Goal 2015: Beyond Our Borders

The Missionary Purpose of Acts and the Church’s Expansion

I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to the first chapter of the book of Acts and just hold your place there at Acts chapter 1. At the beginning of 2014, I told the congregation, all of you, that I believed that this year was going to be different.

And I do believe that it has been different than all of the previous years that I have been here. We did some things this year that we have never done as a church. We joined a fellowship of other churches, confirming our stand on Reformed theology and our commitment to stand with other churches which are like-minded.

We hosted our first real Bible conference, inter-church Bible conference, wherein we hosted ministers from other churches to come and preach. And in doing so, we began a fellowship which is continuing even to now where I am meeting on a regular basis with all of those ministers for lunch and fellowship.

And trying to seek ways that our churches can minister together. We have expanded our online outreach and we have exceeded now, this week, 26 ,000 downloads since we began that outreach just a couple of years ago.

And we have seen our messages go out to people all around the world, to Africa and to Asia. It is being expanded out through the ministry of our online outreach. So, we have seen a lot of things happen this year and most importantly, we have seen people come to Christ.

We have seen people be baptized in the name of the Triune God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. And we have seen people grow in their faith. We had a young man decide to join the ranks of the ministry and enter seminary.

What a blessing that has been. We have had the opportunity to support him in that. So, we have seen so much good in this past year, but beloved, as much as I believe we had potential last year to do great things, I believe we have only scratched the surface of what God has in store for us.

I believe that God has even greater things for us to accomplish in the year to come. And I am convinced in my heart that God is pushing me and by extension all of us to be more missionary minded in the coming year.

He is opening doors for me and for our church. And I believe that this year has the potential for establishing a stronger emphasis on global outreach than we have ever had before. So, based on this urgency which is in my soul, based on this urgency that I believe God is pushing us toward, I have decided for the beginning of 2015, starting today, to begin a series of lessons from the book of Acts.

Acts is an account of the early church's missionary zeal and it gives insight into how they took Christ's message into the world. How that small group of 120 that were there in the upper room turned the world upside down for Christ.

We often think how small we are, but how small were they? And yet they turned the world upside down and we still, 2 ,000 years later, feel the effects of what they did. God has something for us that we can do.

We just need to do it. So, I do want to kind of prepare you for this series because it's going to be different than some of my other... Normally when I preach a book, I preach verse by verse all the way through the book.

We took three years to go through Hebrews, three years to go through Luke. We're not doing it that way this time. Instead of giving a verse by verse exposition of Acts, what I'm going to do is I'm going to look at some of the great missionary teachings that are in Acts.

So, we're going to look through Acts and we are going to be teaching expositionally. It just won't be every single verse. But rather, we're going to look at some of the passages in Acts that will help urge us and encourage us in our evangelistic approach.

And my hope is that in the pages of the book of Acts, we will see ourselves and what we need to be doing as a church. So really, what I hope to see in Acts is a mirror. This is what we can do. This is what we should be doing.

And mirror it back to all of us, that we might seek and save the lost. Not that we can save them, but to bring them the message of salvation. To bring them Christ. For He came, as He said, to seek and save that which is lost.

So, beginning there, I want to open the series with reading the first eleven verses of Acts. So, stand with me as we give honor and reverence to the word of God. And we're going to look at Acts chapter 1, verses 1 through 11.

And we're going to focus our attention on verse 8. Because every book has a theme and every book sort of has a thematic verse. And verse 8 is the thematic verse of the entire book of Acts. And by the way, the book of Acts is written by Luke.

This is Luke volume 2. So, if you notice at the beginning of Luke, it opens up to Theophilus. This also opens up to the reader, Theophilus. It says, In the first book, O Theophilus, talking about Luke, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach until the day when He was taken up, after He had given commands through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom He had chosen.

He presented Himself alive to them after His suffering by many proofs, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. And while staying with them, He ordered them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for the promise of the Father, which He said, You heard from Me, for John baptized with water, but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.

So when they had come together, they asked Him, Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel? He said to them, It is not for you to know times or seasons that the Father has fixed by His own authority, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

And when He had said these things, as they were looking on, He was lifted up, and a cloud took Him out of their sight. And while they were gazing into heaven, as He went, behold, two men stood before them in white robes and said, Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking into heaven?

