EAN: Mission of The Church

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Today's message I've titled Missio Ecclesiae, or Mission of the

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Church. It's a version of the similar message I gave in 2019, and it's something that's been very heavy on my heart.

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It's inspired by a small book from our dear brother Joseph, Dr. Joseph Boot, if you guys know who he is.

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The book is called For Mission, and it's subtitled The Need for Scriptural Cultural Theology.

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And today I hope to answer this simple question, what is the mission of the church?

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I know the Great Commission was just read, but that's the main passage for today is

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Matthew 28, 18 -20. Behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

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Before I pray here, I want to read you a quick quote from Joe Boot in this book. He says, As individuals, and as families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, and cultures, human beings are made to glorify

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God and enjoy him forever. The mission of God's people is thus intimately tied to the purpose for which we were created, and therefore, the biblical teaching of the kingdom of God.

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Before I go any further, if you abide with me, I'll ask God to bless us. Lord, I just thank you so much for this opportunity to be here today to teach from this pulpit.

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Lord, I thank you for allowing us to get here safely. And I ask that you would speak through me, Lord, get me out of the way.

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And I ask that you would use this message to encourage and strengthen your people and that you use it for your glory.

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And we ask this in Christ's name. Amen. So first, I want to define what is mission.

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Dictionary .com says, What about biblically?

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How do we biblically define mission? The Encyclopedia of Christianity defines missiology, or the study of mission, as a systematic reflection on the work of mission, usually

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Christian mission, including the mission or sending of God, Missio Dei, of Jesus Christ, of the apostles, of the church, or of other mission organizations.

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And the Faith Life Study Bible says, Mission is the reason the church exists and the church joins

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Jesus on his mission. And the mission is from everywhere to everywhere. Christians are to be both engaged in missions, the international pursuit to preach the gospel to all corners of the earth, and be missional each and every day.

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Being missional conveys the idea of living on a purposeful, biblical mission.

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So quickly, I want to answer this question. What is the difference between mission and commission? We all know the

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Great Commission. I just read it. Matthew 28. And dictionary .com lists multiple definitions of commission.

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So I'm going to explain this here. There's, let's see, I think there's four, and we're going to apply these through the

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Great Commission. So number one, the act of committing or entrusting a person, group, etc.

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with supervisory power or authority. So we look at the Great Commission. We got that.

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All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Now take that authority and go therefore. How much authority?

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All authority. Where is the authority located? In heaven and on earth.

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And what group has been entrusted? His disciples. The second definition is an authoritative order, charge, or direction.

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Again, what's the order of the charge? To go therefore, make disciples, baptize them, and teach them to observe all that I have commanded you.

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Teaching them what? To observe all that I have commanded. All means all, not some.

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Not only in the New Testament, but also in the Old Testament. So go, make, teach. And then the third definition is authority granted for a particular action or function.

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Again, we've already discussed the authority, and the action, and the function. The next definition was a document granted such authority.

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Bingo. God's Word. That's our document granting that authority. Five, a group of persons authoritatively charged with particular functions.

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Again, it's Christ's disciples, and consequently, well, the original disciples, and consequently, any disciple thereafter, meaning us.

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All Christians, of course, trace their spiritual roots back to that moment. Six, the condition of being placed under special authoritative responsibility or charge.

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Again, the Great Commission, that's the condition. And as Dr. White says, the gospel is not a suggestion, it is a command.

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So, if then statement then is, if you are a Christian, then you are to be a missionary.

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By the special authority of your Savior. As believers in Christ, it is our responsibility that we will be held accountable for.

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And then the last definition is a task or matter committed to one's charge or an official assignment.

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Again, go, make, teach. That's our official assignment, and it's a committed task.

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So, to go back to the faith -life definition of mission, there was four points there. And I know I'm doing a lot of explaining at the beginning, and we'll get into more of the text here in a minute.

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But I kind of wanted to lay out how to define stuff. So, there's four points.

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It said, mission is the reason the Church exists. So, the chief end of man, and man's primary purpose.

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Anyone here know it? I figured you all knew it. Glorify God and enjoy

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Him forever. So, how do we glorify Him? By loving Him and loving others. Simple.

