Sunday, May 14, 2023 AM

Father, we do thank you. We thank you for what we've already heard this morning, from the singing, from the songs that have been sung, that you are reigning. You're reigning throughout the earth. Sometimes it's hard for us to see.

Sometimes it's hard for us to really believe that you're in control of everything when we see what's going on around us. But, Father, we thank you that you are in control. We thank you that you are reigning.

And, Father, as we turn to your word now, as we think through some of the things that you've told us before, we ask that you will speak to each one of us. We ask that you'll help us to understand what it is to walk with you, what it is to share your word.

And I pray, Father, that as we go out from this place later on, we're prepared just that little bit more to spread your word, to bring your kingdom, in many ways, to earth, to see your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

So we pray these things now. Father, we also want to continue to thank you, as has been mentioned already. We do thank you for our mothers, for our wives, who, in so many ways, have brought us to where we're at now.

And, Father, we also do pray for those who struggle today because of loss, because of the pain of those losses. Father, we pray for them, that you'll comfort them, that you'll encourage them today, too.

So, Father, we do thank you for the time that we have now. And I pray that, as in this time, I pray that you'll speak to each one of us clearly. And I pray these things in Jesus' name. Amen. Well, good morning.

It's good to be back, good to be here again. You know what's really kind of fun for me? It's good to see a lot of faces that I don't really know. The Church is growing, which is good, which is encouraging to see.

And, you know, for those of you that don't know Rachel and me personally, do talk to us. We don't bite, not hard. Except at barbecues. I like biting, you know, stuff at barbecues, but that's different.

But, yeah, Rachel and I feel very privileged to be members of this Church. As Brian introduced us, I think, last time we were here, we were probably the members with the worst attendance record. We don't get here that often, but we're privileged.

And we do thank you for your support. Not just the financial support, obviously that helps, but the prayer support, keeping in touch. You know, Facebook is wonderful for that. Rachel keeps up with things a lot better than I do on Facebook.

But we do appreciate all that you do for us. So, we're going to try and think through this question this morning. What is stopping us from fulfilling the Great Commission? As you see the verse up there in Mark 16, verse 15, Jesus told his disciples to go into all the world and preach the good news to everyone.

The references I've got here are all from the New Living Translation. I know it's not the version you tend to use here. Sometimes I think that's a good thing. It kind of jolts us a little bit. You know, that's not how it says it.

And sometimes that's a good thing, to help us to see maybe a different aspect that we're not used to. One of the things that I've done over the years is to... I now listen. Rachel and I listen to the Bible every morning.

We use different programs, you know, to listen through the Bible in a year. And what I like to do is switch versions every year. And I actually do it back and forth from English and then into Spanish, different years.

Just to, you know, help me think through, you know, is that really how the Bible is supposed to say it? So, anyway, that's for free. That has nothing to do with the sermon. That's just so you know, just in case you're looking at the references and thinking, that's not how it says it in my Bible.

So, yeah, Mark 16, verse 15 says that. And then Acts 1, verse 8, he says, This is just before Jesus went up to heaven. He says, Remember that reference, because we'll come back to that one in a little bit.

So the responsibility of the Church is to take the Gospel to the ends of the Earth so that everyone will hear. Everyone can hear the Gospel and to respond. So how are we doing? The Joshua Project tells us this.

These statistics are from just this week. The global summary of the people groups and the unreached groups in the world, and then the population of the world, which is now, what is it, 7 .93? Yeah, still the same there.

7 .93 billion. And so around 42 of the world's population is unreached. So, if we think about it, right now, the Church is divided roughly in half. Okay, you're half in each side of the Church. So if we take from the smooths forward, okay, and all of this side, you're good.

Okay? The rest of you, sorry, yeah, you're unreached. That's what we're looking at. Okay, why is that? Why is it taking us so long? Just to show my age, when I was young, there were only, what, around 3 billion people on the earth?

Okay, yeah, roughly, yeah. How many unreached people are there now? Okay, it's getting away from us. Okay, so there's something wrong that it shouldn't be that way. Okay, so we're going to look at four reasons why the Church has not yet completed the task that Jesus left us to do.

I'm not even going to argue the point that it is our job. Yeah, I'm taking that as obvious. Yeah, hopefully, if you don't, if you're not sure about that, then we can talk about that afterwards. But, you know, it is the job of the Church to reach the world, to take the Gospel to the ends of the earth.

So, four reasons, and it's these four reasons, ignorance, comfort, sin, and distraction. And what we're going to do is we're going to go through each one of these. We're going to look at a biblical example related to that particular reason.

