Alliance Missions Sunday (Aaron Winn)

Andrew Meher: you Good morning everybody. Thanks for having me here. I was really surprised when Andrew told me that you guys are used to two hour sermons, but that's great. I can work everything in. I promise these two guys in the front here, they're gone now. ⁓ there they are. They're in the back reloading their coffee. I promised them I'd keep it short. So, man, coffee. Is that an East Coast thing that, you know, like 10, 12 year olds drink coffee? It's tea. Okay. All right. It's tea. It's tea. Very good. I think we've got a slide to get ourselves started here. There we go. Yep. That's me. All right. Perfect. We'll take the next slide. Thank you very much. There we go. Cool. So as Pastor Andrew said, my name is Aaron ⁓ and this is my family. ⁓ I'm the bald one. My wife, Kelly, on the opposite side. Kelly and I have been married 27 years and as Andrew alluded to, ⁓ I served in youth ministry. We've done some church planting, worship leading, various things like that over the years. ⁓ My wife is ⁓ an educator by training. She's a high school speech English theater person. She also has a certification in dance, which is her love. She is primarily a dancer, a choreographer, retired dancer now, we're too old for that, but a dance teacher and a choreographer. ⁓ So that's us. We're both heavily involved in the arts. We wouldn't know a sport if it hit us in the face, which it often did in gym class, which is why we're artists, not athletes. ⁓ And so I'm a visual artist, a graphic designer, communication consultant, web designer, all those kind of things. ⁓ As you may have guessed, many of my years in ministry were tent-making years, and so I've done a little bit of both. ⁓ by counterintuitively the shorter one. Kate is 22 years old. She lives in Omaha, Nebraska, where she is finishing up a master's degree at one of our alliance mega churches, Christ Community Church, through Crown College. She's discipling girls in the youth group, doing some counseling, and she's also a worship leader at their church. It's kind of fun. She gets all the tech stuff and all the fancy things. And then our younger daughter, Charlie, is the taller one. Charlie's 14 years old, and she lives with us in France, and now currently in the United States. States. And Charlie, along with Kate, they're both dancers as well. They're both vocalists and musicians. just yesterday, she warmed my heart and two days ago and said, Dad, I think I want to start learning guitar. So you better believe the guitar was out in about five minutes. And so she's she's thinking about doing that. She's a big theater person, though. She just she that's that's where she feels as her calling. But that's us. First thing I want to say this morning before we get too far is I want to say a huge, huge, great big thank you. You have a hundred six hundred and fifty six hundred and seventy international workers around the world If you're new to the Alliance you may have heard the term missionary before and that's a term we used to use but because that's not safe for everyone in every country Sometimes that title that label will get us in trouble not me in France, but in some countries it does So we were kind of getting rid of that word and we're using the term international worker. Sometimes we just say IW So if you hear that term around, that's what that means. You're now in the know, congratulations. There are 650, 670 of us around the world today, and we can't all be here this morning. You don't have room for us, and we have work to do, but I'm standing here on behalf of them saying thank you. Because we could not be out there doing what we're doing in our various places around the world without churches just like Highlands. So maybe you've never given to missions, maybe you give sacrificially, maybe you've never prayed for an international worker, maybe you pray daily for international workers. Whatever your role is in this, thank you. We could not do it without you and I hope by the end of today you have a sense of how important you are to the work of God's kingdom here on planet Earth and how grateful we are to be a part of that. So my wife and I serve in France. I've got a display table back there. Feel free, the kids are welcome to hang out with the rugby ball. They can take it outside, throw it around, that kind of stuff. It's not a valuable possession. Please don't throw the airplane, it will fall apart. ⁓ But we live in France, and in France we work, as Andrew said, with InVision. And with InVision we do a number of things. We host internships for 18 year olds and older. You have to be 18 and a US citizen. Internships are short or long. It can be a three month internship or one month. It could be up to a year. ⁓ And what you do in an internship is you come and live with us in France, not in our home. We'll get you your own apartment. And you live in your own apartment and you're part of our team. You help us do ministry. You help us share the gospel with lost people, building relationships, and you help us build up the local church. We also host short-term teams in Envision. So teams from churches just like Highlands that might send over four or five people, maybe a dozen. That's a big group for us. Four or five or six is about right, because everything in Europe is smaller, right? And so you come over for 10 days with us and you help us engage in ministry. And I would love to tell you so much more about what we do there, but I was joking about the sermon time. We do need to keep this a little bit shorter. if that appeals to you, if God's