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Matthew 22, 36 -40. It says, So, how do we ultimately love others?

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By laying down our lives for the Great Commission. Sacrificing our good for the good of others.

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By preaching the Gospel. By going, therefore, and making disciples. This is the mission that has been given to us by Christ and for which we exist.

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The second point here is the Church joins Jesus on His mission. As Christ breathed

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His last breath on the cross in John 20 -21, He said, So, Christ's mission from the

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Father was to seek and save the lost. And to vanquish the works of Satan, 1 John 3. And to reconcile to Himself all things in Colossians 1, which we will discuss later.

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We, as Christians, are to join Christ in this mission. We are the feet of the

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Gospel. Romans 10, 14 -15 says, How, then, will they call on Him in whom they have not believed?

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And how are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?

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And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news.

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And the third definition is the mission is from, again, I said earlier, from everywhere to everywhere.

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So, we are going into all the world, making disciples of all the nations. This includes the jungles of Africa, and it includes your next -door neighbor.

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Everywhere means everywhere. There's not one square inch of earth that should be safe from our mission.

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My good friend Andrew Sandlin has said, and I love this quote, he says,

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Again, that means everywhere. Even the gates of hell, which

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Matthew 16, 18 says, Now, I love this point here, and I hammer this point home a lot.

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Gates are defensive, not offensive. And I think as Christians, we often get this point wrong.

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When we hear, when we think of the gates of hell not prevailing against the church, we picture them being offensive, right, like coming through the front doors of the church.

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But in reality, the gates of hell are defensive. And so they're not going to prevail against the church because the church is going forth from the four walls of our church, right?

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We're going forth out our doors, and we're knocking down the gates of hell. The next point, then, is we are to live missional lives.

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Spurgeon said, So every aspect of our lives should be defined by this mission.

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We are to be salt and light. Matthew 5, 13 -16 We'll actually come back to this passage here in a little bit.

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But the point is that this is what a life of mission looks like. Now, going back to Dr.

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Boot, this is how he defines mission. He says it's, But which focuses on understanding the way that Christians, as God's vicegerants, live out the gospel in every area of life.

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This living out is our mission, our act of worship. It finds expression in every area of life.

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And the way we think about that mission says something important about our understanding both of the nature of worship and of God.

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So a quick definition here. A vicegerant is a person exercising delegated power on behalf of a sovereign or ruler.

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In other words, we are Christ's deputies operating under his delegated authority to us.

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So we operate as Christ's vicegerants to the world. This mission, however, is not simply our commanded calling, but again, is also worship.

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And as Dr. White has also famously said, theology matters. And so your view of God and your view of worship greatly affects your view of the mission.

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And just like theology, I would contend that eschatology, or the study of last things, also matters.

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And I'm not going to get into that today. But the point is this, that eschatology can also significantly affect your view of the mission.

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Joe often says, Dr. Boot, he says, People say I have an over -realized eschatology, but my response is to say,

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No, you have an under -realized soteriology. So this is the question that I want to ask is, just how encompassing is

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God's salvation? How far exactly does the gospel reach? The answers to these questions will affect your understanding of the mission.

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So my next point here is, how has the church failed its mission? And I think, honestly, the reason both of our cultures are what they are today is because the church has failed so miserably in our mission to the world and to the culture.

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But Joe Boot says, The decline of a robust, full, vital, and applied Christianity in the

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West is clearly evidenced in our society's preponderance of ungodly laws, apostate educational practices, secular political outlook, and overtly neo -pagan arts entertainment, to name just a few.

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Christians have allowed and sometimes even been instrumental in furthering this decline. An impoverished understanding of our mission has increasingly led us to either abandon these key areas of life and the culture in the name of true piety, or to uncritically adopt or synthesize them with our faith in the name of relevance or even wisdom.

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In either case, we have tacitly accepted an unbelieving view of the world as normative.

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And once that has happened, we are in urgent need of fundamental redirection and reformation.

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In other words, going back to what I said earlier, the church has failed to be salt and light to our cultures.

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We've retreated to our pietistic bunkers, pretending to bend over and tie our shoes while the culture goes to hell in a handbasket.