This Jesus who was taken up from you into heaven will come in the same way as you saw Him go into heaven. Our Father and our God, we thank You for giving us this opportunity to again dive into Your Word and study it.

I pray, Lord, that You would keep me from error, as I know I am a fallible man capable of preaching error. And I pray on behalf of the church, for their sake and for mine, Lord, that You would keep me from error.

And Father, also that You would increase our unction, our desire, our urgency for the lost. As we read in the book of Acts and see ourselves, as we look in the book of Acts and see what we need to be doing as disciples of Christ, as believers in Him, as ambassadors for Him.

Thank You, Father, for the call to missions. May it be that we are struck with a new zeal for that call. In Jesus' name we pray and for His sake. Amen. I have entitled this series, Beyond Our Borders.

And I want that to become the theme, not only of this message and not only of this series, but I want that to become the theme of the year and might I even say the theme of the church. Because throughout this year, I want us to be able to look back on this message and that idea and be able to be confronted by it often.

In this text that we've just read, we see sort of the epilogue to Luke's gospel here and the prologue to the book of Acts. And really what we have in the book of Acts is we have the bridge between the gospels and the epistles.

Imagine what we would know about the early church if we didn't have the book of Acts. If all we had was the stories of Jesus in the gospels and the epistles, we'd be able to construct some of what the early church looked like.

But we would have so much missing if we didn't have this great historical narrative, which comes to us from the pen of Dr. Luke. Luke was a physician and Luke was also a historian. And when Luke brings to us this writing, he brings it to us as the second part of this great historical narrative about the life of Jesus Christ.

And so we read this and we see the power and the majesty of the Holy Spirit's work in the early church. And one of the things that we often call this book the Acts of the Apostles, but one of the great teachers of the past said, really it shouldn't be called the Acts of the Apostles, it should be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit.

Because we see Christ's ministry in the gospels. And Jesus said, if I be taken up, I will send to you another comforter. I will send you one who will come to walk beside you, who will indwell you and who will empower you.

And the one that he was referring to was the Holy Spirit. And we see the ministry and work of the Holy Spirit. And we're going to study more about this in the weeks to come as we get on to chapter two.

And we see how the Holy Spirit fell as tongues of fire and that the people began to speak in languages they didn't know. And that was the great benefit of seeing the gospel being proclaimed to all languages, no longer just in Hebrew, no longer just among the Israelites, but that it would go to all people and all languages.

And that's the blessing of the tongues that were given, the new languages that every man heard the gospel in his own language. And so what we see in Acts is we see a church that's bursting from its borders.

And that's why I've titled the series Beyond Our Borders. If you look at verse eight, he says, You will receive power from the Holy Spirit when the Holy Spirit has come upon you. And you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in Judea and Samaria and to the end of the earth.

Now, I want you to notice the extension of the borders there. Yes, there's a theme in my message. Borders is the theme. But I want you to notice the extension of what has happened. He says you're going to begin in your immediate area.

You're going to be in Jerusalem and you're going to be my witnesses where you are, because you're going to be in Jerusalem and you're going to start witnessing there. And we'll see when we get to chapter two, how they preached in Jerusalem.

Three thousand souls are saved in Jerusalem. We see this great evangelistic expanse and you will be my witnesses there right where you are. You're going to start there, but you're not going to end there.

You're not only going to evangelize Jerusalem. You're going to evangelize the surrounding area, which is Judea. So you're going to go outside of the borders of Jerusalem and you're going to go to your surrounding area and you're going to evangelize that.

And then you're not going to just stop there, but you're also going to expand to areas that you don't even want to go. Samaria. Samaria was a place, remember the Jews didn't like the Samaritans. Remember Jesus used the story of the good Samaritan as to express someone who they wouldn't have liked.

The Samaritans were not Jews and they weren't Gentiles. They were a mixture of the two. They were half Jew, half Gentile and they weren't accepted by either side. And the idea here is you're going to go out into areas that you don't even want to go.

Don't even think you should go. Don't even feel comfortable going, but you're going to go there. And then he just expresses it to the hills. He says, and to the end of the earth. Now, Jesus knew the world was round, so there is no end.

