God's love to the whole world

Vision / Mission 2018 • Sermon • Submitted 6 years ago

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God's love is for the entire world, and as part of God's church, we need to be doing our bit to share this love everywhere

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Challenging a local view

As I suspect most of you are aware, a few weeks back we ran a car wash here at the church. The money we raised from this event went to the work of Josifus who we support working in the slums of New Dehli.

Now to let people know about the fundraiser, one of our efforts was to use Facebook, where I posted to the local Facebook group. In the post, I made it clear that all money raised was going towards supporting a Christian ministry operating in the slums of New Dehli, India.

Shortly after posting, quite a number of comments were added to the post from those in the community, many of which were excited about the possibility of their car getting a clean, however a number of them expressed a different sentiment.

One such comment read: “Support Aussie or local groups, why India?”

Another comment read: “… I believe we should keep the money in this country!! There’s plenty of worth while charities within Australia”.

This last comment does make a valid point. I certainly agree that there are many worth while charities in Australia.

But I believe that it indicates a very blinkered view. It’s blinkered because it only considers the problems that are immediately before us.

I find the whole thing quite curious. More and more the world is becoming one global community. More than at any time before us we are able to find out exactly what is happening around the world. We can easily communicate with others, right around the world. When a disaster, such as an earthquake, flood, cyclone, or whatever hit at any place in the world, we can know as it happens.

Yet despite this unprecedented access to the needs of those in other parts of the world we somehow seem to get lost in our own problems. Now, honestly, I do recognise that here in Australia and even in our local community we have real problems that do require our attention, but sometimes I believe we are in need of taking off our blinkers to see what other people in the world are putting up with.

Those comments I mentioned earlier about our car wash, came at a very similar time to the Federal budget which our government handed down. You may not have heard because it didn’t receive a whole lot of attention, but within that budget, they chose to continue the freeze on the foreign aid budget. Just to be clear, in real dollar terms, that actually represent a decrease in spending.

That part of the budget didn’t receive a lot of attention because the majority of Australians don’t want to see our money going off shore. It’s our money and we want it spent on us. - You might notice a bit of a selfish ring to that.

Local view of ministry

Now, as Christian you could argue that maybe we’re a bit better, and I would certainly like to think that we’re at least a bit less blinkered when it comes to seeing the world around, but I’d argue that there still are blinkers there.

You see, most churches that I’m aware of at least have some mission focus. Usually there will be a few missionaries they will support, the number of which depending on the size of the church and the way they figure things out.

But unfortunately, we often think of mission as a small subset of what the church does. Now there are practical reasons why this is the case, but the consequence seems to be that we only allow so much attention to go to mission. In the end, our blinkers might be slightly wider, but not much.

Stats

So let’s look at some quick stats. There are approximately 7 billion people in the world. Just over 2 billion, or about a third, would identify as Christian. Of course quite a significant portion of that 2 billion are what you might call nominal Christians, that is people who identify as Christian but don’t really practice it in any meaningful way. However an estimate has been made that there are about 750 million Evangelical Christians, although I’d take that statistic quite loosely. This would represent about 10% of the population that take their Christianity seriously.

Now people who study mission have made a definition of what they refer to unreached people groups. Although I should clarify by people groups, we are not just talking about countries, but about distinct groupings of people within a country - some countries like China and India for instance have many people groups.

Well, a people group is considered unreached when they have less than 2% of their population being classed as evangelical Christian.

Well, based on this definition, it has been calculated that just over 40% of the population live in an unreached people group. That’s over 3 billion people.

Now if we consider the number of Christian workers in this region, we will see the massive imbalance.

It’s been estimated that there are over 4 million Christian workers in countries that are considered “reached”. This equates to somewhere in the ball park of 1 Christian worker for every 1000 people. Again, remember to take these figures rather loosely, but they do give a good indication.

Compare this to an estimated number of Christian workers in countries consider “unreached”, there is a little over 20,000. That is the equivalent to about 1 Christian worker for every 150,000 people. To put that into perspective, its as if you had one Christian worker for the entire Newcastle City Council area.

The stats are even worse if you consider Muslim countries, where there is only one Christian worker for every four hundred thousand people.