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The reformed tradition refers to the living and breathing church as the church militant.

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But in reality, there's nothing militant about the church and our cultures. This does not mean that we are to take up arms and go to war looking for bloodshed, but it does mean that we are to be actively and vigorously involved in this mission.

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This is nothing more than spiritualized cowardice. Again, my friend

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Andrew Sandlin describes this as the church at large in our culture, describes it as a pious goop of spineless religion, and goes on to say this appeasement reinforces the cultural irrelevance of Christianity and has become the unintentional ally of secularists and pagans.

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And this is precisely what the church has become, an overly pious spineless pile of goo.

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Do you guys have jello jigglers here? If I say that, do you know what that means? Okay. You have jello?

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Do you know what jello is? Okay, so they're like squares, right? We have a saying, it's like trying to nail jello jigglers to the wall, right?

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So imagine trying to take a piece of jello and nail it to the wall. It's just going to keep—that's like what the church is, just spineless.

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There's no guts. So that actually represents what it's like to hold especially many mainstream pastors to God's standard of truth.

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And as Dr. Greg Bonson said, the salt has lost its saltiness. Both of our current cultures do not have a pleasant taste.

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They do not taste salty. They taste like blood. Have you ever been punched in the mouth or bit your lip?

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You've tasted blood, right? It's gross. It tastes like iron. This is precisely the taste that our cultures leave in your mouth.

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We live in cultures of death, and the flavor is that of bloodlust. We as the church have failed entirely to add this salty flavor of the gospel to our cultures.

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And if you remember what I said in Matthew 5, 13, And again,

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Greg Bonson, as he said, Except to be trampled under the feet of the culture.

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And dear brothers and sisters, this is absolutely what has happened. Think about this for a minute.

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Christianity, the gospel, God's word, ultimately has become a laughingstock in our cultures.

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Why is this? Because we've lost our flavor. We are now trampled underfoot of gross immorality and of the love affair of death.

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And although the culture is culpable for their sins and their desire for death, the church is also at fault for our lack of saltiness.

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Now, I mentioned I gave this sermon before. I had to go back and make some changes because as I was going through this,

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I remembered that you guys don't use salt here in your food. That's okay.

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But we fat Americans, however, we add salt to our food like our lives depend on it.

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And in reality, it's killing us. But that's another point. My point is that salt's primary purpose is not just to flavor your food.

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In the States, that's what we think it's for. It's definitely to flavor your food. But it's to serve as a preservative, right?

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What does salt do? It preserves life. Before refrigerators, before we had ice, which you guys don't use either, salt was used to preserve meat, literally to extend the life of a slaughtered animal before rot and decay to cold.

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Preservatives are added to food to extend its shelf life. Medicine is used to preserve human life, and the church's mission is to preserve and extend the life of the culture through the gospel.

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But because we have failed to do so, the culture reeks of death and decay. Instead of extending life, the culture is literally shortening it through the means of homosexuality, abortion, and euthanasia.

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So what is the root cause of this failure? I believe we can trace this collapse back to the change in eschatology.

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As I mentioned, eschatology matters, and I'm not going to get deep into that today, but I'm more interested in its effects.

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That's what I want to focus on today. Instead of holding to the optimistic eschatology of Christians throughout the history of the church,

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Christians began to fall for a pessimistic doomsday eschatology. And this,

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I will admit, this is a much bigger issue in my culture than it is in yours. But instead of believing in Christ's victorious kingdom,

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Christians began to prepare for the end times. Instead of thinking long -term, Christians slowly became consumed with only what was immediately and directly in front of them.

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This directly resulted in Christian retreatism. Now, instead of boldly proclaiming the gospel in hopes of fulfilling the

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Great Commission, the church retreated into the four walls of their church buildings, taking the gospel with them.

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And instead of speaking to the culture, the church hid from it. The longer the church has sat around waiting, the worse the culture has become.

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And the worse the culture has become, the more irrelevant the gospel has become. Proverbs 19, 18, this is one of my favorite verses.

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It says, Where there is no prophetic vision that people cast off restraint, but blessed is he who keeps the law.