And then after that, we're going to go back through and we're going to make more of a personal application. Just so you know, that's where we're going. So if you fall asleep and wake up, you know roughly where I'm at.

Okay, so let's talk about ignorance. Ignorance first. Can you read that?

Good.

In Acts 10, we read this. This is when Peter was about to go to talk to Cornelius. In Acts 10, the next day as Cornelius' messengers were nearing the town, Peter went up on the flat roof to pray. It was about noon and he was hungry.

But while a meal was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the sky open and something like a large sheet was let down by its four corners. In the sheet were all sorts of animals, reptiles, and birds.

Then a voice said to him, get up, Peter, kill, and eat them. No, Lord, Peter declared. I've never eaten anything that our Jewish laws have declared impure and unclean. But the voice spoke again. Do not call something unclean if God has made it clean.

So if you're not super familiar with the story, Peter was a Jew and he had grown up eating Jewish food. Everything was kosher. And so if it was meat, it had to be killed a certain way. There were certain food types that couldn't be mixed and so on.

And there was a whole host of animals from the Levitical laws that he wasn't allowed to eat. He had also grown up his whole life believing that the Jews were God's chosen people, chosen for salvation.

Sorry, what am I doing wrong? I'm fine. So he felt like anybody outside of the Jewish nation was condemned, was under God's judgment. But if they were inside the Jewish nation, then they were fine, they were good.

And Peter knew that he should have nothing to do with non-Jewish people, with Gentiles. A bit later in the chapter, Peter recognized, after he was already with Cornelius, he recognized his mistake and he says this in verse 28 of Acts 10.

Peter told them, you know, it is against our laws for a Jewish man to enter a Gentile home like this, or to associate with you. But God has shown me that I should no longer think of anyone as impure or unclean.

So from the very beginning, it was God's purpose for everybody to hear the message, for everybody to hear the gospel, and for everybody to have the opportunity to know him. The Jews were not chosen for salvation.

They were chosen to declare his glory. They were chosen to serve him and to make him known throughout the whole earth. A very important distinction. So Peter thought that the gospel was just for the Jews.

And then God had to show him, no, it isn't just for the Jews, it's for everybody. Okay, moving on to comfort. The comfort, now, remember Acts 1 .8, you remember that verse I read? Yeah, and I'm sure a lot of you can quote that verse.

Yeah, that Jesus said, you know, the Holy Spirit will come on you, and you'll be my witnesses, where? Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and the ends of the earth. So Acts 8 .1 says this. Saul, this is just after Stephen had been killed.

Saul was one of the witnesses, and he agreed completely with the killing of Stephen. A great wave of persecution began that day, sweeping over the church in Jerusalem. And all the believers, except the apostles, were scattered through the regions of Judea and Samaria.

What did it say in Acts 1 .8? Who was Jesus speaking to in Acts 1 .8? Who was there, not in the room, but on the mountaintop when that happened? Wasn't it the apostles? And in Acts 8 .1, who didn't go anywhere?

Is there a problem here? Do you see a problem here?

Yeah?

The apostles stayed in Jerusalem. But Jesus said, you need to get moving. You need to go and be my witnesses in Jerusalem, yes, and then Judea and Samaria and the ends of the earth. Now, eventually, some of them did.

But at this point, they didn't. And, I mean, it's reasonable to recognize that Jerusalem wasn't the safest place in the world. Stephen had literally just been killed. He'd been stoned. So it wasn't like it was the safest place.

But, for some reason, the apostles didn't move from home. They stayed where they were comfortable. They stayed where they knew what the rules were, and so on. We see, this is actually a pattern which we see throughout Scripture.

In Genesis 11, we read the people of that time said this. They began saying to each other, let's make bricks and harden them with fire. In this region, bricks were used instead of stone, and tar was used for mortar.

Then they said, come, let's build a great city for ourselves with a tower that reaches into the sky. This will make us famous and keep us from being scattered all over the world. Does that sound familiar?

Yeah?

The Tower of Babel, depending on which language you're speaking. Thank you, James, for that.

Yeah?

They said, let's build a tower so that we don't have to get split up. We'll just stay together. And then the disciples did the same thing. They stayed in Jerusalem. Now, I don't know how comfortable they were, but there's something about being comfortable that just helps us stay exactly where we are.

Yeah?

How many, I don't know if you got the rain before we did this morning, but how many of you were still in bed when the rain hit and you thought, you know what, I'm comfortable. I don't need to get up yet.

Yeah?

Maybe you feel that at other times, too. So being comfortable, just why move? Why make the effort? Let's just stay where I'm at. Okay, let's move on before we get too comfortable. Okay, so in Joshua chapter 7, we read this.

