Lean, Mean Discipleship

Our scripture reading today, 6th chapter of Mark, verses 1 -13.

He left there and came to his hometown, and his disciples followed him.

When the Sabbath came, he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astonished.

Where did this man get these things, they said? What is this wisdom that has been given to him, and how are these miracles performed by his hands?

Isn't this the carpenter, the son of Mary, the brother of James, Joseph, Judas, and Simon?

And aren't his sisters here with us? So they were offended by him.

Jesus said to them, a prophet is not without honor except in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his household.

He was not able to do a miracle there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them.

And he was amazed at their unbelief. He was going around the villages teaching.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for your word, quick and powerful, sharper than a two -edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of the soul and the spirit and the joints of the marrow, and a discerner of the thoughts and intents of our heart.

Lord, we come into your presence to hear your word proclaimed and taught.

So Lord, give us ears to hear and hearts to obey and a willingness in the flesh to work and to carry out the things that will be taught that we should do so that we might live out and flesh out this very powerful word that you place within us.

Empower your preacher today, Lord, that he might speak with wisdom and he might speak with boldness.

And we pray all these things that Christ might be exalted so that he might draw men and women, boys and girls to himself.

In his powerful name, amen. In Luke 16, we're given the parable of the rich man and Lazarus.

I'm going to read a section of that, and I think that you will see the relevance this morning. And he said, Then I am asking you,

Father, that you send him to my father's house, for I have five brothers, in order that he may warn them so that they will not also come to this place of torment.

But Abraham said, They have Moses and the prophets. Let them hear them. But he said,

No, Father Abraham, but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent. But he said to him,

If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they will not be persuaded even if someone rises from the dead.

We come to a difficult text this morning. It's kind of deceptively difficult. And all of those practices that I'm trying to be leading you through as we look at Mark come into play to understand this section this morning, and it is about context.

And this story this morning is sandwiched in between great miracles, and great miracles of belief to those that are close to Jesus, and then a great miracle that's going to feed the nation and usher in a type of false belief that the

Messiah is here to create a new utopia on earth that we'll look at next week.

But here today, we're going to see how Jesus' own family members and the people who watched him grow up don't believe him.

And then as we go on through the story, we're going to see what the awful cost of unbelief is and in God's measure, how he looks at unbelief and the unbelief of anyone who hears the message.

So in Mark, we've seen Jesus' authority over nature. We've seen his authority over the kingdom of Satan.

We've seen his authority over sickness and even death last week. And there's going to be a question, does

Jesus have authority over the hearts of man? That seems like the last battleground.

And last week, we saw a message of great faith. We saw the faith of Jairus and the faith of the woman with the issue of the blood.

And then right after that, Mark gives us this story of unbelief with those who you would least suspect having unbelief.

So Jesus goes from these great miracles where the crowds are following him, and he goes back home, back home to Nazareth.

And you would expect this to be a homecoming, right? It should be a pep rally, almost a ticker tape parade.

It would be like when Harry Bailey comes home from the war and it's a wonderful life. Like we're going to throw big parties and all that kind of stuff.

But that's not what we see. We see Jesus come right back and he goes to the synagogue and he starts to teach.

And the people who are listening to him teach, the question that they have is not, wow, how does the man speak with such authority in the way that we've seen before?

But instead, this morning what they say is, where's this guy getting all this stuff?

See, there's a subtle difference in that, right? How does this man speak with such authority? That's a marvelous question.

Because the people that were asking that question earlier, Mark, are understanding that they are in the presence of something that's not really explainable by what their eyes can see.

How can this man open up the scripture and teach them this way?

And yet when Jesus goes to his hometown and he preaches, the question is, who's this guy think he is?

He's saying these things. He wasn't trained. Isn't he the carpenter's son? Isn't he the one?

We know him. We know him. We know his brothers. Catholics hardest hit there, right?

Mary was not perpetually a virgin because I don't think that Jesus' brothers and sisters beamed out of Mary either.

So we can put that false dogma aside right now and, sorry, we're going to shoot those shots this morning.

There's a lot of shots at the beginning of this. Who is this guy? Who is he?

We grew up with him. Who does he think he is? And so we see that the hearts of man can be in stark contrast to reality.

Familiarity breeds contempt. It's an idiom because it's often true. Familiarity breeds contempt.