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Simply put, there has been little to no prophetic vision from the church into the culture, and the people have therefore cast off restraint.

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We're watching it before our eyes. We are to be the light of the world, and a city on a hill, in order to illuminate the way to Christ.

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That's our mission. But in selfish fear, we've hidden that lamp under a basket. This is what

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Joe Boot defines as churchianity. So churchianity, to set this up,

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I want to discuss the two most dominant views of the church's mission in modern evangelicalism.

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So one is an overrated view of the institutional church, and two is an overrated view of the state.

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Ultimately, both views have led to a failure of this mission. Pastors from each perspective have failed to provide adequate answers to the morally failing culture.

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And not just morally failing, but increasingly anti -Christian. Simply put, the church has not been properly equipped to engage the culture with the mission we've been assigned.

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So an overrated view of the institutional church. Let's quickly look at this. I want to clarify a couple things first.

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The distinctions and use of the term church. So there's three

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I want to discuss. There's the universal church. So this is the Catholic, not Roman Catholic, but the

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Catholic universal bride of Christ, past, present, and future. All who have, all who will repent, and believe in Christ for salvation.

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So if you were to gather all the Christians for all time, that would be the universal church.

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Then the second is the visible or militant church that I mentioned earlier. So this is the living, breathing, active church.

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Those who we presently see throughout the world. The opposite is the church triumphant, or those already in heaven.

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So they have triumphantly finished the race. And then the third is the institutional church.

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So this is the church as an entity or an organism. So Apologia Church in Mesa or Dundalk Baptist Church, that would be the church institution.

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In this scenario, the institutional church is being conflated with the kingdom of God, and therefore radically church -centered.

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So simply put, they're being viewed as one and the same. In reality, they are not at all the same thing.

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Ultimately, the church is only part of the kingdom of God. Christ is ruling and reigning now, both in heaven and on earth, and the universal church only makes up one portion of that kingdom, and the institutional church, an even smaller portion.

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This camp typically has a Biblical Orthodox soteriology, or study of salvation, but a faulty missiology.

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So they have the gospel, right, but they're failing to put that into mission. As I have mentioned, they have become overly pietistic and become retreatists.

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They have taken the mission with them inside the four walls. So it's like they have the gospel, they come in their church and lock the doors and say, you're not getting in, right?

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But they're not going forth with the gospel. So this has resulted in little to no engagement with the culture.

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At best, this group is largely disinterested in Christ's lordship over all things, both in heaven and on earth, every sphere of life and every institution.

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And just for the record, the four spheres I'm talking about would be personal, family, church, and civil.

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Those are the God -ordained spheres of government he's given us. At worst, they are even hostile to it, right?

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All conversation of redeeming the culture is discouraged or even seen as contra -scripture.

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If there is any cultural engagement, its purpose is seen as strictly evangelical. In other words, any conflict with the culture only serves as a means to rescue them from hell.

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Joe Boot says that the gospel essentially refers to a narrow set of affirmations about the cross, the new birth, the justification of individuals, and their escape from hell.

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The immediate result is the truncation of the Christian mission to the task of getting more people saved and into the church so that they can go to heaven.

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Which isn't a bad thing, but that becomes the only thing, which we're going to discuss more. But the Christian life is radically reduced to personal evangelism, piety, growth, and blessing.

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This is precisely the opposite of what Christ commanded in Matthew 6 .33, to seek ye first the kingdom of God.

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Paul tells us in Colossians 1 that Christ not only created all things, but will also, this is important, will also reconcile to himself all these things, both in heaven and on earth.

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All things have been replaced with some things. This full -orbed mission to not only make disciples of all the nations, but also teach them all that he has commanded has been either forgotten or, even worse, ignored.

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Here, Joe Boot says, this pietistic but broadly theological conservative worldview produces immature believers attending churches where they can remain unchallenged week after week, calling on God for personal blessing or to increase their faith and obedience, but with little or no conception of the scope and grandeur of the gospel or the transforming power of the kingdom of God for all of life.

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As we have already discussed, again, I'm not going to harp on this, but I do believe eschatology greatly affects this.