spirit is saying something in your head, wow, I'd love to go to the south of and tell people about Jesus and help out. I would love to tell you more about what that looks like. I'm gonna be sticking around for the fellowship meal. If you weren't, please stay. ⁓ I'm gonna share with you a lot more about Alliance missions during that time so you can understand your role in Alliance missions because you have a role. All right, Envision, next slide please. We are located 22 places around the world. So I'll say this much more about Envision. And these locations all exist to help you engage in the global mission of God. We can't help you with the local mission. We can encourage you maybe, but there's not a lot we can do here. You guys know this area so much better than we do. I couldn't start to come in here and tell you how to go about mission here, how to go about ministry. But if you're interested in global mission, this is where we can help out. Every one of those 21, 22 blue dots right there is looking for you. Every one of those dots would welcome your help. We have dots in Central America, South America, we have some in Sub-Saharan Africa, the Far East, we've got three in Europe, and just my location, I run the site in France. Just for example, one of my biggest ministries, one of the best ways I connect with lost people is through English conversation groups. And guess what? People in France want to speak English. And they have great access to British English, no offense, brother, but they want American English. You know why? Netflix. Yeah, right? mean, when they watch American movies or Disney or whatever it might be, they want to sound like what they hear on there. And I've spoken to many of you, you have excellent English here. And with an American accent for many of you, I've noticed this is a huge draw in our city. So we currently run the largest English conversation group in a city of a million people by God's grace. And we cannot, we have to turn people away every week. We're turning people away because I have limited bandwidth as a human being. But every time a team comes over, I can multiply that impact. And they get to hang out and practice American style English with American English speakers. And they start noticing week after week, month after month, man, you have a lot of friends in America, Aaron. Like, well, I sort of do. Well, how do you know so many people? And then I usually kind of grin and say, you know what? I didn't meet these people before they arrived, but they're not just friends. They're my brothers and sisters. And the goodness that you sense in us, it's not us, it's Jesus. These are not normal Americans. These are Jesus followers. So if you like what you noticed, you ought to consider Jesus. And when you send a team over, it gives me that platform. It helps me do that with relationships that I've been building. Okay, I'm preaching too long on that. Here we go, moving on. ⁓ here, next slide please, thank you. I love what I do. Like I think I have one of the best jobs in the world and so I tend to get off track. So this is your entire Alliance missions team in France, right here, okay? They're also all back on the display there. We can talk more about them. Some of the dude how many of you know Chris and Bridgie is that just through Andrew or do some of the rest of you know Chris and Bridgie He's preached here Chris has been here Chris You'll remember he looks just like me the long blonde hair and everything you get us confused all the time Yeah, so Chris is in Bordeaux along with his wife Bridgie We've got a big team in Bordeaux a smaller team in Toulouse and a smaller team in Paris Just to give you perspective Paris to Toulouse is about a seven-hour drive or a seven-hour train So for me, I'm down in Toulouse, for me to get over to Bordeaux and hang out with Chris is about a two and a half hour drive. So that's kind of how we are spread out around the country. And we each have unique ministries and, yep, all of them, all of them are awesome. I had to think for sure. Yeah, they're all awesome, it's amazing. I would love to tell you more about any of those ministries that you're a part of, that you're interested in because they're all fantastic. Okay, let's go on to our next slide and we're gonna get into things this morning here. I wanna talk to you this morning about the idea of a foreigner. And I looked this up in the dictionary just to make sure I had it right. And a foreigner is a person born in or coming from a country other than one's own. Yeah, thanks Google. That really helps a yeah, foreigner. Yeah, that's pretty much what I expected. But there's an informal sense of this word as well when we talk about a foreigner. It's just a person who doesn't belong to a particular place or to a particular group, a stranger, an outsider. I'm an outsider this morning. Right, I don't belong here. This is my first time here. Somebody showed me the men's room, that was really helpful, I appreciate that. But I'm an outsider, maybe you're here this morning and you're an outsider to this body, I don't know. I wouldn't know by looking at you. And I wonder, how do we feel, how do you feel about outsiders? How do you feel about strangers? about foreigners, the legal term for a foreigner is an alien, right? But again, it's just someone from another place, right? Sometimes we talk about aliens from space and that kind of thing. But how do you feel about outsiders? Maybe... Maybe you're like those of us who grew up in the late 1900s and we had this idea of stranger danger, right? Stranger danger, right? And