I will tell you that if I went back to my hometown of Prairie Grove, just down the road, and I started doing some, you know, putting some heavy teaching on people, there might be some people from my past that would be like, who's this guy think he is?

Is that that little jerk that wore those thick glasses that just kind of looked like a nerd all his life?

Is that him? Is that that guy? Man, he was awkward. Is that the baby bear?

No, we're not going to listen to him. That might be what would happen.

The difference is that I'm not God, and Jesus is God. And so to have a fence, to take a fence at the teaching of Jesus and the miracles of Jesus is an extraordinarily dangerous thing to do, and it doesn't matter who you are.

And that should be a message for us this morning because many of us, familiarity can breed contempt.

We will hear story after story of people who are unchurched today who will say, yeah, I grew up in the church.

It's a bunch of hypocrites in there. These people who have heard the gospel their whole lives, who have been around the people of God, and all they have eyes to see is the sin of the people in the church.

And there is grievous sin that happens to the church, no doubt about that. But being around the message of the gospel without having true faith is a very dangerous place to be.

And we're going to see what God thinks of such unbelief. It's an amazing type of unbelief.

Notice when we see amazing over and over, Jesus was marveling at their unbelief. He's amazed at their unbelief.

How can Jesus be amazed at anything? Doesn't he know everything? Well, of course he does. But once again, we see in God's economy, unbelief in what he has made manifest through creation and what more specifically, notice the context, what he's made manifest through special revelation by the teaching of Jesus, his son in the temple.

To have unbelief in the face of that is amazing and not in the good way. It's in stark contrast to the demoniac.

When the demon comes out and he sees Jesus who had freed him from the oppression, he wants to follow immediately.

And he goes back and he starts to tell the cities of Decapolis about what Jesus has done, and it says that the people were amazed and they were afraid.

When the woman with the issue of the blood is healed, she drops down on her knees trembling and she believes and she's healed and they're all amazed.

But in his hometown, no. And can you imagine? This would not be, this is where my analogy falls apart.

The people who grew up with me, they would have seen plenty of sin. They would have seen what a jerk

I was. They would have seen the ways that in many times I tried to appear pious and look down my long nose at those unwashed masses who were around me who maybe weren't quite as smart as me or maybe they were just not quite as virtuous as I was.

But Jesus, when they grew up with him, his brothers and his sisters and these people of Nazareth, they would have grown up with a young man who never sinned.

He never slandered anyone. He never gossiped. He never had any regrets. There's not one skeleton in Jesus' closet.

There's not one person that he would flinch at seeing in the public square because he treated everyone rightly to the perfect completion of the law of Moses in every interaction he ever had with every person he ever met.

That's the level of unbelief. They saw Jesus grow up sinless. Can you imagine the sinless 13 -year -old?

Let me back up the train. Can you imagine the sinless 3 -year -old? Can you imagine?

We describe my youngest as currently going through her terrorism phase right now. She has no middle switch.

There's angry and happy. Jesus didn't have that. Jesus was perfectly righteous as a toddler, perfectly righteous as a 13 -year -old, perfectly righteous as a 21 -year -old, perfect, perfect, and they still don't believe.

These are a people that are fascinated with ancestry. We get these admonitions over and over in Scripture to not be caught up with talking about useless genealogies and useless historical facts and stories, basically translated old wives tales.

You're not to be fascinated with that. But the Jewish people, and especially in Jesus' hometown, they could not imagine how the temporal status of Jesus could mesh with the eternal son of God from the line of David who was going to sit on the eternal throne of David.

They have familiarity with the wrong aspects of Jesus. See, they're focusing on the humble beginnings.

They're not focusing on the teaching. They're not focusing on the character. They're looking at what they know from the back.

And this is not a nice word that Mark uses, the word that is used for their taking offense.

They are scandalized. That's what the Greek gives us. They are scandalized by, who does this guy think he is?

This is a scandal. This guy from Nazareth, does anything good come from Nazareth? Even the people of Nazareth think this.

How could the great prophet live here? Wouldn't he be from Jerusalem, you know, the city that kills all the prophets, right?

Wouldn't he be from there? See, for us, we can fall in the same trap.

We can have familiarity with likable or comforting aspects of someone and ignore their whole story.

And we do this all the time. Before I go to us completely, let me give you a little backdrop. I just alluded to it.

But the people thought that there was going to be a big, bad Messiah who came clearly, who was going to sit on the throne of the king, and we're going to see that really clearly next week.