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The parousia, or the coming of Christ, is viewed as the ultimate goal, while redeeming the culture is viewed as a waste of time.

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Why polish brass on a sinking ship? We hear that all the time, at least in my nation.

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We are told that salvation is for the soul and the inner life, while the kingdom of God is something yet to come.

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The result is that the church institution is viewed as the only place on earth where God's rule and Christ's lordship are expressed, leaving behind a blatant and radical sacred and secular divide.

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This, brothers and sisters, is modern -day Gnosticism, a theology deemed heretical in the

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New Testament. All things Christian are seen as holy and good, while all things secular are seen as immoral and bad.

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Where it becomes problematic, however, is when Christians restrict the teaching of all things to only the secular realm.

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So this idea and thought is that you can't teach the secular realm to obey the

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Lord. We as the church have stopped holding the secular realm accountable to the standards of Christ the

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King. So the other position that I mentioned was the overrated view of the state. This is the other end of the spectrum.

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This greatly overrates the view of the state and thereby underrating the importance of the institutional church and its administration of the sacraments, the preaching of God's holy word and church discipline or accountability.

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This camp rightly views the mission as not being restricted to within the four walls of the local churches and that the gospel involves more than simply saving souls from hell.

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They rightly recognize that our mission must impact the culture tangibly here and now.

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However, the tendency tends to shift the source of hope from the church to the state.

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Christ's atoning death, resurrection, and salvific power is replaced with social justice and the social gospel, resulting in the kingdom of God being identified by anything and anyone actively pursuing economic and social equality.

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The state then acts as the great high priest or better yet the Messiah that will deliver mankind from all forms of oppression.

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Justification by faith alone in Christ alone is replaced with moralism and social action.

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Inward sanctification and the good works produced thereof are supplanted by external political coercion as the only acceptable route to the kingdom.

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Scripture is actually greatly concerned with oppression and injustice and therefore so should the church be.

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Spurgeon said a church that does not exist to reclaim heathenism, to fight with evil, to destroy error, to put down falsehood, a church that does not exist to take the side of the poor, to denounce injustice, and to hold up righteousness is a church that has no right to be a church.

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However, the philosophy behind this movement is vastly different than that of our assigned mission.

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The latter is rooted in scripture, the former is not. Neo -Marxism and utopian humanization is substituted for the gospel.

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Now, both of these views have commonly shared root problems. The first one here, clearly our mission should fall somewhere in between these two perspectives, right?

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But now I'd like to shift our attention to a few common root issues. Both are extreme positions and have the same three core concerns.

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The first one is a failure to correctly identify the foundation of our Christian hope.

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It is neither the church's institution nor the state, but is solely found in the salvation and the lordship of Jesus Christ over all things.

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The totality of life not comprimentalized. He alone is the one mediator between man and God.

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Both the church and the state are divine institutions, sovereignly placed to rule over us, but have limited roles, limited functions, and limited power.

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They are designed to serve God and function to ultimately point us back to him. The second root issue is a mischaracterization of the nature of the church and the state.

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So a false view of the church, a false view of the state, naturally leads to a false view of the mission.

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The church is not the kingdom of God and therefore cannot be limited to it. Our mission extends well outside of the doors of our local churches.

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Boot said to limit the kingdom of God to the church is to surrender culture to the enemies of God.

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On the flip side, the church institution is a very important part of the kingdom of God and cannot become irrelevant.

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It cannot become a servant of the humanistic state. Instead, the church must speak prophetically to the state.

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We must boldly hold the state accountable to God's standards of ethics, morality, and law.

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And here again Boot says when the church becomes a handmaiden of the state and an advocate of liberal progressivism or social justice, rather than biblical righteousness, it has forsaken its true character.

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And then the last root thing here is the influence of implicit and destructive dualism.

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I talked about this a little bit a few minutes ago, but again this is modern -day

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Gnosticism. Boot describes this as an implicit and destructive dualism that slices up reality into matter and spirit, nature and grace, secular and sacred, natural and supernatural, time and eternity, higher and lower, with one area perceived as lesser or evil and the other as higher and good.

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Again, the direct outworking of this system creates a radical separation of creation and redemption, the secular and the sacred.