don't get in cars with strangers. our parents, my mother had this fear that somebody in a white van, panel van would pull up, slide open the door and hold out a lollipop and I'd be gone. That was a real fear we lived with, right? And now we get online and we find a stranger and we hop in their car. That's how I got from the airport, right? Maybe you think of strangers as something dangerous. a stranger is someone, maybe there's pain associated with that. Maybe when you think of an outsider, you think of, wow, I could be hurt. It's safe, keep it in the family. Keep it in the church, gotta keep things close. Or maybe when you think about outsiders, you're a little bit more like me and you think, wow, I'm curious. So what part of England are you from? ⁓ that's cool, and we didn't have much time to talk. Man, I'd love to learn more about your life, that's so cool. Like I'd love to meet each one of you and like learn more about how you got where you are and what God's doing. To me, I'm curious, I find it fascinating. Like what kind of food did you eat when you were a kid? What was your favorite food? And you know, I get to live in Europe and so I meet people from all over the world and they tell me about foods that they've never, that I've never even heard of. And then we find a reason to fix that food and get together and hang out and build relationship. But when I think of outsiders, sometimes I think, man, this is just curious. This is fascinating. This morning I wanna tell you about three foreigners, three outsiders. Myself, a woman named Natalie, and a man named Jean Francois. All right, Jean, you like that? Jean Francois. Sounds very French, right? Natalie is also a French name, by the way. Would you pray with me before we go further? Heavenly Father, what an absolute delight to be with your bride this morning, with your church, with those you have called out of darkness into your marvelous light. With brothers and sisters who are on this journey with me as we stumble along, falling down, getting up, you are so gracious to pour out your love on us, to call us your own. Holy Spirit, you work through us this morning? If there's things I say that are of Aaron, I pray they would just fall to the carpet and just lay there and be forgotten quickly. If there are things that you wish to say, I pray that those would find lodging in our hearts and in our minds and that it would do the transforming work you intended. Jesus, thank you for your presence with us, for your sacrifice, for your love. we remind ourselves that we are gathered here today in your name. Not in the name of the Alliance, not in the name of Highlands, but in your name. Would you do the work in us that we can't do ourselves? It's in your name we pray. So my first experience as an outsider was in Egypt. When I was in college, I got to spend a semester of my undergrad ⁓ in Cairo, Egypt, three months living there, and I was studying Arabic and Islam and the Middle East peace process, and it was fascinating. It was amazing, I loved it. I grew up in this group, the Alliance, and so I was always fascinated, because we frequently had, we used to call them missionaries, now we call them. Great job. We had IWs coming in all the time and speaking and I was just fascinated by their stories and I thought maybe someday I could do that. And so when I had the chance in college to do that, I jumped on it, went over there, did that studying and it was such a good experience for me. Like I took to the Arabic language really well, didn't know I could do that, that was really fun. I don't remember anything now other than I could impress you with a few phrases. I loved the food, I loved being the only white guy in the room. It was really kind of cool. I didn't know that about myself. And I was 18 or something, 17, 18. years old and I was just full of youthful energy and it was such such a good experience. My second experience living cross-culturally, I came home and everything was good, my second experience was moving to France five years ago. You've probably picked up between the lines that I didn't get to go overseas and be an international worker for about 25 years there. The Lord kept closing doors, long story, tell you all about it, including my wife's miraculous healing, which allowed us to go overseas eventually, but that's another story for another time. So we moved to France five years ago. I was 45 years old, roughly. and was really excited. We get a year of French learning and ⁓ didn't know anything about France. I mean, I've seen Beauty and the Beast, but that was about it in terms of, know, the bonjour. ⁓ That was as much French as we had when we moved there. And I was just really excited. We're finally getting to what God's put on my heart this whole time. And we get there and it was overwhelmingly hard. It was the four years we lived there and we'd been home for like nine months, something like that. We do one year home assignments. And it was four of the five worst years of my life, personally speaking. Ministry was great, don't get me wrong. God did more than we expected. But it was horribly miserable. My wife Kelly suffered from migraines. For the first two years, she had a migraine almost every week. She was in bed two to three days a week. It's really hard to do language school that way. and send your, at that time, nine-year-old daughter to school crying and pick her up crying and... We got that down to about once a month for the last couple of years. And I don't know why God didn't relieve her of those. Like I don't know why he's healed her before, but it was