But what he meant was you're going to go and there's going to be no stop. There's no borders. There's no place where you're going to come to this spot and say, you know what? I can't go past that. I can't go plant a flag for Christ on the other side of that because this border is holding me back.

In the ministry of the gospel, there are no borders. In the ministry of the gospel, there are no nationalities. There are no races in the ministry of the gospel. There are only souls. There are only souls.

And that's the point of verse 8, is you are going to go out and you're going to find the elect in every nation. You're going to go out and you're going to win souls in every single nation because God's elect are there.

God has his people there waiting to hear the gospel, waiting to be confronted with the truth, waiting to hear that which they can believe on because the text asks the question in Romans 10, how will they believe if they've never heard?

So go and tell them. There was a missionary who told a story. He said that they had gone to an area. I want to say it was near near the Koreas, but I could be wrong on that. But he went to this area and they met a local group that had not been influenced by outside the outside world.

They were living very old. They were living sort of according to the old older customs and old style. And they came to them and they started talking to them about Jesus Christ. And the first thing they asked them, they asked these people who had not been influenced by the outside world, they asked the question, what do you believe happens when you die?

You know what their answer was? It was powerful. What do you think happens when you die? And the answer, no one has told us yet. No one's come to tell us yet. Do you realize that in the world today there are people who haven't heard of Jesus?

They haven't heard of the gospel. They haven't heard the glorious truth of the cross. How dare we as Americans, because it's been forced that into our lives our whole life, for us to consider that the whole world has had that blessing.

There are people who've never heard it. But we need an urgency to go beyond our borders. So today I want to address three borders that we need to go beyond. Three borders that we need to eliminate from our mind and start crossing them.

Overcoming Personal Borders in Evangelism

The first one is personal borders. These are on your notes. They're also going to be on the screen. Personal borders. I want to ask you a question. And you don't have to answer this with a hand raised.

I'm not going to ask you to bow your head and raise your hand, but I want to ask you a question. How many of you have family members, friends, co-workers, and neighbors who are unsaved? Again, I'd ask you to raise your hand.

Just answer these in your heart. If you want to raise your hand, that's fine. But how many of you know that you have co-workers, neighbors, friends, and family that are unsaved? Number two. How many of you have a longing in your heart to see those people come to Christ?

Now my hope would be that if the answer to the first one was yes, which it certainly would be, that the answer to the second question would be yes, certainly it should be. That if we have unsaved neighbors, friends, loved ones, and co-workers, that we should care about the fact that they're lost.

Now, I want to ask the third question. This one may be a little bit more poignant. How many of us have made an effort to reach any of them in the last 12 months? We know we have unsaved friends. We know we have unsaved loved ones, unsaved neighbors, unsaved co-workers.

And yet, we set up borders around ourselves. We set up these things we can't cross in our minds and in our hearts and in our attitudes. We tell ourselves we can't do that. What is it that keeps us from it?

What is it that keeps us from reaching out? I've said it before and I'll say it again. I believe the one thing that keeps us from reaching people, the very biggest thing that keeps us from reaching out to people is fear.

We're afraid of being embarrassed. We're afraid of being ostracized. We're afraid of being confronted with a question we don't know how to answer. We're afraid of creating enemies because the gospel is offensive.

So we're afraid. We don't feel comfortable. Every time I ask a question with a small group and I allow answers, I say, what keeps you from sharing your gospel? It's one of those reasons. And it always boils down to something regarding fear.

So how do we overcome our fear? I think this verse speaks to it. This verse in verse 8, he says, you will receive power from the Holy Spirit. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.

Do you realize that if you are a believer, if you are a Christian, you are a vessel for the Holy Spirit of God, that he lives within you and that if he lives within you, you have the same power within you that the early church had within it, that you have the same Holy Spirit.

Now, we do believe that certain ministries of the Holy Spirit, such as miraculous healings and the gifts of tongues, are no longer active. But it's the same Holy Spirit. It's the same Holy Spirit living within us that lived within the early church.

So why is it that we're so afraid? Well, the primary thing we are afraid of is we are afraid to trust that God will do what he has promised to do. We're afraid to simply trust that God will use us. And so we allow ourselves to fall back into fear.

Now, I am one who does believe that we should learn more about how to share our faith, because I think it will help us overcome our fear. But nothing that we learn, no argument or articulation for the gospel will ever take the place of the Spirit's power within us.

That's what's going to see men come to Christ. There is very few people who have ever been argued into becoming Christians. Most people just have to hear it and God changes their heart. It's not arguments, it's proclamation that makes believers.

Very few people are argued into becoming Christians. It's simply a proclamation of truth. And God uses that to do his work in the heart. I want us to learn more about sharing our faith this year. That's part of what we're going to do.

That's part of why we're studying Acts. That's part of why on Wednesday nights we're going to do some classes on how to share our faith. Because I do want us to become better equipped, because I do believe this.

I believe that no man is afraid to do that which he knows he's good at. So if we learn to share our faith better and we become better at it, we won't be as afraid to do it. But the reality is ultimately what's really going to overcome fear is not that.

What's really going to overcome fear is when we start trusting in God that this is what he's called us to do. If God has called us to do something, he's also equipped us to do it. We've got to trust that he's equipped us to do this.

And we've got to quit looking at our own weaknesses and start looking at God's strengths. And it all must begin with understanding the urgency of the call that we've been given. Charles Spurgeon said this.

Every Christian is either a missionary or an imposter. We're either sharing our faith or we're not really in the faith. That's what he's saying. So we're either out there proclaiming the gospel, we're either out there seeking to win souls, or we're not really Christians.

And this is Spurgeon, so if you don't like it, get on to him. I think he's dead, so he might not be listening. But the reality is all of us are called to be missionaries. Not all of us are called to live in a hut in Africa.

Not all of us are called to live in a lean-to in Asia. But all of us are called to go outside of our personal borders and seek the lost. That's the call that we have. It's not just true for some. It's true for all of us.

Not everybody is supposed to go to Africa, but everybody is supposed to bloom where we're planted. And that's the problem. We stay in the ground. We stay tight. We stay low. We don't seek to see any fruit.

And only when we realize the urgency of our missionary call will we be able to pass our own personal borders. So that's number one. The first border we've got to get past is our personal border. The second one is our congregational borders.

Crossing Congregational Borders and Reaching Beyond the Church

Our congregational borders. Now, I realize we have a few guests with us this morning, a few visitors. But the vast majority of you guys are church members. I want to speak to you for a moment. Most of you are sitting in the room with your best friends.

You're sitting in the room with the people you go out to eat with. You're sitting in the room with the people you spend the most time with. You're sitting in the room with your friends. And what happens in a church, especially a conservative church like ours, is we tend to huddle in our own groups.

And we don't expand out past the congregation. And thus, we're not influencing anyone for Christ. A survey was done by a couple of sociologists named Glock and Stark. I thought Glock was a nice name. A couple of sociologists named Glock and Stark did a study among Christians.

And it said among conservative evangelicals, that would be us, among conservative evangelicals, more than half of their closest friends were people that they knew in church. But in liberal churches, hardly any of them said their closest friends were in their church.

And what does that tell us? Well, I think, number one, it shows that in a lot of places that call themselves Christians, their Christian life doesn't affect their real life. And thus, they don't really have friends in the church.

They just have acquaintances in the church. And they come to church on Sunday, and that's pretty much it. And that is it for a lot of liberal folks. Church doesn't affect their life at all, doesn't affect their life at all.

But the reality is, we could also look at that survey a little differently. Because it highlights an issue which we often don't consider. And that is that very few conservative Christians are really engaging the world around them.

They're only talking to themselves. Byron and I have talked about this. We're good at building up the base and encouraging each other. And sort of having rah-rah sessions when the pastor's preaching and everybody's amening.

Well, we don't do a lot of amening around here. But when the pastor's preaching and everyone's nodding, we do a lot more nodding in this church. But we're having our rah-rah session. But when do we go outside the walls?

These metal walls become like a soup can that's hooked us in. And we're now sitting like preserves on a shelf. We can't get out. But we must get out. We must go into the community and seek the lost. The problem is, we often tend not to want more people to come.