That was the idea. You can't be the Messiah if you're not going to throw the Romans out and usher in peace to usher in the new kingdom of David, right?

That's not possible. But that's not what Jesus says. In Matthew 23, this is one of the most scathing, I'm going to tell you right now.

Let me just skip to the chase. Almost every church in America would throw a man out who talked this way.

And I hope that doesn't include us, but I think it might. I think it might.

This is rough. This is what Jesus says to the religious leaders of the day, the most versed scribes in the law.

He says, Did you know that Jesus, he would later equate the religious leaders of his day with Cain?

He would pin the murder of righteous Abel on the heritage of the scribes and the

Pharisees. They're not Abel. They're Cain. They are the son of iniquity. And they say, no, if we had but lived, we wouldn't have killed

Isaiah. If it had been us, if it had been us in that day, we would have listened to Jeremiah.

We would have listened to the warnings of Hosea. We would have listened to the scathing rebuke of Amos and Micah.

We would have heard it. We would not have shed the blood. And Jesus says, you are about to shed the blood of the greatest prophet of all.

He knows their hearts. He discerns it. So why bring the scribes into this section that's talking about Jesus's hometown and the people who don't listen to him?

Well, it's going to illustrate the universality of the human pride and thinking that we know more than we know and despising what appears humble and lowly.

Let me give you some quotes. These are men, I'm going to give you four. Man, I had to cut one of them out. It was way too spicy. It was

Martin Luther. If you know, you know, okay? I thought about reading it and was like, wisdom here.

I don't think I'm going to read that one. Here's where I'm at. These are men that we quote to back up our opinions all the time in the

Reformed world. Okay? We read them and we quote them and we hold these guys in high esteem. I want to imagine one of these quotes being uttered from a man in a pulpit in the modern church in America today.

Let's start with John Chrysostom. The festivals of the pitiful and miserable Jews are soon to march upon us one after the other and in quick succession.

The feast of trumpets, the feast of tabernacles, the fasts. There are many in our ranks who say that they think as we do, yet some of these are going to watch the festivals and others will join the

Jews in keeping their feasts and observing their fasts. I wish to drive this perverse custom from the church right now.

Nazi, anti -Semite, right? Augustine, he says, those shameful acts against nature such as were committed in Sodom ought everywhere and always to be detested and punished.

If all nations were to do such things, they would be held guilty of the same crime by the law of God, which has not made men so that they should use one another in this way.

I don't know if we would throw him out for that one. John Calvin, on this account, all women are born that they may acknowledge themselves as inferior in consequence to the superiority of the male sex.

John Knox, I dare not deny lest that in so doing,

I should be injurious to the giver, but that God hath revealed unto me secrets unknown to the world.

Not very cessationist of him. Not very gentle of Calvin.

Not very understanding of Augustine. These are the men that we say, if we lived in their day, we would have believed what they said and we would have followed them because we name our sons after them and we use them in our arguments and we use them as our handles on the internet.

You know, I'm Knox 1980, right? That sort of thing. I'm not, but I could be, right?

We quote them all the time, but let us not fool ourselves. Let us not fool ourselves. Even the quotations of the

Apostle Paul, where he tells famously the Galatians, the heresies, the heresies inside the

Galatian church that he wishes they would emasculate themselves, that they would not only cut the foreskin off, but they would cut the whole thing off.

That's what he tells them. He calls them, he calls their doctrine scuba line, which is filthy toilet refuse.

And we would say, man, that's, that's not very good. Let's throw them out. So here's what we do. We have to avoid the pride of presentism.

We have to avoid thinking that just like the Pharisees, that if we lived in, we would not have done what people did then.

We wouldn't have persecuted brothers, sisters. We absolutely would have. Okay. We have to understand that we as Christians have to discern the truth.

We don't follow men. We follow Christ. We don't venerate and worship

Calvin, but he is a father of the church and we stand on the shoulders of giants this morning and we let familiarity breed contempt.

And right now there is a wave moving through Christendom and especially through young men where there is what's called a resourcement of some of the writings of these men.

And it is causing a lot of discomfort. And so we go back to this writing in Mark and we think here and we should think to ourselves, we should have some humility and we should understand we need to judge everything based off the weight of scripture.

We need to not so quickly throw aside the historical confessions that have served as guardrails for the church for centuries.