hard. We were just constantly feeling overwhelmed. And they told me moving overseas would be difficult. They told me living in another culture would be difficult. It's hard when you're young. ⁓ They say it's even harder in your middle age, right? Because Kelly and I, were kind of, I don't know, sort of at the peak of our careers. I was a, I think, well-respected youth pastor in the central district ⁓ and mentoring other youth pastors involved in all sorts of things and church planting and district teams and things like that. And life was really good. We were seeing kids come to Christ. was a really good season and Kelly was doing all sorts of really good things in our local inner city school district and starting dance programs there and seeing kids just their lives transformed and and God calls us over to seas where we can't communicate even at a toddler level. And they told us you're gonna suffer this loss of identity and the food's gonna be weird and it might take your digestive system a little while to adapt. I got used to the bread, you can tell. What? But it was hard and it just, language school was hard and we're constantly in these classes with like 20, 25 year old Europeans, right? And they do this dumb thing where they go around the room. So why are you here learning French today? Except they asked in French and I had to figure out what are they saying? Okay, we have to explain and you know, this person next to me say, well, I already speak Arabic and German and of course English and I have my PhD, but I wanna get a second PhD and it's only offered in French. So I'm just taking French real quick to learn it before I take one. I talk English good and I don't remember what we learned yesterday in French class. Like, it's amazing. If you want your kids to learn a language, man, start them now. Start them young, huh? Because you get to this point and it just... ⁓ goodness, I feel like I learned as much French in three years, four years over there as I did in three months learning Arabic when I was 18. It was hard. And my wife and daughter noticed how hard it was and I kept thinking, when's the plane gonna start coming back up? ⁓ When am I gonna start to feel acclimated? When am I gonna start liking the food? It was hard. We started seeing a marriage counselor because things were just rough between my wife's migraines and just my... I just felt like I couldn't adapt. Why can't I adapt? I'm good at this. I like this. This is what I've always wanted to do. Ah! We've sold our house and our cars and we've moved overseas and like, come on Lord, when are you gonna catch us? And eventually, our marriage counselor diagnosed me with depression, which was so incredibly helpful. Ah! Some of this makes sense to me now. And so she got me started on some medication. I see a therapist, those sort of things. And I don't know, again, my age, my growing up in the evangelical church, I don't know if it's like that here in the East Coast, but Midwest, like men don't get depression. Certainly not Christian men, certainly not pastors, right? Because we've got Jesus and Jesus just takes care of everything. We don't have struggles in life, right? So things are a lot better. A little while into it, my then, now, at that point, 13-year-old said, it's like dad's back, which was cool. Praise God for doctors and medicine and counselors and therapists and the stuff he's allowed us to figure out about the human being. But my second experience as an outsider was not as enjoyable. I seeing God do all these really cool things and yet I had no joy in it. It was just miserable. I tell you about another foreigner. Her name is Natalie. Natalie is a woman in our French church. Natalie is a French woman. Her husband Dante is also French. And ⁓ Natalie and Dante are not the kind of people who have flamboyant ministry, right? So they don't have public ministry, right? They can't play an instrument, they can't sing with that kind of passion. Thank you, where are you? That was awesome, thank you for leading us guys. Appreciate that so much. ⁓ They can't speak in front of people, they don't preach, they don't lead a kid's ministry. They're just very nice people. But you know what they do? They make coffee. on a rotation once a month, and they greet at the door because they're friendly people. They just think they don't do it in front of people, right? And I wanna tell you as a foreigner in France, that those first six months not being able to understand one word of the message, and then the next six months being able to kind of follow along. But just the gist of it, all right, I see John 3.16 is up on the slide, so I know generally what he's talking about. Right, it was years before I could really follow along, and man, talk about feeling like an outsider, and I was so grateful for Dante and Natalie's ministry. Because it was one I could receive, right? When I show up, there's Dante and Natalie standing at the door, and they seemed sincerely glad to see me. This crazy American who is butchering the French language doesn't know which end is up. Sometimes his wife is with him, sometimes she's not. And they were just, they welcomed me in. And they had coffee for me. I wanna encourage you, if you have a behind the scenes ministry here at Highlands, do not look down on yourself. The body has many parts and they're all valuable. It's not just a saying, it's not just a scripture verse, it's true. and your ministry may impact someone more than you realize. But Natalie, I wanna tell you about something else here real quickly. Let me make sure I'm not getting too far ahead