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This also promotes subservience of the Christian to the secular culture and a full -on abandonment of any

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Christian culture -making whatsoever. So the next point is how does the mission affect the culture?

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Why am I harping on this so much? How can we as the church proclaiming

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God's mission affect the culture? There is a sentiment contrary to the mission that says that the gospel does not change cultures, but the gospel does change people, and people change the culture.

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Culture is nothing more than religion externalized. The flavor of your religion will flavor your culture.

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Human beings are cultural creatures. This is how God designed us and intended for us to function.

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Everything we do in life is culture -making. If we are not making a godly culture, then we are making a

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God -hating one, or at least allowing one to be made. There is no neutrality.

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That's a myth. And it's high time we stop living like it's true. Here, Boot says,

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The salvation of an individual and their subsequent faithfulness to God and their personal and family life does affect an immediate change in culture as they live in the world.

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The culture of the home is altered when a man surrenders his life to Christ. The culture of a business begins to change when its leader orients his heart towards God's word.

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The culture of a school begins to change when the head teacher turns to Christ and is directed by the scriptures.

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Indeed, everything in which the true believer is involved, as they live out the truth in terms of God's word, is powerfully impacted.

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Christ's total lordship over all things is not simply a theological idea that we just sit around discussing over a hot cup of tea.

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I said coffee, but I'll say tea for you guys. Brothers and sisters, it is much more than that. It's a lifestyle.

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He either gets to tell you how to live every aspect of your life or none at all.

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His lordship does not exist only inside these walls. It does not stop the moment you step outside of this building.

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Our mission is not to get people to vote for Jesus for president, or what do we call it here, prime minister?

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Whatever that you said, yes. But announce that he is already ruling and reigning, right?

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And that it would be in people's best interest to bow before the king in humble submission.

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This is absolutely critical. We cannot tell the world to believe it if we don't believe it ourselves.

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Our friend Doug Wilson said, What can be said of unfaithful emissaries who change the message? We are as full of unbelief as the people we preach to.

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You cannot divorce religion from culture, and likewise you cannot divorce religion from politics.

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Politics is simply legislated morality. Even the way you vote is affected by your religion.

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Culture is driven and shaped by religion, and if you are a Christian, the gospel should drive and shape you.

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Our mission should be fulfilled by the natural outpouring of Christ's lordship over all things, over all of life.

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So in conclusion, what should our response be? In light of everything

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I've just discussed, how should we approach the missio ecclesiae? Here's a quote from our friend

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George Grant. This was at a missions conference at Christ Church in Moscow, Idaho. He said, I start to think to myself, maybe we shouldn't polish brass on a sinking ship.

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But then I read my Bible and I realize that we are not supposed to be polishing brass and we're not on a sinking ship.

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Instead we are the emissaries of a glorious message that the world yearns to hear. For all of its rebellion against it, the word of the cross is powerful for the transformation of the nations.

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Do we really believe this though? Is the gospel really powerful enough? 1

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Corinthians 5, 16 -21 says, From now on, therefore, regarding no one according to the flesh, or we regard no one according to the flesh, even though we once regarded

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Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.

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The old has passed away. Behold, the new has come. All this is from God and through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

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That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against him and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.

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Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us.

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We implore you on behalf of Christ to be reconciled to God. For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

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So again, remember Colossians 1, that Christ came to reconcile all things to himself, heaven and on earth.

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And we, as Christ's emissaries, have been given this ministry of reconciliation. All those who have been reconciled to Christ, we have also been granted, again, the ministry of reconciliation through Christ.

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God is reconciling the world to himself. This message has been entrusted to us. Brothers and sisters, this is our mission.

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We are not simply trying to save souls from hell, but also trying to reconcile the world back to God.

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The fall and sin's curse has separated the world from God. He has assigned to us the responsibility of repairing this damage, of fusing the fissure, and of mending the seam.

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Lastly, I'm going to end with this quote from Job. He said, The message of the gospel is therefore centered in the declaration that this

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Jesus Christ is Lord and King over all the earth, over all cultures, peoples, and lands, and that he is calling all people to repentance and joyful obedience to the coming kingdom of God.