Because we know that new people means new ideas. New ideas means new methods. New ideas means new methods. Means all that dreadful word change. And we don't like change, so we don't like new folks. It's reality.

It's really the way it is. New people are met with suspicion rather than welcome. I wonder what he's got on his mind. I wonder what his ideas are. You know? The walls of the church become like those of a medieval castle.

We hold the citizens in. We hold the foreigners out. And they're put up like a big moat around the church. We're safe. We've got our group. And this is all we need. And a major issue in the modern church is one of church shopping and church hopping.

It's another problem that we have. Because instead of reaching outside of our church to bring people in, we reach into other churches and bring people in. One guy by the name of Sam Shoemaker said this.

He said, in the Great Commission, the Lord has called us to be like Peter, fishers of men. But we've turned that commission around so that we've merely become keepers of the aquarium. And occasionally I take some fish out of my fishbowl and I put them into yours.

And you take some fish out of your fishbowl and put them into mine. But we never go out into the sea and bring in new fish. Now, I'm not opposed to people coming to us from another church if that church is not preaching the gospel.

Let me make that clear. If somebody comes to us because they're not preaching the gospel and they want to hear the gospel, come. As long as you're not under church discipline, as long as you're not a problem in your own church, welcome.

Come, come, hear the gospel. But here's the truth. It's much more important that we reach people that have never heard the gospel. It's much more important that we're... And you ask, are there Americans who have never heard the gospel?

Yes! There are Americans who have not heard the gospel. I work at a middle school and I listen. I exercise my pastoral prerogative in eavesdropping. And I listen to these little kids. And I listen to them talk about their faith.

And, beloved, if they're expressing anything close to what they're being taught, we're in a lot of trouble. Because most of them know very little to nothing outside of maybe the ABCs of salvation, that whole VBS level Christianity.

Most of them know very little about Christ, the gospel, sin, salvation, being lost and being saved. There is a great ignorance in our world when it comes to the gospel. It is a tremendous ignorance. And we cannot let the church walls hold us in.

We can't hide ourselves like monks in a monastery. We must be going out beyond the walls of the church, reaching out to the community, not compromising the gospel, but taking it out. Finally, national borders.

Why World Missions Must Go Beyond National Borders

National borders. We've talked about our personal borders. We've talked about congregational borders. And now the third point is national borders. And by national borders, of course, I'm talking about world missions.

It's easy for us to become very myopic when it comes to outreach. We tend to focus only on our small community, only on our neighborhood. And we forget that there is a world out there that needs the gospel, too.

And how could we really expect to make a dent on the global scale? Well, again, I want to call your attention back to this, because as we're going to see in the weeks ahead, this is not a church starting with a thousand people.

We see 120 people in an upper room. And most of them, we don't even know their names. We only see a couple of people throughout the book of Acts who really go out and turn the world upside down. We see Peter, and we see John, and we see the Apostle Paul.

And we see them going out into the world and making strides for the gospel throughout the world. And in that, they did that. Here's the amazing thing. Here's something to really consider. Out of that small group, the gospel was taken out into all of the known world.

And they did it without airplanes. They did it without cell phones. They did it without laser printers. They did it without Google. They did it with one thing, and that was the Holy Spirit of God's empowerment on their life.

That was all. Jesus gives us a lofty assignment in this passage. He says, you will be my witnesses. The word witness there is martiros. Martiros is where we get the word martyr. Now, why does Jesus say you will be my martiros?

You will be my witnesses. Why? Because at this time in history, a martyr, that word martiros, simply means a witness or a testifier of something. Someone who bared testimony. But what happened in a very short time was that the people who were the witnesses for Jesus Christ quickly became those who were sought after for death.

And thus, that word became synonymous with someone who gives their life for something. And that's where we get the word martyr in our language. A martyr is somebody who dies for their faith. Well, that's not what it was originally.

What it originally was just someone who proclaimed their faith. But the reality was the proclamation of the faith was so akin to giving your life that it became one and the same word. What we see in the early church is we see a church that was willing to be so influential that the powers above, the powers of the governments were so concerned about it that they tried to hold it back with the sword.

That's how influential this small band of believers became. That the government had to come against it. How powerful is that? How powerful is that? And you know, we see that in our world. We see whole governments coming against believers in other countries.