or behind myself. I'm not, good. So I'm gonna need a volunteer for this next part. Someone about my size, an adult is what I mean by that. Not a child, sorry guys. Really? Come on. You can trust me. Are you willing? You're being volunteered. Tim, right? Tim, come on up Tim. Tim and I met earlier, we're old friends. We've known each other for all of 12, 13 minutes, I think, something like that. Alright Tim, so here's what we're gonna do. Tim and I are walking down the street and how do we greet each other? ⁓ look at that, I didn't even have to tell him. This is not arranged, We did not do this. We know how to do this, right? You wrap the four fingers along the bottom, the one around the top, and it's typically which hand? The right hand. Now if I came at you with my left hand, you probably would do it, but that feels a little weird, doesn't it? ⁓ Yeah, so we know how to do this. COVID, right, has expanded our repertoire of greetings. What's another way we could greet during COVID? Oh, look at that, how's it going? Yeah, and it's just so easy, right? Now that's, you stay right there, I'm not done with you yet, okay. You don't have any like sickness or anything right now, do you? Okay, okay, okay. So, he's inching away from me. Look at this. Come on, gotta stay, you gotta stay, we're streaming this, so you gotta stay within the, yeah, stay in the light, All right, and so, not all cultures greet the same way, and Tim knows where we're going with this, but in France, they have a greeting called la bise. Would you show that next slide, please? La bise ⁓ is the word for the kiss, okay? So, you doing all right still? You with me? All right, Tim's still with me, all right. All right. You guys ever seen your dad kiss your mom? Yeah, what do you, he's like so tense right now. He's like where is this, he is not sure he wants to be part of this. Think how your dad feels. ⁓ man. So in France they practice la bise, right? And so la bise is called the kiss. And the way this works is we're gonna go to the right side first. Okay, so your right cheek and my right cheek. Okay, gotta be clear on this. Because they told me go to the right first. And I'm like wait, his right or my right, right? And you don't wanna, keep backing away from me, right? No, I'm good. And so you gotta get this right because if you go the wrong way at the wrong time, you know what's gonna happen. You're gonna have lip contact. I mean, I love your brother, but we're not that close yet. It's like 15 minutes now, but that's not enough. All right, so right cheek to right cheek. And all we're gonna do is just lightly touch cheeks and make a kissing sound into the air. And we've got the microphone, so it might be a little loud, but you got it, right? Okay, here we go. All right, now in the south of France, we do a second one on the left. Perfect, now here's the trick. the further out of the city you go, the more likely it is that there's a third kiss back to the right. Right? And if you go to different parts of France, it might only be one kiss. Right? So there's this really interesting dynamic of like, okay, which side is, ⁓ get this. And then in some parts, they start with the left. Man, that's just like ripe for disaster, isn't it? Did you notice as we were coming in here, like, we just did this, like, look, we kind of almost grabbed elbows, like, you just have this, sort of, even as an Ameri- you're American? Yeah, yeah, even as Americans, and I'm assuming no experience with this? You don't kiss a lot of other people besides your wife. That's the right answer. Good job. Okay, good. So even intuitively, Tim, we kind of lined each other up, right? Like you don't just come in ⁓ mouth open, blind like this. You got to line it up a little bit, okay? Tim, you've done a great job. Give Tim a hand. So I come into church one Sunday morning and it was a particularly low Sunday morning and my wife and I think we're fighting on the way and I know none of you do that but sometimes IWs do, fight on the way to church and intense fellowship, sorry, intense fellowship on the way to church and we were just going along and I get there and I'm just like, I don't even wanna be here, God, why do you have me in France? Why am I going to this church where I can't understand the language? I just want something familiar. Standing at the door was Natalie with her big smile. And like, ⁓ and like it was just this moment of like, okay, I'm where I'm supposed to be. Like this is good. it was like she was the presence of Jesus for me, welcoming me in to and it was just such a beautiful moment. And I want to encourage you again, if that's your ministry, don't look down on that. You never know how God's gonna use that, And Natalie reaches out to me and I walk in and I just wrap my arms around her. I give her this, I'm a physical touch kind of guy, like that's my love language and I'm a hugger, so anybody wants hugs, feel free, you don't even have to ask, just come hug me. But I've learned as a youth pastor, you gotta moderate that, but I wrap my arms around Natalie and just give her that kind of brotherly, tap on the shoulder kind of thing, just squeeze in, just enjoy the set, just for a second, and I back off, and this look of just abject horror on her face, right? And in that instant I realized, ⁓ she was lining up for the beast. I was supposed to kiss, right? And I just like full body contact this woman. And I look over at her husband and he's like, he just can barely, it's hilarious. Poor Natalie, she would not make eye contact with me for about three, four weeks. ⁓ Just, ⁓ poor woman. We're good now, we're good. I apologize profusely as best I could. ⁓ just we desolated, desolated. As best I could and. we're all good, but you know, sometimes interacting with foreigners can be really awkward, right? Jesus has something to say to us, I think, about how we interact with outsiders and how we treat outsiders. And I know this is a big issue in our country right now, it's a big issue in France right now on the political level as well, and I'm not talking the politics of it, that's for people much smarter than me. But I wanna look at what I found that God says in the scripture. about outsiders. So let's look at this next slide. First thing I noticed is that God wants us to be fair to outsiders. I'm gonna have like four five columns up here by the time we're done. I'll let you know when we're done. If you wanna snap a picture of it, if you're that kind of person, that's fine, but I'll let you know. ⁓ We're not gonna look at all these passages, don't worry. ⁓ But here are just a few example passages where God is really clear that he wants us to be fair to outsiders. Don't put them at a disadvantage. Right? Think about how you can level the playing ground for them. How you can level the playing field. But isn't it just like God that he's like, don't just make it fair, but next slide please, don't oppress them. Right? Be really careful not to do anything to put them down, to hold them under. Right? And you may be sitting there kind of thinking like, I don't think I've ever oppressed anyone. Like I don't own any slaves. I treat people at work fairly, at school, whatever. But I wonder how often we hold people back or hold people down unintentionally without thinking about it, right? Now as a younger church, you guys are doing so many things really well and I wanna compliment you on them because, and I wanna encourage you not to forget these things. So your slides, your announcements, they used no Christian jargon. I noticed this. I baptism, you could call it that, Hard to get around that word, right? And Pastor Andrew explained them in very common terms that if you're a first time person here, makes some sense, right? Maybe I don't know what baptism is, but I understand what they're offering and how I could go about that. First thing I judge a church on when I walk in is its signage, right? When I drive in. You guys have a sign out there saying, don't turn in here, it's the next driveway for parking. Do you know how helpful that is as a first time visitor? Immediately, I feel less like an outsider. Immediately, I know where to put my car. And then I get out of my car and there's another sign, entrance, this way, straight ahead I think it said, something like that. Whatever it said, it worked. I didn't have to wonder, do I come in through that building back there, which I guess is gym. You wouldn't believe how many churches I go to and I don't know what door to go in. It's obvious to everyone who's been there for 50 years, but to an outsider, so thank you for that. Signs all around the building, restrooms this way, right? Now had to ask, but somebody did show me where the men's room is, that's important, need to know that, right? Easy to find, well labeled. What do we do in our churches to not oppress people who are just coming in? What about at school? Two school-aged guys, all right, talking to you then. What about at school? Or what about at work? What do we do to not oppress the new employee who comes in, the new colleague, the new office worker, to make sure they get a fair start? But you know, God doesn't want us to just not oppress. God always goes positive with these things, doesn't he? Next slide, please. He actually wants us to not just make it even and level, but he wants us to help. to proactively go out of our way to help the outsider. Now, we help our family, right? We help our church family, we help our friends, but what do we do to go out of our way to help the outsider? This is important to God. Scripture makes that clear. And you know, if you know Jesus at all, you know that he's not just interested in helping, next slide please, but he also wants us to love the outsider, okay? Not just help. Not just when it's convenient. Not just when it doesn't cost us much or doesn't cost us anything. But love is always costly. Love is always inconvenient when it's sacrificial, And this is how God wants us to treat the outsiders. Can do the next slide please? What I want us to remember for just a moment here is that we were all outsiders once. I'm guessing that some of you are like me, you grew up in the church. Some of you have had parents that loved you and provided for you and took good care of you. Some of you had a place to belong. Some of you were on the team in the club. But I want us to remember, just for a moment, that we were outsiders. You know, I'm guessing that most of us in the room are Gentiles. That's a pretty safe bet, usually here in the US. And a Gentile is simply someone who isn't Jewish. Right, so if you're not Jewish, then you are Gentile. And the scripture is pretty clear on this too. The Jews, the Jewish people were God's chosen people. They were his family. And a Gentile was someone who was not chosen, someone who was on the outside, someone who was not included. That was us. Let that sink in for a minute. We were on the outside. Paul reminds us in Ephesians two that we were strangers and aliens in Colossians one that not only were we alienated, there's that word again, aliens, right, which means foreigner, which means an outsider, not only were we alienated, but we were actually hostile to God. We were going our own way. We wanted to be in charge of our own lives instead of the true king. This hit me a few months ago that I was an outsider. I was not in. I didn't have the privileges, the entitlements that we have now, the direct line to Abba Father through Jesus. And while we were still different from God, offensive to him even, hostile, outsiders, he reconciled us to himself through Jesus. I know we've been celebrating this in recent weeks with Easter. I want us to just continue pondering it. You see, God gave us citizenship into his kingdom through Jesus. Colossians 1 reads this way. For in him, meaning Jesus, all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. And through him, Jesus, to reconcile to himself, God, all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace by the blood of his cross. And you, who were once alienated and hostile in mind, that's us. doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him. Next slide please. Ephesians 2.19 sums it up. So then, you and me, you are no longer strangers and aliens and outsiders, foreigners. but you are fellow citizens with the saints and the members of the household of God. Colossians 3.11, you can leave that slide up for a bit. Colossians 3.11 says, here there is not Greek or Jew. Now, in this kingdom, obviously there is Greek and Jew, right? There's Greek in this sense meaning Gentile, right? Anyone who's not Jewish, that's the outsider right now. So there's not outsider and insider, there's not family and not family. In this kingdom there's not circumcised and uncircumcised, right? That's New Testament code for religious and non-religious, right? So some of you may have grown up very religious, but you didn't know Jesus and you weren't trusting him. Some of you may have grown up not very religious. but somehow you knew Jesus, right? Somebody introduced you to him. didn't play the game well, you didn't fit into church well. So, clarion, civian, whatever that is, slave, free, and I don't think Paul is saying that these groups of people don't exist in the kingdom of God. I think he's saying they are so unimportant compared to the fact that Christ is all and in all. We were once outside and now we're inside. That's incredible to me, that's mind blowing. You know this part too, but I wanna make sure it's really clear. How do we accept this gift of citizenship from Jesus? from God through Jesus. How do we accept it? Well, it's not paperwork, right? If you want to become a citizen of another country, right, there's green cards involved, there's tests, there's paperwork involved, right? It's not your baptism certificate, although maybe you guys issue those, I always did, I thought it's nice memorabilia, nice way to remember. But it's not paperwork that gets us into God's kingdom, gives us citizenship. You know it's not doing religious things, right? Because there are unreligious people, there are non-religious people in the kingdom of God. It's not doing religious things. It doesn't matter how much you pray, that doesn't get you citizenship in God's kingdom. It doesn't matter how faithful you are in your attendance here. It doesn't matter how many chapters of the Bible you read a day, a week, a month, a year. It doesn't matter how much you give to missions. It doesn't get you into God's kingdom. And it's not your connection. Someone famously said that God has no grandchildren. Just because mom and dad are in the kingdom doesn't guarantee that you are. Just because Pastor Andrew is the best preacher in the district, the best pastor in town, doesn't mean, and just because you're at the best church in town, doesn't mean you're into the kingdom of God. You know how it works. The way we get this gift, the way we receive this gift of citizenship is by believing on Jesus. And that is the only way because it is a gift. And I wanna tell you about the third foreigner, Jean-Francois Gravelet. Because I think there's some confusion about what it means to believe on Jesus and he helps me understand. Jean-Francois Gravelet, I've never met the man. He lived about the same time as the founder of the Christian and Missionary Alliance in the 1800s. Hence I never met him, I'm not that old. Jean-Francois Gravelet was a remarkable man living in France, and his particular skill set was acrobatics. He was an acrobat, a gymnast, right? And if you know your European history much, cultural history, you'll know that this gymnastics and acrobatics became really trendy in Europe around the end of the 1800s, early 1900s, and it made its way across the pond to us. Jean-Francois Gravelet was particularly known for being an excellent tightrope walker. Okay? And Jean-Francois de Cravelet did what any good professional, accelerating person did in that time. He moved to the United States so he could go even further with his career. And so he found his way to the United States and he started performing and what he was really good at was marketing. Right? And so he would go into a town and he would say, you know, a week before and he'd put up posters and he'd go to the local bars and the local churches and wherever and, hey, you gotta come out on Saturday and see this, I'm gonna be doing this and whatever it might be. And people would get excited and he would make a big deal of it. I'm sure there was a drum roll and he had a good manager that kind of helped promote him. Jean-Francois Gravelet became well known here in the United States. He changed his name though, not necessarily, yeah. Okay, Charles Blondin. Charles Blondin is well known for being the first person to cross Niagara Falls