The point that I want to make is not that we shouldn’t focus on the looking after those in our own local community - because I certainly think we should, but just to highlight that there is a massive need out there that we usually are completely unaware of. There are billions of people in this world who are going to die at some stage having never met anyone who is a Christian and thereby never knowing the love that he has for them.

New Vision

Last week at our church business meeting, the members affirmed the vision that was developed by the deacons, which hangs on the words, Love, Share, Serve.

What this means that as a church, what we see that we’re on about is loving others because God first loved us. That flowing from this love we then share the many blessings he has given us, and serve those around us.

Through the month of May we’ve been exploring this, first with a reflection on the love God has for us, then with how we love God and others.

Well today my aim is to extend this idea of loving others to show that it moves beyond just the community around us, and includes loving and serving others throughout the world.

Unfortunately, as was evidenced by the Facebook comments I noted before, we can have a tendency to think that contributing elsewhere in the world means we will neglect those around us. And so I’d like to clarify that of course we need to serve in the place God has placed us, but my argument is that it doesn’t end there, and in our view should be a bigger picture.

A Biblical World View

I chose as my passage this morning which is known as the Great Commision, however, rather than just focusing on this passage, my intention is to do a quick biblical survey to show the global perspective that has always existed in scripture.

The Old Testament

It might come as a shock to some of you that even in the Old Testament there is this wonderful picture of God’s love for the whole world. Often we seem to characterise the Old Testament as the time in which the sole focus was on Israel, and certainly as God’s chosen people, they did take centre stage during this time. However, they were God’s chosen people for a reason. You see as you start to look closer you see that they were God’s chosen people in order that God’s glory is revealed to the entire world.

The beginning

So let’s start at the beginning. In the first 11 chapters of Genesis, there is no such thing as the nation of Israel. Creation is described to us in the first two chapters, then from chapter 3 sin enters the world, and from this chapter through to chapter 11, things just get worse.

But then, in , God starts a plan that will restore things the way it should.

It’s in the first three verses of this chapter that we see one of the great promises given to us.

You see, verse 2 starts by saying “I will make you into a great nation” - in other words, he’s talking about the nation of Israel here.

But it’s often verse 3 that we jump over, when God promises: “and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you”.

You see right from this early stage, God chose Abram, but it was in order to bless the whole earth.

Early laws

Now let’s fast forward from this time a few hundred years when we have Moses going up the mountain to receive the law.

This period of course is just before they enter the promised land which you might remember by the way God wanted them to blast out the foreign nations. We need to understand this in the bigger picture of what God is doing here, however, what might surprise you is some of the laws God gave them.

Take as an example:

Leviticus 19:33–34 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

‘ “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not ill-treat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.

or later in God commands that the gleanings from the harvest should be left for the poor and the foreigner.

The Psalms

As we keep moving through, I want to take you to the Psalms. Again we might picture this separation between Israel and the rest of the world during this time.

Let’s take as an example. The Psalmist in verse 3 tells us to “declare his glory among the nations, his marvellous deeds among all peoples”.

Then down in verse 10 it says: “say among the nations, ‘the Lord reigns’”.

The point is, that even in the Psalms, we see this vision that moves beyond Israel and shows God’s vision for the entire world.

Prophets

But the bigger vision becomes even more exciting when we move to the writings of the prophets, which we find at the end of our Old Testament.

Now just to put these writings into perspective, they occur at a critical point in the history of Israel. Israel had long passed the glory days when David ruled over the nation and left a kingdom to his son Solomon in relatively speaking, peaceful times. But since that time, the nation had split and had gone quite off track.

The prophets played a crucial role during this time, because with the trajectory that they were heading in, things were quickly going to get way out of hand, however God placed the prophets there to bring bring them back to where he wanted them.

Now what I’m about to show you is actually in quite a number of the major and minor prophets, but I’m just going to highlight the book of Isaiah.

You see, I think Isaiah was able to express the clearest how in the middle of things going really bad, the ultimate vision that God has.

And so I want to

His first chapter essentially laments the bad state of affairs, but then in the second chapter he reports on a vision of what is to come.

In this vision he sees this great mountain of the Lord, and what’s perhaps most curious is that people from all nations are streaming to it.

I could pull out a lot of quotes from Isaiah saying similar things, but just one more because I think it paints a beautiful picture. In , we see Isaiah describing the downfall of Egypt but then something strange emerges.