Where's our influence? Where are we turning the world upside down? Where are we so influential that unbelievers look at us and shudder? And want so bad to shut us up. The world is bigger than our community.

The world is bigger than our state. The world is bigger than our America. The world is bigger than our continent. The world is a big place and the world needs the gospel. So we need to think past our personal borders.

We need to think past our congregational borders. And yes, we need to think past our national borders. And we need to start thinking every person is a soul and every soul needs the gospel. Now, to bring this to a conclusion, I want to finish with just a very important thing that as I was writing this sermon, I was just very encouraged that I need to say this because I think this needs to be made clear.

Very clear. And if you've fallen asleep, wake up. I know I've gone a little long today. Maybe. I never know what time it is. You know, the first time John MacArthur preached, the second week they put a clock in.

They put a clock at the back of the church the second week. Because he went an hour and 15 minutes and they put a clock. Just to let you know. So, here's what I want to say. And if you want to write this in your notes, I think it would benefit you.

Outreach, and you can say evangelism outreach missions because we want to use those three interchangeably, those words. But I just want to make this clear. Outreach is not, underline not, is not just doing social and helpful work for people.

Let me say it again. Outreach, evangelism missions, whatever you want to put there, it's all the same. It is not just doing helpful and social beneficial work for people. Now, why do I say that? Because there are many groups out there who feed the hungry.

There are many groups out there who build shelters. And there are many groups who do other types of works of aid, but they never bring the gospel. And what do they say? Oh, well, they'll see the gospel and what we're doing.

No, they won't. They'll see you as a nice person. They'll see you as a helpful person. But nobody sees the gospel. People hear the gospel. How will they hear unless someone preaches? Back in the early 20th century, churches invested themselves in something called the social gospel, which was an attempt to reach the community, but to do so without the gospel, but rather to replace the gospel with good deeds.

They did all sorts of good things and started many positive social programs. However, with this came the demise of many denominations because they abandoned the gospel in the midst of social programming.

And that's what we see, the seven sisters of modern American Protestantism. We see this in a lot of churches, the PCUSA, the UMC and all these other churches. What has happened to them? They've become gospel-less associations.

They don't have the gospel. All they have is social programming. And, beloved, that is not enough. This is from a website that I frequent. It says, those who adhere to a social gospel sought to apply Christian ethics to social problems such as poverty, slums, poor nutrition, education, alcoholism, crime and war.

These things were emphasized while the doctrines of sin, salvation, heaven and hell and the future kingdom of God were downplayed. And what happened? What happened as a result? The church lost its teeth.

The church lost any proclamation of the truth. But do you know why this is so popular? Do you know why social outreach and social gospel is so popular? Because it's easier. It's easier to build someone a house than to tell them about Jesus.

It's easier to do yard work for somebody than to tell them about Christ. It's easier to bring someone food than it is to bring someone the truth of their sin. So we replace what is hard with something that is easy and we placate our conscience by doing that instead.

Put this in your mind. And I'm going to stand on this as the pastor of this church. I stand on this as the church. The reason for anything we do in outreach must be the proclamation and proliferation of the gospel.

That must be it.

We see in Acts what the church did in the beginning. And you know what they didn't do? They didn't go to Antioch and establish a food bank. They didn't go to Rome and establish a soup kitchen or a clothes closet.

They proclaimed Christ and they established churches. And you know what happened when they established churches? People got fed. You know what happened when they established churches? Poor people got shelter.

You know what happened when they established churches? Love and community help did go out. But it went out through the church. And it went out with the gospel. Should we be doing those things? Yes. But the gospel must be the reason.

It must be the impetus. And everything we do must include it. We must remember that the primary goal of sovereign grace, family, church is the proclamation of Christ's gospel. Lending aid to people without providing them the cross is lending a toothless gospel.

A savingless gospel. An impotent gospel. When we support a missionary. When we establish a program. When we seek to reach the community. Or anything else that we do that we call outreach missions or evangelism.

We must always ask this question. Where is the gospel in this? Question mark. Every time. Where is the gospel in this? And if we cannot answer that question definitively. We need to reevaluate what we're doing.