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but men loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil.
20 Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that his deeds will be exposed.
21 But whoever lives by the truth comes into the light, so that it may be seen plainly that what he has done has been done through God."
(NIV)
About a year ago my wife and I went to Mexico to attend her brother’s funeral. Most of her family is Catholic, because they were baptized as infants into the Catholic Church. Because of this they believe that they are saved. The priest performing the service asked if anyone had any questions or comments. My wife gingerly raised her hand and began witnessing to the priest about Jesus and that being baptized, as an infant does not save them. I was so very proud of my wife. That took a lot of nerve to witness to a Catholic Priest if front of a couple hundred people. After the funeral one man wanted to know how he could be saved and accepted Christ and others had many questions concerning salvation and the Catholic Church.
Last week my wife and I went to Mexico to visit her family for a few days. They told us that the Priest that had performed the funeral service left the church a couple of weeks following that funeral service and no one knows where he went. I pray that the Holy Spirit convicted him and he accepted Christ.
On this trip we saw that most people are still unwilling to accept the truth. As verse 19 says, people love the darkness because of their sins. They know that to accept Christ means that they would have to turn away from their sins that they enjoy and they are not willing to do that. They are lovers of wickedness. One lady loved her wicked ways so much that she even made fun of Jesus saying that he was not perfect and that he even fathered children from Mary. People do not want to hear the truth, but that is no excuse for us not to witness to them and to pray for them. My wife was told that they would even place a curse on her because of her witnessing. My lovely wife is not scared, because she knows that she belongs to God and nothing evil can harm her.
Being a supply Pastor until God blesses me a church to pastor, has given me the opportunity to observe many different churches. In doing so I have observed one thing that is the same in all churches. We are not training people to serve.
“The church today is raising a whole generation of mules. They know how to sweat and to work hard but they don’t know how to reproduce themselves.”
I don’t know who first made that statement, but I am sure it must have been one of the elderly hard workers. These workers have come into the church to serve. They have carried supplies, cut the grass, planted and watered the flowers. They have made repairs to the church, painted the walls and even cleaned the toilets. They visit the homebound, pray for the sick and even help move other members. The only problem is that they are almost always sterile and thus cannot reproduce. They are hard workers, but they are the end of the line. They do not produce more like themselves. Some churches where I have preached have younger couples and youth, but they are not workers. They depend on the elderly to get the job done and the job will get done. Why don’t the younger and stronger people put on the yoke and start pulling the load? Maybe it is because they know the old mules will do it. Maybe it is because the Pastor doesn’t require it of them, because it is easier to let the old-timers carry the load.
Christ told His disciples to “go!” The real job that the Lord gave us is to go into the world and “reproduce ourselves” by making disciples of others. It is a tough lesson to realize that you may have worked hard and yet still haven’t gotten the job done. If we are not evangelizing, we are not doing the job that Christ requires us to do. At the same time, if we are leading people to Christ, but are not teaching them to serve and to be a part of the workforce of the church, then we are not following Christ’s command to teach them to obey all of His commands. If we are nothing more than a generation of mules, we are on the road to extinction. If the workhorses grow old and die, who will teach the children and youth? Who will keep the church doors open? Who will lead others to Christ?
We must get back to witnessing. We must return to our first love, Jesus Christ. We must give our all to God. I am not talking about money. I am talking about putting God first in your life. Putting God before your desire for more money. Putting God before your pleasures. Giving God all of your time, not just when you have a few minutes between your two jobs and watching your favorite show on TV.
Luke 9:23-25
23 Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
24 For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it.
25 What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, and yet lose or forfeit his very self?
(NIV)
If we would work as hard for Christ as we do to obtain more and nicer processions, we could change our community and the world. If you truly serve the Lord from your heart and put Him first in your life, He will bless you more than you could ever imagine. There is nothing more important in the world than serving God and denying yourself. There are times that I don’t want to get out of bed. There are times that I would rather watch TV than study my Bible. There are times that I would rather just do something for me than to help a church brother. There are times that I want to just resign from all the committees, stop teaching all the classes and be like the others, but I know that is not what Christ wants for me. It isn’t what God wants for you either. Then God reminds me that my reward is not here in this world; my reward is in heaven where it really means something. This is why I will not compromise my love for Christ and I will serve Him and put Him first in my life until He calls me home.
What is the most important thing in your life and in your church? It isn’t important how big or beautiful our church building is. What is important is filling all of the empty seats not with members of other churches, but filling those seats with new believers in Christ. To do this we need workhorses that will produce other and younger workhorses and not more mules.
We all need to take up our cross and follow Christ command.
Matt 28:19
19 Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,
(NIV)
Invitation:
