Burning Bright For Christ

2 Corinthians 5:16-21 From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer. ¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come. ¹⁸ All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹ that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹ For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

INTRODUCTION

Good morning and welcome to missions week. If you’re new to Grace, missions week is a time we set aside every year to highlight God’s charge to His people to tell the whole world of His infinite glory and grace. We spend one week each year reminding us of that which should be our heartbeat all year.

With this sermon, my earnest hope is that God will be glorified by helping us consider missions with greater clarity and engaging in missions with greater earnestness. To those ends, I intend to begin by saying a bit about our basic convictions on missions. Then we’ll take a look at our passage in 2 Corinthians to help us see how we get from believing the gospel ourselves to engaging in world missions. And from there we’ll be in a good place to grasp this year’s missions theme and a handful of practical applications. In all of that comes the challenge to burn bright for Christ wherever we are, and on the mission field in particular.

The big idea of this sermon (along with all missions week) is that God’s Word calls God’s people to glorify God by calling all people everywhere to follow Jesus and we do that best by burning bright for Jesus. The main takeaway, then, is to call all people everywhere to follow Jesus by burning bright for Jesus.

Let’s pray.

FIVE BASIC CONVICTIONS ON MISSIONS

For those of you who are newer to Grace Church, this is our eleventh missions week. Our consistent hope each year is that God would be pleased to use it to call some to sacrificially and joyfully go onto the mission field and to burden everyone else to more actively support the called. Ask God right now to open you up to those things.

Because we all tend to forget and because there are so many newer families, it seems good to begin by defining our terms and naming a few of our core convictions surrounding missions and missions week.

God’s Word Is Ultimate Authority

First, God’s Word is our ultimate authority in all things. That is, as our doctrinal statement affirms, we believe, “the Bible is without error in the original writings, the complete revelation of His will for salvation, and the ultimate authority by which every realm of human knowledge and endeavor should be judged. … it is to be believed in all that it teaches, obeyed in all that it requires, and trusted in all that it promises.”

That statement comes from passages like 2 Timothy 3:16-17 which says, “All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, ¹⁷ that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.”

Therefore, the Bible is our authority on missions. We’re eager to hear stories about how God is working around the world. We’re glad to wrestle through the different approaches God’s people have taken toward missions over the centuries. It’s good to take certain cultural things into account as we go to unreached places. And yet, none of those things are our final authority.

The first and main question we ask as a Church is what does God’s Word say about missions. We start there and remain there. Whatever else we ask, think, believe, and do flows continually out of and submits to that. We’re certainly not perfect in this, but it is our core conviction regarding missions and every other aspect of life.

God’s Glory Is Ultimate Goal

Second, we believe God’s Word teaches that all things (including mission) exist for God’s glory. The chief end of all mankind and everything we do is to see, delight in, and celebrate the unmatched, infinite glory of God.

1 Cor 10:31 So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do [engage missions], do all to the glory of God.

Missions is never first or most about helping Christians use their gifts or find their purpose. Missions is never first or most about mere obedience to God’s commands. Believe it or not, missions is never first or most about the salvation of the world. Grace, missions is never first or most about people at all. Missions, rightly understood and applied, is always first and most about the glory of God.

There are to key ways in which that’s the case. First, mission is about the glory of God in the sense that God reveals His glory by drawing to Himself a people from every tribe, tongue, and nation. Second, it’s about God’s glory in the sense that we rightly engage in missions when we are so amazed by God that we can’t not tell the world about Him. We’ll come back to both of these in a bit.

Grace, God is greater than you could ever imagine and He created all of us for His glory—to be eternally satisfied in Him. We are unwaveringly convicted that missions exists to bring that message to the world. Missions, like everything else, exists for the glory of God.

Love for the Nations

Our third primary conviction regarding missions is that missions is most honoring to God when it is done out of love for our unknown neighbor. Only when our aim is the glory of God and our motive is love for neighbor, will we joyfully go wherever God leads us, no matter the cost.

Matt 22:36-37 You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. ³⁸ This is the great and first commandment. ³⁹ And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

It is out of God’s love for us that we love Him (1 John 4:19). It is out of God’s love for us that we love others (1 John 4:20). And if loving others means anything, it means bringing them the good news that they can be rescued from the death of sin and reconciled to the life of God. That’s missions.

Definition of Missions

Fourth, we believe that biblically speaking, missions is: Glorifying God by crossing a significant cultural barrier to call others to follow Jesus by the power of His Spirit. Within that definition, I’d like to point out a few key implications.

First, many people (understandably) talk about being a missionary wherever you are or a missionary to your neighbors. While we appreciate the sentiment, we think it’s most helpful to maintain a distinction between local ministry and cross-cultural ministry. Reserving the term “missions” for cross-cultural ministry helps us to do that.

Second, likewise, people often talk about humanitarian aid or service projects as missions. Again, while meeting the physical needs of others in Jesus’ name is certainly part of godliness, and while it is understandable why people refer to that as missions, we think it’s most helpful to maintain a distinction between actively seeking to make disciples and actively functioning as disciples. Reserving the term “missions” for making disciples helps us to do that.

Third, our definition is mean to highlight the fact that success in missions is faithfulness to God’s call. We long for people to come to faith in Jesus and to mature in Him (to become His disciples), but those things are ultimately God’s to distribute as He sees fit. We are called to be faithful to God’s Word in proclaiming God’s Word, not to secure the salvation and sanctification of others. Successful missions takes place whenever we faithfully proclaim Christ regardless of how people respond to our proclamation.

And fourth, in all of this, we hope it’s easy to see that missions is simply ministry across a significant cultural boundary. We are not called to do one thing in our neighborhood and another thing among unreached people groups. The nature and aim of both are fundamentally the same. A lot of problems have occurred in missions because of how easy it is to think otherwise about missions.

Universal Call to Missions

God’s Word is our ultimate authority in missions, God’s glory is our ultimate goal in missions, love is motivation, missions is simply cross-cultural ministry, and, finally, we believe that the Bible calls every Christian to engage in missions by either going or supporting those who do. In other words, as one Pastor has said, our only missions options are to “go, send, or disobey.”

The primary passage containing the universal missionary call is Matthew 28:18-20, the Great Commission.

¹⁸ Jesus … said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. ¹⁹ Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, ²⁰ teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

You might be wondering how we get from this being a charge from Jesus to His first followers to a universal call for everyone of us (for all Christians). The logic is pretty simple and straightforward. Jesus’ commission was for His disciples to make disciples of the whole world. Once we receive that call and respond in faith, we become Jesus’ disciples and the commission becomes ours.

One of our most significant convictions as a church regarding missions, and one of the most significant truths driving missions week, is that God’s Word teaches that missions (like baptism and orphan care and active participation in a local church) is not optional for followers of Jesus. Not all of us are called to go, but all of us are called to make sure that those who are called are well-qualified, well-trained, and well-supported.

Those are our basic convictions regarding missions. They shape everything we do in regards to missions at Grace—or at least we mean them to and ought to repent wherever we find that they don’t. And that leads to the next part of this sermon—the gospel and its missions implications.

THE GOSPEL AND ITS MISSIONS IMPLICATIONS

With all of that in the way of background, let’s zoom in a bit and look to our primary text for this morning. As we do, we’ll see the gospel lens that makes missions make sense, the gospel’s inward effects that makes missions inevitable, and the gospel’s outward effects which is missions.

The Gospel Lens

Have you ever had something happen that completely changed your perspective on something? There have been countless examples of that in my life; some big and some little. On the little side is guacamole. I spent most of my life on the hobbit side of things, “I don’t like green food.” I wouldn’t even try it. At some point that I can’t remember, for some reason I can’t remember, however, I did. And it’s really good. Nothing changed in guacamole. The only thing that changed was my perspective.

The same thing happened with coffee, wood working, reading, old trucks, wood burning stoves, vinyl records (and all things analogue), and a whole bunch of other little things. I’m sure you all have your own similar lists. You began liking something you originally avoided, not because the thing itself changed, but simply because your perspective on it did.

Our text opens with one of the most significant perspective shifts we can possibly make. It is a call to consider every single person in the world through a particular lens.

¹⁶ From now on, therefore, we regard no one according to the flesh. Even though we once regarded Christ according to the flesh, we regard him thus no longer.

If we are to think rightly about any aspect of this world, and about missions in particular, it will begin with us clearly seeing that every single man, woman, and child is an eternal being, made in God’s image, created with both body and soul.

It is all-too-easy to think of ourselves and the people who live in our homes and who we pass on the street and who we’ve never met as merely physical beings. And because of that, it’s all too easy to forget that everyone will live forever somewhere—either in heaven or hell. If we regard people only according to the flesh, we will never see people or missions as we ought.

But as Christians, we know that no one is merely or even mainly skin and bone (flesh). We know that everyone is body and soul, physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal.

And as Christians, we know that we have a responsibility, given to us by God, to care for whole people. That is, according to Jesus’ example and directive, we must care for the physical needs of others. We must feed the hungry, comfort the sad, give shelter to the homeless, plead the cause of the orphan, and seek justice for the oppressed.

But we must also, also according to Jesus’ example and directive, care for them as the spiritual beings they are. We must work to meet their spiritual needs as well as their physical ones. We must pray for their souls, help them to see who God really is and who they really are, and, as we’re about to see, we must share the good news with them that they can be rescued and redeemed—body and soul—for eternity through Jesus Christ.

One of the great challenges of missions is that while everyone readily recognizes their physical needs and is almost always eager to have help in meeting them, that is not necessarily true of the spiritual aspect of their personhood. There are a few people who don’t even know about their spiritual needs, some who do not want them met, and most who do not believe that the gospel of Jesus is able to meet them.

Missions begins for God’s people when we see that Jesus was not merely flesh, but the eternal son of God, the Christ. And it continues on when see that all mankind was made in His image and, therefore, “regard no one according to the flesh.”

With God’s help, we must gain the right perspective on people and from it, we must joyfully give people all of what they need, for all of who they are, no matter the cost.

With God having given us this new perspective, this new lens with which to see mankind, I invite you to consider the gospel (the good news of Jesus) and its primary horizontal implication (world missions!).

The Gospel Inwardly

If we are to engage in missions as God intends, we will look at the world not through the lens with which we were born, but with the new lens given to us by the Holy Spirit of God and we will use it to see what Jesus has done for us in an all-of-life altering way. If your hope is in Jesus, if you are a Christian…

You are a new creation.

¹⁷ Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation. The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.

Every one of us came into this world born physically alive, but spiritually dead. To be a Christian is to have been born again—to have been born spiritually as well as physically. Your spirit was dead in sin but was made alive in Christ that you might see the grace of God in Jesus and receive it in faith (that’s what it means to be a Christian).

To have become a new creation is to acknowledge Jesus as King of all and to live in a new and unfailing hope. To believe this is to be amazed by this. It is to be thankful beyond measure. It is to find peace where you were fearful and anxious. It is to have been rescued from slavery to sin and death. It is to know that you are a child of God. It is to have all your rebellion and failure atoned for. It is to have the promise of complete restoration of all that is broken in you. And it is to know that you deserved none of it.

We will never really understand or engage in missions if we don’t see and love this. But that’s not all.
Your new life is entirely owning to the grace of God.

The second thing to understand about the gospel’s inward work is that all of it, every single ounce of it, is a gift from God. You did not, indeed could not, earn even the smallest measure of it. You did not, indeed could not, even seek it on your own. It is all from God and all according to His unmerited grace.

¹⁸ All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself…

We were spiritually dead in our trespasses and sins…until God reconciled us to Him.

To be a Christian is a gift from God. It is only His kindness that would forgive us and free us from our rebellion against Him. We deserve nothing but His just condemnation for our treason. But all we get in Jesus is the gift of reconciliation.

All of this is critical for us to understand, absorb, and love if we are ever to care about sharing the gospel here, and even more so if we are to care about sharing it to the ends of the earth among hostile people. And that leads to the last aspect of this passage for missions: the gospel outwardly.

The Gospel Outwardly

The fact of the matter is that when we look through the lens of the gospel, it has implications not just for how we see ourselves and others, but for how we relate to others as well. One of the primary ways the gospel shapes our relationship to others is found in verses 18-20.

¹⁸ All this is from God, who through Christ reconciled us to himself [that’s what we just considered] and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; ¹⁹ that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation. ²⁰ Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us…

To be a Christian is to have been given a ministry of reconciliation, it is to have been appointed to the position of ambassador, it is to represent Jesus on earth in all we do. This is why we say that Christians must go, send, or disobey. It is critical that we recognize this.

But it is equally critical that we recognize that we cannot reconcile anyone to God. That’s not our job. Our job is to tell them how they can be reconciled to God by grace, through faith in Jesus. We do the proclaiming, God does the reconciling. We tell people how they can have their sins forgiven, God does the forgiving.

Again, when we see through a gospel lens, and when we understand the good news of what God has graciously, accomplished in us, we cannot help but to feel a holy angst for everyone to know Christ. When we see everyone as the eternal being they are and when we know that we didn’t deserve the grace of God we were given, there is no room for silence, pride, or fear, only ministering reconciliation to the world according to Jesus’ charge.

In that way, truly, to believe the gospel is to share the gospel. We simply cannot believe in the good news promised in Jesus and keep it to ourselves. Grace, one of the ways we know we truly believe it is from the Holy Spirit-given compulsion we have to share it.

That is exactly what Paul’s final words from our passage communicate. The necessary outcome of everything we’ve seen is crying out for the world to hear this good news.

²⁰ … We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. ²¹ For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

When that is the cry of your heart and those are the words of your mouth, you get missions. When Jesus and His reconciling work are your greatest treasure, such that you can’t help but to share it with others, you get missions. When you have an insatiable longing for people you’ve never met, in every corner of the world, to hear this good news and receive it in faith, you get missions.

That’s what Jesus did, that’s what the world needs, that’s what we are called to, and cultivating all of that within our church and living it out in the world, is why we have missions week.

THIS YEAR’S THEME FOR MISSIONS WEEK: BURNING BRIGHT FOR CHRIST

With all of those things in mind, each year the missions team settles on a theme to help define and narrow our focus. This year, as you’ve heard, the theme is “Burning Bright for Christ.”

We started out by considering missions through the widest lens (our missions convictions), then we zoomed in to consider a biblical basis for missions (in 2 Corinthians). And now, we’re going to zoom the rest of the way in by considering our particular theme for this year: burning bright for Christ.

The idea of burning bring for Christ is rooted in the facts that sin has plunged the world into spiritual darkness, that Jesus is the light of the world, and that God’s people are called to reflect the light of Christ into every corner (among every tribe, tongue, and nation).

Ephesians 5:8-14 sums this up well.

⁸ … at one time you were darkness, but now you are light in the Lord. Walk as children of light ⁹ (for the fruit of light is found in all that is good and right and true), ¹⁰ and try to discern what is pleasing to the Lord. ¹¹ Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them. ¹² For it is shameful even to speak of the things that they do in secret. ¹³ But when anything is exposed by the light, it becomes visible, ¹⁴ for anything that becomes visible is light. Therefore it says,

    “Awake, O sleeper,
    and arise from the dead,
    and Christ will shine on you.”

The gist of what we mean by “Burning Bright for Christ” is being so amazed by Jesus that we spend our entire lives reflecting the light of Jesus—His glory, holiness, love, mercy, grace, and reconciling work—to the world. But what does that actually mean?

Practically, we do this in the most God-honoring way: (1) When we are closest to Jesus, (2) When the “mirror” of our lives is cleanest, and (3) When we do so together.