We are sons of the Reformation, but oftentimes we are extremely ungrateful sons of the

Reformation. And I think that we should have a little bit more gratitude. Wouldn't you think, wouldn't you think that when

Jesus goes to his hometown with these stories of healing, even the recent story of a resurrection from the dead, wouldn't you think that there might be some gratitude that he would come back home?

But that's not the heart of the unbeliever. And so then we see the first of the almost seemingly unsolvable riddles of this text.

It says that he could do no miracle here. That's tough, right? It's very tough.

He could do no miracle there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. So what we have is a limitation of the scope of Jesus's miracle ministry in this area.

So we have to throw some things out of the way. Was Jesus unable to do the miracles that he was doing before?

No. That's ridiculous and that's a heresy. Jesus is God. He's omnipotent. He can do anything he wants.

But what we see here is the interaction of human will, human depravity, and the sovereign power of God.

This is a hard thing, so don't despise me when I say it. Or despise me, but let's go to the scripture, right?

Here's the thing. God ordained some to be vessels of destruction to his glory.

And it does not matter what they hear. And it does not matter what they say that they believe. And it does not matter how outwardly pious they are.

And it does not matter how good of a guy they seem to be. If they do not have faith in the living

God, they are being stored up for destruction. And there will be no miracle in their case because since the beginning of time,

God has ordained some to show his glory and righteousness and justice and his judgment on those who have gotten what they want.

See, here's the thing that people don't understand about election, right? The only people who do not get what they want are the people of God.

See, we didn't want him, right? We were perfectly happy to try to fool everyone for our own social cred and for our own pride to make people think that we are righteous people.

We love that. No one loves, everyone loves to be righteous, right?

That's why we justify our sin. Everyone wants to be thought of as being a great, virtuous guy, okay?

Even criminals, I work amongst them. I do. I work amongst them.

And they don't walk around going, yeah, I'm pretty much the worst sinner there is.

I'm terrible. They don't say that. They justify and they rationalize their sin and they try to cloak themselves in some level of righteousness and we will bend in pretzels trying to do that.

But God elects some and through his irresistible grace, he pulls us out of the quagmire that we're in.

He pulls us out of the rebellion that we've grabbed onto and he changes our heart and he gives us belief and he does a miracle.

But those who have unbelief, those who have been appointed to have unbelief, and thank God that even in this text we know that these were not forever given unbelief because two of Jesus' brothers write two of our books in the

New Testament and one of them becomes the main elder at the church in Jerusalem, his brother

James. But they have unbelief at this moment and it's a bad thing. And what it does is

Jesus is going to model what he's going to tell the disciples in the part that I was really wanting to get to this morning, and I'm happy with my time here.

This is a hobby horse that I could ride, the whole judgment thing. I tell people that all the time. So he's going to leave his hometown and then he's going to get into sending.

So this is where I wanted to go. I've titled the sermon this morning Lean, Mean Discipleship and we're going to look at the tactics.

So I'm going to read the section and then we're going to go through it. Mark 6 verses 7 through 13, it says,

And he summoned the twelve and began to send them out in pairs and was giving them authority over the unclean spirits.

And he instructed them that they should take nothing for their journey except a staff only, no bread, no bag, no money in their belt, but to wear sandals.

And he added, do not put on two tunics. And he was saying to them, wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave town.

And any place that does not receive you or listen to you as you go out from there, shake the dust off the soles of your feet for a testimony against them.

And they went out and preached that men should repent. And they were casting out many demons and were anointing with oil many sick people and healing them.

Tactical discipleship. Discipleship is what has been lost in the modern

American church. We've lost it. We can congregate as a community of believers who have fun.

We can, you know, try to enjoy each other. And then we get together and we watch the sage on the stage preach the message, right?

And we think, oh, in reform circles, we think, oh, how smart he is, how gifted. I'm so glad that I was privileged to sit under the wisdom of that great pastor.

That's the reform camp. In some, we go for an experience, right? We turn the lights off, we get the smoke rolling, have a little bit of a drama up front.

We entertain. For some, it's just a couple of hours of babysitting on a Sunday.

Like, I just want to get away from my kids for a while. There's a children's ministry over there. I just don't want to listen to them for like an hour and a half.

And that's our Sunday. And we can do that. But what we've lost is discipleship.

And Christ gives us, in this section, he gives us an idea of what discipleship looks like.

And it looks lean and it looks mean. And it looks not comfortable. It looks aggressive.

And that's been my prayer often for us here at CBC, that we would not grow comfortable, but that we would be aggressive, that we would be wise and aggressive, that we wouldn't kick the door down, but that when the door opens, that we would be ready to run through it, that we would almost be crouched ready.

And I see that in this text. I see first in tactical discipleship, what Jesus does is he has the disciples to go in pairs.

Now, there's a couple of things going on here. One is that there's going to be two or more witnesses to the truth.

So these disciples are going to go out and they are going to proclaim the message of repentance. Remember, the kingdom of God is at hand.

What must you do when the kingdom of God is at hand? You must repent and you must believe.

What do you believe now? You believe in the Godhood of Jesus Christ. You believe that he is the

Messiah. That's the message that the disciples are going out with. We have a much greater message today, do we not?

We have the full revelation of what was coming. The kingdom of God was at hand. Today the kingdom of God has come.

And the kingdom of God was always Jesus Christ. But now we see the perfected and full work of Jesus Christ.

So when we go out in pairs and we bear witness, we bear witness to this truth, that your sins can be forgiven through the blood of Jesus Christ, that you don't have to play this game of trying to suppress your unrighteousness and try to suppress the truth.

You don't have to do that anymore. You can lay your sins on the Son of God who has paid in full all of our debt to God and he's made it go away.

He has saved us. That's the message we have. And we can bear witness. And our testimony is more powerful when we have one next to us backing it up.

It's a powerful thing. We should do more being in groups. Not to be like the

Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses. Their story's paper thin. And the fact that they've made such inroads in America shows the weakness of our discipleship.

That they can knock on a door and they can convince you that some boy got a revelation from a demon in the wilderness and it's going to convince

Christians. That's because we don't know the Bible. Sometimes our discipleship needs to start with us knowing the

Bible. Come let us reason together. Let's disciple. Let's know what's going on in the scripture.

If God wrote a book, if God truly created everything and he truly wrote a book, should we not study it?

These are the words of life. They are no trifle. They are no trifle. They are your life.

Follow them and you will live long in the land. Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth from the mouth of God.

This is God's word. This is where discipleship starts. So they're together. The disciples go out together because they can witness what they've seen, right?

Two witnesses. They've seen the miracles of Jesus. They've heard the teaching. And they can vouch for one another.

But there's also protection and safety. There's also camaraderie. Should discipleship be fun? I think we've lost this.

I think what we've tried to do is we've tried to make Christianity a nerf ball religion of people who are a little bit overweight, who don't like to do anything, who kind of like to sit and have their soft power hour together to get their holiness quotient for the week, and then go around and sit on their butt all week long.

I think that's what we've done. I think we've turned it into a thoroughly effeminate practice. And it's time that we stop.

Do you know what men respond to? Men respond to challenges. Men respond to hardship.

Men respond to war. If you want to enlist men, if you want to enlist high quality men, you issue challenges.

Men, is it our shame that the entire pro -life industry is on the backs of women?

It's shameful. It's absolutely shameful. And I am thankful for the women who have carried the torch, but God says that women leaders are a shame and a disgrace on His people.

And so it is. Where are we? Where are we? It's time to get involved.

It's time for us to have fun together doing the mission. Doing the mission.

All right. Go in pairs. Here's the other thing. And man, this is one of those deals. There's an apparent contradiction, so I'm going to have to talk through it.

I'm going to do it quick. Here's the key principle. Jesus tells them, don't go get anything. Just go now.

Go now. Go with the stuff you got. Don't go home and grab an extra tunic, right? That would be kind of what goes under next to the skin.

Don't grab one of those. Don't get an extra pair of sandals. Don't get a money bag. Don't go get anything.

Just go. It's urgent. Go now. And then we have this problem. All right. So in Matthew 10, we have a parallel passage where seemingly it would say, don't even bring a staff.

In Mark he says, bring a staff. In Luke 9 .3, he says, don't get a staff.

Don't bring a staff. Okay. Okay. Atheists love this. All right. See? Contradiction.

Now, first I would turn around them and say, like, if the best you can got is the best thing you have is about a staff, then

I'm willing to live with that. However, I don't think we have to. Okay. So let's do this. I'm going to nerd out for a second.