Let me pick it up from

Isaiah 19:22–23 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

The Lord will strike Egypt with a plague; he will strike them and heal them. They will turn to the Lord, and he will respond to their pleas and heal them. In that day there will be a highway from Egypt to Assyria. The Assyrians will go to Egypt and the Egyptians to Assyria. The Egyptians and Assyrians will worship together.

Conclusion from OT

The point that I’m trying to make with all these references is that though Israel was a focus in the Old Testament, God never lost sight of a bigger picture, a picture in which the whole world would be restored.

I could of course spend a lot longer exploring this idea, but in the interest of time, I hope that you can begin to see that even in the Old Testament, God had a plan for the whole world.

In the New Testament

In the New Testament this idea continues.

Jesus

Now it should be recognised that Jesus came with a mission to set up his kingdom, and this was first done through the people of Israel. You see this when he responded to a Canaanite woman in , who when begging for mercy, he says: “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel”.

However, as that same encounter demonstrates, his love doesn’t stop with the Israelites, and he does grant that foreign woman the mercy she sought after.

But despite the primary focus that Jesus maintains, he is always aware of the bigger picture that is at play. In another example with a foreigner, this time a centurion in , he says when commenting on his exceptional faith:

Matthew 8:11 NIV (Anglicised, 2011)

I say to you that many will come from the east and the west, and will take their places at the feast with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven.

But it is after his death and resurrection when it all changes gear in the way that it was always intended to.

The Great Commision

This is where we come to the passage I read earlier, known as the Great Commision.

It is in this passage, that Jesus tells his disciples, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations”.

Acts

And this is exactly what we see in the book of Acts. If you read through the whole book of Acts you see this outward projection. It first starts in Jerusalem, spreads to the outer reaches of Judea, then into Samaria, and finally into the nations further afield. It ends in Romans, but it ends in a way in which you can see it has only just begun.

Summary of Survey

I’ve spent this time going over a quick bible survey because I want to show how God has always maintained this world wide focus. Even in the Old Testament when the focus is quite rightly on setting up Israel to be the vessel of the good news, the bigger focus is never lost.

Our Focus

In a similar way, we can see how God has placed us here on the Tilligerry Peninsula. Our focus is to serve this community, but it doesn’t stop there. We need to be aware of the much bigger picture, and we need to be supporting that bigger picture.

We’re not all going to be called to be missionaries in a cross cultural setting, but particularly after I’ve highlighted earlier how few people are actually ministering in some of these regions throughout the world, we need to be supporting every effort that addresses this situation.

It’s easy to think, but what can I do? I’m just one person. The truth is, as one person we can’t reach everyone. But by changing the way we think about such things, we can begin to be a part of a bigger movement that makes God’s heart a reality on this earth.

Application

So what does this mean in practice for us?

Well for starters, I suggest it means as Christians we should be taking an interest in the global missionary movement. In our Baptist movement, there is Global Interaction which is one mission organisation in the mission field. Look at there website. They have various events where you can meet missionaries.

As we increase our awareness, that bigger focus within the church will also start to happen.

But I’d also add that it’s not just the missionary movement we should be following. I believe that if we are to have the heart of God, and love, share and serve like our vision states, then we also need to have a greater awareness of the general state of the world.

Lachie shared with us earlier about a couple from Iran who are here as refugees. We don’t really see many refugees here on the Tilligerry Peninsula, so it is very easy to ignore the issue, but we need to recognise that every person throughout the world is made in the image of God, and therefore we need to accept that their situation is really hard.

As Christians, we should be advocating for issues that are going to make the world a better place.

There are lots of different policies that have been proposed in order for us to best serve the international community. I don’t want to suggest I have all the answers, but I do believe that our love and concern needs to extend beyond our own little community.

Conclusion

We started this series by looking at God’s love, and this is really important because this is where it starts. But while we are situated here on the Tilligerry Peninsula, we need to recognise that God’s love moves beyond this little area of land. And that is why our vision of love, share and serve is bigger than just the immediate application before us.

While there are two missions in particular that we support, namely, Faith Mission in Gono, and Josifus in New Dehli, we are going to continue to pray for the bigger effort that is going on throughout the world.