Closest to Jesus

The closer we are to the Light of Christ, the brighter the reflection will be. In other words, burning brightly for Jesus is only possible when we are truly satisfied in Him, when He is our joy and treasure, when our trust is truly in Him. The more we find our satisfaction in Jesus and place our hope in Him, the more everyone around us will recognize the reality of Him in us and the legitimacy of His offer to save them as well.

In this way, the first and best thing you can do to burn brightly for Jesus, the first and best thing you can do for missions, is to have a quiet time each day, to seek God in prayer, to hide the Word of God in your heart, to taste and see that the Lord is uniquely and supremely good. If you want to engage in missions in a God-honoring way, come well-prepared to Church each Sunday, make use of the means of grace God has given us, and nurture your love for Jesus in every way He’s given us to do so.

You can’t burn brightly for Christ (reflect the glory of Christ) if you are not near Christ. And you can’t be near Christ if you don’t go to the places He’s promised to be.

Clean “Mirrors”

Second, we burn brightly for Jesus when our “mirrors are clean.” The cleaner the mirror, the better it can reflect the light of Christ.

Nothing lies more about the infinitely glorious nature of Jesus than people claiming to be His followers, but preferring the dark. We all sin, of course, but Jesus is honored as we confess it as sin, drag it into the light, and walk in the forgiveness and freedom that are already ours in Jesus. If you want to burn brightly for Jesus and engage more fully in missions, make war on your sin and cultivate an appetite for the things of God.

You can’t burn brightly for Christ if you continually cover yourself in that which He hates.

Shining Together

Finally, we are not called to burn brightly for Jesus all by ourselves. If we must, we must. But God’s design is that we’d all delight in Jesus, with “clean mirrors,” together! There is no limit to Jesus’ brightness and we reflect it most brilliantly when we do so surrounded by others who are committed to as well.

Do you want to burn brightly for Jesus and engage in missions more fully? If so, become a member of a local church, use your gifts to build it up, serve sacrificially alongside the other members, commit to participating in a DG, go through the discipleship tracks with someone else, and above all gather with God’s people every Sunday in worship.

Trying to do Christianity on your own, treating membership in a church like membership in the YMCA, coming to church only when it fits into your extracurricular schedule, doing little but consume when you come, focusing on negatives or personal preferences, and aiming at something other than glorifying God by making disciples, all lie about Christ’s glory and snuff out the brightness we’re intended to reflect to each other and the world.

You can’t burn anywhere nearly as brightly alone as you can with God’s people.

Burning brightly for Jesus means reflecting His glory into the darkness. We do this by getting as close as possible to Jesus, by having clean mirrors, and by doing so together with our church and the Church. All of that is what we’re focusing on this week during missions week.

CONCLUSION

In conclusion, let me ask you to consider carefully your current posture (your thoughts, feelings, and actions) towards missions. Ask God to sift through your mind and heart and reveal yourself to you. When it comes to missions, are you nervous, indifferent, afraid, frustrated, confused? Your answer, whatever it is, as we saw in 2 Corinthians, is always rooted in your understanding of the nature of God and His work in your life.

Wherever something other than God’s Word is your authority, God’s glory is your goal, and Christ is your treasure, wherever you believe you earned your salvation or otherwise believe you deserve it, wherever you are trying to go it alone or keep your sin in the dark, and wherever you are looking at yourself or the people around you (even hostile strangers on the other side of the world) through some lens other than the gospel of love, you will not burn brightly for Christ and missions will not be the cry of your heart and the aim of your life.

But wherever God’s grace allows you to see His Word as it is (the sufficient revelation of the will of God), Him as He is (infinitely glorious), yourself and all mankind as we are (dead in sin until we place our faith in the gracious work of Jesus), and your charge as it is (to lovingly and corporately engage in a ministry of reconciliation as an ambassador of Jesus), then you will burn brightly for Christ and mission will be the cry of your heart and the aim of your life.