Sorry. So in Mark and in Luke, we have the biggest problem. Between Mark and Matthew, Matthew uses a verb that says, don't acquire.

The idea would be, don't go buy a bunch of stuff. Don't go buy staffs. Don't do anything like that.

Just go now. In Mark and Luke, the word is to take. Okay. Luke says, don't take a staff.

Mark says, take a staff. Here's what I think it is. I think that Luke is actually giving a series of these kind of commissionings and sendings.

He does another one that's very similar in chapter 10. So chapter 9, chapter 10, Luke sends two.

And I think, simply put, what's going on is that Luke is talking about a different event than this one.

That's what I think is going on. All right. Side trail over. You don't have to listen to the atheists.

You can say, hey, what basis do you have to argue anyway? You don't believe we're anything more than stardust.

Why are we talking about staffs? Okay. But there it is. Here's the thing. It is easy in the

Christian camp to try to overplan and overprogram discipleship. What's Jesus doing?

Jesus is saying, take what you got and go right now. Go right now. What do you have? What's the important part of discipleship?

The important part is always and has always been the message, right? The message.

Paul says that he is a weak clay vessel that has something of surpassing value inside of it, right?

It's not the apostle Paul that is the critical piece of discipleship. It's the message.

It's the gospel that's the critical part of discipleship. And so it is. We can overprogram it.

How has the church decided to do discipleship? Well, let's just throw programs at it. We're going to have children's ministry, youth ministry, women's ministry, men's ministry, single men's ministry, young singles ministry, college, elderly ministry, men's prayer breakfast, women's prayer breakfast.

All of it, right? Beth Moore study, all of it. It can go really bad.

Okay. Suffice it to say, it can go really bad. Is that what Jesus says? He says, go therefore and make programs.

No, that's not what he says. He says, go now and go to these cities and give the message. And that's what we're to do.

Guys, it's not that complicated. If you are a Christian, you cannot be a Christian without knowing the message of the gospel.

The gospel is this simple, right? Jesus saved me. He's the king of the universe. Repent, repent and believe.

If you repent and believe, then you will be saved. If you profess with your mouth, you will be saved and your faith will give rise to actions.

That's going to happen. And what we do is instead we try to say, if we're even good, we start to say convert and then we just kind of leave you alone.

We want to make disciples. We want to stay a while. Yes, that's the next thing is Jesus tells them to stay a while.

Stay with those who house you. In Matthew, he adds up. He says, if the house is worthy, let your peace come upon it.

But if it is not worthy, let your peace return to you. Did you know that Christians bring peace? We are emissaries of peace.

I don't think we think that very often in our dark world because we seem like agents of violence and agents of aggression.

But truly, truly, there is no peace outside of the Christian faith. We've known this the world over.

What is the one religion that promotes peace? It is Christianity. Every other demonic religion out there promotes war, constant fighting.

See Christians, we like peace so much that we don't want to make war on people, but we like to fight each other because we don't kill each other, right?

That's what we like to do. We like to kind of lower the temperature a little bit. That's what we're about. So what we need to understand is that as we are emissaries of the prince of peace, that we are also merchants of peace because the only peace any human being can have is peace with God.

That's the only relationship that ultimately matters for your eternal station. And then we get the blessings of peace with our fellow man.

Love God. Love your neighbor. It is the summary of the law, is it not?

We are awakened to love God's law and that brings peace. It brings peace between us and our creator and us and our fellow man.

So what's the mission? The mission is urgent. Have we been urgent?

I think we've urgently tried to spend as much money overseas as we can because let's be real, that makes us feel good about ourselves.

And it requires very little of us in our very wealthy country where even the poorest of us here are living like sultans in most of the world, okay?

The poorest of us here. We're not urgent. We need to be urgent. Did you know that Northwest Arkansas needs disciples?

We need them. We need disciples. We need men and women who are following their creator because what's going to happen is there's going to be much fruit there.

We've already seen that. What kind of fruit is there with those who have faith, where the seed goes in and the roots go deep?

Thirty, sixty, a hundredfold, massive fruit. We need those kind of Christians.

The mission is blessed. Did you know that? The mission of discipleship is blessed by God. He's commanded it and he has the authority to command it and so we can go with confidence knowing that God is with us.

Whether we die or whether we live, God is with us in the mission of proclaiming his gospel. So we need to be urgent.

We know that the mission is blessed. We don't need to fear anything. We need to be strategic. We need to go in pairs and we do not need to relentlessly cast our pearls before swine.

Here's what I've seen and what you've seen. If you've been plugged into the greater Christian movement in the dark ages between about 2005 and about 2020, when the darkness was kind of unveiled all of a sudden, here's what it was.

All the Christian thought, all the Christian thought was, go to the cities. Go win the cities.

God cares about cities because he cares about people. Yeah, except that it was hard ground and the cities are not being revived, are they?

The cities are spiraling into their own destruction faster and faster. And who is coming into the kingdom?

It's the unwashed young masses. It really is. Did you know that? It's 22 -year -old males who are buying

Bibles, who are asking questions. And some of them are hicks, right?

And some of them are uneducated. And a lot of them don't make very much money. And you don't get to have meetings with them in cool cocktail bars, right?

You might be at the gas station with them. It's not going to be all that fun. However, what we do is we've lost the strategy of going where the harvest is.

That's what Jesus says. He says to go to these cities and to proclaim the gospel. If they don't accept you into their house or if they don't accept the gospel, then what you're going to do is you're going to turn around and leave and you're going to shake the dust off of your feet.

And the reason you're going to shake the dust off of your feet is because there was an old Jewish tradition that when you left the motherland, when you left

Israel, before you came back on the Holy Land, you would shake off the dust of the pagan land so that you didn't defile

Israel with the dust of the pagan land. What Jesus is saying is when you go into these cities and they don't accept you, they are not

Israel. They're out. They're out. And guess what? Because you went there and you heralded the gospel, not only are they worse than Nineveh, who listened to the repentance message of Jonah, you're worse than Sodom and Gomorrah.

Because Sodom and Gomorrah had no such instruction, did they? They had righteous lot living among them with less than ten people who had any ear towards the

Lord of hosts. And so when the angels came in there, the response of Sodom and Gomorrah was to rape

God's angels. That was their response. And Jesus, in God's economy, Jesus says that if you leave, if they will not accept you with this message, they are worse than Sodom.

They're worse than that. And we say, how can that be possible? Here's how it's possible. Because Sodom did not have the message and the manifestation of the living

Son of God among them. And so we should not come into this place casually and we should not be casual.

When we spread the gospel, we have spread the words of life and the message of forgiveness, but we have also heaped condemnation on the unbeliever.

Because those who live in the dark, they hate the light because the light exposes their evil works.

Be very careful. Be very strategic. You don't sit there and grind your wheels where there is no harvest.

Because remember, context, go back to the beginning. What did Jesus say? He was amazed at their unbelief and he could do no miracles there.

It happened later. What we should do is be more strategic. Go where the harvest is happening.

It's important. It's life or death. Understand, understand, we have a job to do here, okay?

Let's bring it to us. And I'm going to ask four questions, and I think that we need to think through these and I think we need to pray.

Number one, number one, do we have the martial spirit of trusting

God and taking bold risks? The bold risk, I think, is according to your frame and your stature.

It truly is. The bold risk that you might take might be calling out the sin of the one that's close to you that claims

Christ and bringing accountability and calling for repentance in your closed circle. That takes courage. I'm not minimizing that.

That takes courage. The bold risk might be going out and being part of a core group and starting a new outpost somewhere else in northwest

Arkansas. The bold risk might be looking for leadership. The bold risk might be making a decision and publicly owning as a father that you've not been leading your family the way you should and that you're going to repent of that and you're going to take off.

That's going to be hard to do in front of your kids and in front of your wife. It's a bold risk, but God blesses humble beginnings.

We've seen that over and over again. The second question, are we spending too much effort on dry ground and scoffers?

We shouldn't do that. People who are scoffing, we can shake the dust off the soles of our feet.

This is a message that will get you kicked out of churches today. But you know what? I didn't say it. I didn't say it.

The Lord of Glory said it. When people scoff, when they do not accept you in, when they rebuff, and when they make fun.

Look, you can continue if you want, but it's more wise and it's more tactical to move on to better ground.

And I've seen this from many men who have the gift of evangelism that I've seen in their life. They roll on.

They roll on. If you're trying to disciple a young man or a young woman and they stand you up or they're hard to get a hold of, let them go.

Let them go. It's one of my axioms that I use as a high school teacher. I can't want it more than you do.

If I want it more than you do, it's not going to work. It's not going to work. Question number three.