The Lord said to Joshua, in verse 12, Joshua 7 verse 10, sorry. The Lord said to Joshua, Get up. Why are you lying on your face like this? Israel has sinned and broken my covenant. They have stolen some of the things that I commanded must be set apart for me.

And they have not only stolen them, but have lied about it and hidden the things among their own belongings. That's why the Israelites are running from their enemies in defeat. For now, Israel itself has been set apart for destruction.

I will not remain with you any longer unless you destroy the things among you that were set apart for destruction. We can't overestimate the damage that sin does in the life of the believer and in the life of the church.

But there's more than just the damage that it does to us. God doesn't bless what doesn't bring Him glory. And whenever we sin, we don't bring Him glory. Yeah, what's the classic verse on sin? Yeah, we've all sinned and fallen short of what?

God's glory. Yeah, but God blesses when He's going to be glorified. So we see here in Joshua 7 that there's one man, only one man that sinned. And God abandoned them. He left them to their own devices.

He left them to do whatever they could do. And as a result of that one man's sin, 36 men died. In Hebrews 6, verses 4 to 6, it says,. For it is impossible to bring back to repentance those who were once enlightened, those who have experienced the good things of heaven and shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and the power of the age to come, and who then turn away from God.

It is impossible to bring such people back to repentance by rejecting the Son of God. They themselves are nailing Him to the cross once again and holding Him up to public shame. Then in Psalm 66, verse 18, a very well-known verse,.

If I had not confessed the sin in my heart, the Lord would not have listened. So if I don't give up my right to sin, we'll talk about that a little bit more. If I don't accept that sin offends God and that He won't listen to me as long as I hold on to that sin, my prayers are wasted and everything I do is in vain.

Okay.

Last one. Distraction. Distraction. We get distracted. In the book of Nehemiah, we see an important principle here. So Nehemiah had returned to Jerusalem and he saw that the walls of the city needed to be rebuilt.

And so he starts to rebuild the walls and so on, but there are enemies. And those enemies are trying to get Nehemiah to stop the building. And so they're threatening him and so on. So while Nehemiah was working, at one point, those enemies, they wrote to Nehemiah and they invited Nehemiah to go and talk with them.

And so in Nehemiah chapter 6, Nehemiah says this. He says, So Sambalat and Geshem sent a message asking me to meet them at one of the villages in the plain of Ono. But I realized that they were plotting to harm me.

So I replied by sending this message to them. I'm engaged in a great work, so I can't come. Why should I stop working to come and meet with you? So what we see is Nehemiah knew that what he was doing was so important that he shouldn't go and meet with these enemies.

It was much more important than just having a chat, having a conference with these enemies. He kept focused on what God had given him to do and he finished the wars around Jerusalem. It was very easy for us to get distracted by lots of different things.

The Apostle Paul knew this and he wrote to the Galatians in Galatians 3 verse 1. He says, O foolish Galatians, who has cast an evil spell on you, for the meaning of Jesus Christ's death was made as clear to you as if you had seen a picture of his death on the cross.

He was reminding them that this is what God has done. This is what Christ has done. Why are you getting distracted? Why are you getting moved away from the things that you first heard? They'd begun to think, the Galatians had begun to think that they could please God themselves by what they do and not through faith in Jesus.

And Paul wanted them to remember no, no, that's not what we taught you. What we taught you was that through faith in Jesus alone that's how you live. That's how you please God. OK, so we've seen four different areas.

Can you remember what they are before we put them up again? What was the first one? Ignorance. And then we talked about.

Comfort.

And then sin. And lastly, we've got distraction. So let's go back and think about how do we apply this to our own lives, to our own situations. Firstly, ignorance. Maybe we're thinking, I don't know about you, and it was interesting in the Sunday school this morning we kind of touched on this a little bit which makes me wonder if somebody isn't wrestling with this very thing.

Very often we say, oh I couldn't share my faith. I couldn't witness. I don't know enough. I'm not going to ask for a show of hands if anybody's actually thought that. But I think it's a very common thing that people think that somehow they need to know a lot in order to witness to other people.

So let me ask you this. How do you know you're saved? Because if you know that you're saved you know enough for somebody else to be saved. You don't need to be a deep theologian or a great biblical scholar to witness.

You just need to be saved. And with that you can actually reach out to other people. And you can give your own testimony. What you do understand. Don't worry about what you don't understand. Be concerned with what you do understand.

Because you can't save anybody. Only God saves them. And the same way with the same information that he saved you he can save somebody else. So ignorance is no excuse.

For.

Not witnessing. And today.

There.

Really are no excuses to be ignorant. Not here. Not in the United States. Not in most of the world. Vast areas of the world we have internet access. There's sermons. There's books. There's good solid teaching that we all have access to.

So.

Hey, we can come to church and hear sermons here. Hear teaching here. So there's all of those opportunities for us to learn. It's a matter of priorities. For some of us, we prefer.

Not.

To read. Okay, don't read. Get audio books. Listen to sermons on YouTube. There really is no excuse for staying ignorant. And it's not just so that we can know more. It's so that we can serve more. It's so that we can give out.

More.

We were hearing in Sunday school today. One of the marks, if you like, of immaturity in Hebrews 5 is that there are people that need to be fed. And they're not giving out.

So.

If you find yourself in that situation where you're really not giving out much, ask yourself, why is that? It's worth mentioning.

That.

In terms of taking the gospel to the ends of the.

Earth,.

Sharing the gospel in a cross cultural context.

Is.

Way more difficult than doing it in your own context, in your own culture.

And I.

Think, obviously I'm biased, maybe, but I think that does require special training.

We.

Should support those people, and you guys do. You support people who make the effort to prepare themselves for that type of a ministry. It can be financial support, but also, as I mentioned already, what you do for us with encouragement, with letters, and prayer support particularly.

Something else to mention when we talk about ignorance is, in today's society, it's very easy for us to become blinkered. Social media and all the algorithms and all that stuff that they use allows us to, or leads us, to create our own little echo chambers.

So the only thing that we hear is what we want to hear.

Yeah?

We see that more and more in the United States. The political parties used to be, you know, there would be some dialogue and there were people in the middle. But now they're polarized. They're very separate, and they're angry.

As believers, we shouldn't have anything to do with that. I'm not saying we shouldn't be interested in politics, but we shouldn't be getting angry. Yeah? We should be looking for reconciliation, for bringing people together.

So, yeah, one of the, one of my areas of responsibility.

In.

Security for the mission is that I need to keep and, if you like, keep current on what's happening all over Latin America, which means I spend a certain amount of time most days looking at articles and things.

But I don't just go to sites that I agree with. I have to go to other sites, which sometimes is really annoying. But you find that by doing that, you have a much better picture of what's going on around you.

And I would just challenge all of us, if we find ourselves looking only at things that tell us what we want to hear, that we're actually creating a level of ignorance of what is actually happening around us.

Not.

Just in terms of, you know, in spiritual terms, but obviously in what's going on in the world.

Okay.

Comfort. Something interesting that I've seen, and it's not true here. I'm pretty sure it's not true here now, which you'll be glad to hear. But I've seen in a lot of churches around the world is that a church is made up of two or maybe three families.

And everybody's related to everybody else in the church somehow. And that's not a problem in one sense. We should be concerned about our relatives. You know, we should be concerned about our family and seeing them.

Saved. But what about the people that.

We're not related to? Are we concerned for them too? We should make the effort to go outside of our comfort zone. The goal of the Great Commission is that everyone hears of Christ, not just our family members.

Again, as we think of this, as we think of that comfort zone, missionaries or anybody who's involved in cross-cultural work, and I hesitate to use the term missionary, because now there's lots of different types of missionary.

Some never leave their passport country. Some never leave the city they were born in. But they're still doing cross-cultural work. Around the world, there's so many people now that you have huge refugee migrations.

And so instead of going to the ends of the earth, the ends of the earth are coming to you. But it's still cross-cultural work. You still have to understand the culture and the world view of the people that you're trying to reach.

And that means breaking out of your own comfort zone. And so looking for opportunities outside of your normal class, race, if you want to use that term, type of the people that you're going to be meeting with.

And so,.

Again,.

People who are involved in those types of ministries need, in a sense, they need more prayer because of the challenges that that brings. When I taught in Mexico, I taught in the Mexican training program, so training Mexicans as missionaries.

And one year, well, we did this every year, we had a field trip from the training program to the M .K. school, the missionary school,.

To see.

What we could learn about American culture because although we were in Mexico, the school was run as an American.

School.

It did K through 12 and so on. Everything was in English. All of the subjects were American-based and so on. Our children went through that system.

And so.

It was like a little piece of America in Chihuahua. And so the students would go and they'd spend the morning just looking around. They'd wander around and they were allowed to go into the class and sit there and listen for a while and just see what was going on.

And as part of that exercise, they were looking for things that could be a hindrance to the gospel. You know, thinking just of, you know, maybe a hindrance to understanding the gospel or, you know, whatever.

So.

One of the students, one year he commented that the degree of comfort in the school, okay, there was air conditioning. None of the tables or chairs were broken. They had a water fountain for, you know, for the students and so on.

There were just several different things that they looked at and they said, well, it's really comfortable. And he said that his comment was that that level of comfort could hold people back from taking the gospel because they're comfortable.

They don't want to go.

We.

Have had missionaries, well, we were in Mexico. There was one missionary.

Family.

That they were looking to go into a tribal work and their first question was how far the tribal work was from a beach resort so that they could get their breaks on a regular basis. Okay. That family is no longer on the field.

But.

On the other hand, we have other young families.

Who.

Are going through all sorts of things and they won't give up. They continue on.

I.

Was talking to a couple just the other day.

That.

One of their daughters has ectodermal dysplasia. Anybody know what that is? No, I didn't know what it was either. Basically, without going into all the details, basically, you can't regulate your own body temperature.

So if you live in the tropics, you're going to overheat and they live right on the edge of the Amazon basin. Kind of tough. But they're still there and they're not giving up. So I say that partly because.

The.

New generation, I think, very often gets a bad rap. They get a lot of criticism for being lightweight and so on. And some of them are. But you know what? So will we. Our generation was the same. We're not losing more missionaries now than we used to.

Some of them, you know, they will tough it out.

If you like. Okay.

Sin. Let's talk about.

Sin.

Not too much. I hope it's not necessary to spend too much time talking about this. I think it's kind of obvious. We know that continuing to sin, continuing to maintain sinful habits is wrong. We know that's wrong.

We know that that's the true. So we're not talking about the everyday things that we do that we know we shouldn't do.

Yeah.

That we say, oh yeah, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have done that. I got angry. Or whatever it is.

But.

When we excuse ourselves, when we justify what we're doing, we're not actually really asking for forgiveness. We're saying, well no, it was okay. It was alright to do that. When we refuse to accept that what we're doing is sinful, then God turns his back.

On us. We don't want to be like.

Achan. The sin of one man caused the deaths of 36 men. If you tell people, doesn't matter who it is, if you tell people that you're praying for them, but God's not listening to your prayers because you're holding on to some sin.

It might be sexual sin. It might be anger. It might be pride. It might be justifying your behavior and saying, no, it's okay. That's just me. Whatever it is, if you're holding on to that sin, God isn't listening.

Now, as.

Missionaries, we depend on you guys to pray for us.

Yeah?

Because there are times that we get into situations that we don't know how God gets us out of them. But we depend on you guys praying for us. If you're harboring sin,.

There's.

One less person that's praying. So potentially, your sin, and I don't want to labor this too much, but your sin, your refusal to accept that what you're doing is sinful could cause the deaths of a whole lot more than just 36 people.

Serious stuff. And talking of.

Missionaries, it's tragic when we hear of missionaries who get caught up.

In sin. Missionaries,.

And, I mean, obviously, I'm a missionary, so I don't want you to think that I'm a terrible person.

But,.

You know, very often people say, oh, missionaries, they're wonderful people, they do these wonderful things.

No.

We might do extraordinary things from time to time, but we're just ordinary people. We're still weak. We still need support. We still need people to pray for us. And so very often you hear of missionaries and they fail, and they get into all sorts of problems, but they need your prayer.

Okay, that's enough about sin. Let's talk about.

Distraction. So.

It's very easy for us to get distracted. We get distracted by the good.

Away.

From the best. In missionary work, there's a very real danger of being distracted by good work, by social work. So in Mexico, we had to, as part of our visa requirements, we had to do some sort of social work.

Water, you know, drinking water projects, that type of thing. Dental clinics, other medical brigades, and so on.

And.

They're good things. They actually give us an entrance into the community. It gives us an opportunity to show people that we care. But if the gospel doesn't get preached at the end of it all, they're still going to die.

They're still going to go to hell. So it's easy to get wrapped up in those things that sidetrack us, that distract us from the main purpose. Now for me, I was planning to become an agricultural missionary.

And.

Then when I was in Colombia working on a farm, God made it clear that he wanted me as a missionary.

Period.

Not an agricultural missionary. And I recognize that some people are called to do if you like, social work. We're friends with a doctor who works with pioneers, but he's a doctor in Mexico. And he has opened up the way for missionaries to go into places because he treats them.

And he's opened clinics and so on. And several years ago, I was helping him learn language.

And.

It got to the point after about a year, I said, you know what Kenny, you're not going. You will not get the language to the point that you can teach unless you close a clinic. You can't do both. And so we had quite a long discussion about it and he chose to keep doing the medical so that other people.

Had.

Entrance and he and they then would teach and preach and so on. So it's not a straightforward thing, but it's recognizing when God gives you something to do that's what you do. And you don't need to be distracted by other things.