What Next?
June 7, 2010
On Sunday we finished a full year’s worth of sermons-52 on the nose-in the book of 1 Corinthians. What comes next? What do we need to hear from God’s word?
I believe one the great things God has in front of us is a deepening call to mission. Not “missions” in the sense of packing up our family, moving to another country, and reaching out to another culture, but a sense of mission toward the people in our lives and city who need to know Jesus. Recently this mindset has been called “missional,” giving a category to those who are on this mission without moving or targeting a different culture. Whatever the wording, the point is that we as a church are here to do something in this world.
There are a handful of scripture texts you can probably identify that relate to this mission. There is the Great Commission at the end of Matthew’s gospel (“Go and make disciples of all nations…”) and the charge of Jesus at the beginning of Acts (“You will be my witnesses…”). But if we consider the bigger story of the Bible, we find that these high points are merely peaks of a magnificent mountain range that spans from Genesis to Revelation. And this mountain range is not ultimately about our mission but God’s mission.
“The Mission of GOD” is the title of our adventure to scale this mountain range from beginning to end, from Genesis to Revelation. We are limiting this study to seven weeks in hopes that we can get the big picture without being lost in the details. The big picture is that the only reason we have a “mission” in our neighborhood, city, and world is because God has been on a mission from before creation. These seven weeks will not be an effort to muster up missionary motivation through guilt over what we ought to be doing; rather, they will be an opportunity to explore what God is doing and learn how we can engage in his plan in a meaningful way. My hope is that at every step of the story-from creation to Abraham’s call to Jesus to Paul-that we would experience a deepening sense of purpose as we join in what God has been about from the beginning.
We will begin this journey on June 27th, and I look forward to preparing for it more in the weeks to come.
Pastor Chris