Are we strategic and aggressive? I think in our camp sometimes we're aggressive, rarely.

We're aggressive but not strategic. But most of us, we try to be strategic without ever being aggressive.

Oh yes. Oh yes, we will do the mission when we hit this number. Or we will do the mission whenever we feel very, very ready.

Like it's all been created in a test lab and it's time to go now. Or we can be too aggressive, right?

We can be foolhardy and raise up men hastily and set about their failure of ministry that would be bad.

We have to be strategic and aggressive. Are we that? How would we do that? And the last thing, how is our urgency doing?

Because remember, the time is short. Man is not guaranteed one more breath. And our family is not guaranteed one more day, and our co -workers are not guaranteed one more day, and this mission is urgent.

And that's why we travel light. We travel light. We don't go home and pack our bags.

We don't go home and get provisions. We don't save our money for a while so that we can have a nice money belt with us.

No, we go and we make disciples. It's urgent. It's martial. It's aggressive. It's strategic.

And it's super important. It is the very mission of the church. It's what we're here for.

How are we doing? Let's pray to God. Let's pray to God that He would strengthen this mission, that He would give us this.

Because as we've said from the beginning, all we can do here as the people of God is put up a sail. We can't make the wind blow, but the

Holy Spirit and God will make the wind blow. And He will power the mission because He is looking for people.

He is looking for people to go out into the field and harvest those white fields. And I think they are white, and I feel the urgency, and I feel that our time is short.

So it's time for us. I'm going to do this. I'm going to use my two minutes.

Here we go. All right. It's too good. Jake and I on our hobby podcast that nobody needs to listen to, well, you should listen to it.

It's good. But we talk often in Tolkien's world about elves and men. Elves live forever. And what the elves do is they're wise and stately, but they're very slow to act.

And we talk about how men, they feel from the very start that their time is short because men die. Right? Men are mortal.

And men, the great men in Tolkien's legend, they burn out bright. That's what

I see for us. That's what I want us to do. I don't want us to be an institution that's about survival, that's about trying to hold on to something so that we can just be alive in a hundred years.

No. I would rather us faithfully burn out in a blaze of glory and aggression than to just hang on forever and grow cold and lose it.

That's what I see for us, and that's what I want. I know that's scary, but I see it here. I see how

Jesus sends out his disciples and that spirit that's with them. And I see that aggression, and I want that for us.

Let's pray. Lord, thank you. Thank you for your word. Lord, it's humbling to know that even your own brothers grew up with you and your sisters and all of your childhood friends, and they heard about the miracles and they did not believe.

Lord, what a sober warning it is for us. We who venerate those who came before us but would not accept their hard preachings and teaching against the things that have corrupted the church.

Lord, the feminism and the acquiescing to evil and wickedness.

Lord, we think that they're harsh, but they're not harsh, Lord. They were men who spoke the truth.

And Lord, we pray we see that these men, your disciples, that they were willing to follow you. They had weak hearts,

Lord, but you strengthened them. And what we do see in this text is that they went out. And they were the ambassadors who were casting out demons and healing.

Lord, that your power over the kingdom of darkness, that it's been given to your people because of your power and your authority.

We go out as the king's men. Lord, help us to remember that. Help us to reclaim it. We've lost it for so long.

We've tried to be comfortable. We've tried to mission with the world. We've tried to not be persecuted.

Lord, we think that we, in our pride, we think that we found a way to do the Christian faith without the world hating us.

Lord, cleanse us from that. Would you burn that out of us? Lord, that we would be zealous, zealous for your word, zealous for your gospel.

Lord, that we would go out, that we would not hold on so tightly to the things that we think we've built, but Lord, that we would follow your word.

Lord, grant us wisdom, grant us wisdom in these days. And Lord, give us a zeal for your house.

Lord, let it not become a place of money changers and a place of complacency, but instead,

Lord, that it would be a place of worship that looks to extend the bounds so that more women and children and men would worship your holy name, and that there would be outposts of that across Northwest Arkansas.

Lord, give us brotherhood, give us a network, and give us a mission to reach the people of Northwest Arkansas and to not leave them as converts, but to make them disciples.

Lord, that we would baptize them and that we would teach them your law, to obey everything that you've commanded.

Lord, help us. Lord, help us. Help us to throw off the unbelief that ensnares us and to trust the invisible things that are far more real than what our eyes can see.