on a tightrope. Yeah, you've heard of that now, cool. So Charles Blondin would do this work and he spent a lot of time at Niagara Falls because obviously that was a pretty big draw and he was so good at it. He would work it up so that there were few places next to the falls where you could actually see, right? And the rest was blocked by trees or rocks and he would set up rope barriers and his manager would work people into that area and as they come through it five cents please, it's 10 cents for kids, whatever. collected his money and that's how they made their money. He was just really good at doing all this and people would crowd along and be watching him. Anybody ever been to Niagara Falls? Yeah, yeah. It's amazingly wide, isn't it? It's tall and it's incredible, but it is really wide. To think about that, like... I did the made of the mist thing where you're down on the water and you know, that's a pretty long ride And I'm just trying to imagine what this would be like and and he would do these things and like I said He was a great performer so he would get out there right at the edge of the rope, right? And he he would be like, you know kind of acting like this and like people like oh my goodness all the moms like oh my goodness He's gonna die and all the teenage boys have their iPhones out and like oh, this is awesome He's gonna die, you know and this kind of thing and they're like excited to see what's gonna happen and he worked the crowd and he would shake his way on out there and he'd get you know 10 feet out whatever he just kind of walk like normal Like he just, it was so easy for him. It was just like you and me walking. Well, maybe like you, don't, I trip over carpet sometimes. ⁓ And he would do this and then he would come back across and he'd like, so you think I can do it? What do you think about this? And he says, who thinks I can carry someone across? And like he'd grab his manager piggyback, put his manager on his back. And he'd walk across with his manager on the, nope. That's what we call nope on a rope. And so he would just like never do it. Like he would do all these crazy things and he would, okay, so one of the things, you can look this up, this is online, it's on the internet so it's true. ⁓ He would do this thing where he had a custom made cast iron stove. You guys know what a cast iron silver is? Okay, dad will tell you. Cast iron stove. So it's a little metal box where you put wood into it and you light it on fire and it sits in your house and it heats up the metal and then the heat radiates out all over. So unlike a fireplace where a lot of the smoke goes up the chimney, most of the heat stays in your home. It's a cool way to, it's really good technology actually. And so he had this little cast iron stove custom made. It wasn't a standard one. And he had it in his backpack. He would go out there and we had a chair on his backpack. He would go out to the middle of this rope, right in the middle of the rope over Niagara Falls. sure it's gotta be swaying, what, 10, 20, 30, I don't know, this is insane, right? So he gets the chair out and he balances the chair and he sits down in it. I'm assuming it wasn't a standard chair. And he gets the cast iron stove out, balances it in front of him, independent of himself, right? He gets a little log out, he puts it in, he lights a fire. He pulls out a skillet, cracks an egg, scrambles it, eats it. Waits for the stoves is cool sufficiently that he can put it back in his backpack and finish his journey across. Like when I say this man was good at tightrope walking, he was world class, none better. And the crowd just went nuts, of course. I'm this is insane. Back then they had a longer attention span than we do now, right? I don't even like the shorts on YouTube anymore. They're just, nah, that's too long, that's too long. We have this little attention span, but back then that was entertainment, right? I'd still watch that. That would be kinda cool, because it's unique, but. And so he'd come back across and he'd pull out this wheelbarrow. You know what a wheelbarrow is, right? Anybody ever driven a wheelbarrow, pushed a wheelbarrow? Yeah, okay, good. They're not easy to do. I've used wheelbarrows down in the Dominican Republic, like hauling cement. We took a mission trip down there once. They're hard to drive and they would have this little ramp, it was like a two by four or something, where you had to go up across a little ditch or whatever. How many loads of cement did we dump in the ditch? Because it's just hard to do. The wheel is the part you can't see. It's hidden by the... Barrel? That part, the other part, right? And they're just notoriously unstable. And he would bring this wheelbarrow out, and the crowd's like, ⁓ this is going to be good. And he's like, who thinks I can drive this wheelbarrow across the falls? And by now, I mean, they've seen him do everything. Yeah, of course you can. Come on, man. Let's do this. And everybody's all excited. He's like, all right, good. Who's willing to get in the wheelbarrow? And I think I understand a little bit better what it means to believe on Jesus. Because there were hundreds, maybe thousands of people standing on the edge. Yeah, you can do it. Come on. And Jesus says, you've seen me do this. You've seen me do greater things than this. Who's willing to get in the wheelbarrow? You see. This idea of believing on Jesus, I'm from the modern culture, I'm old enough for that, I'm now part of post-modernity, but I think as a modern, that's how I was trained, how I grew up. And so I'm finding post-modernity to be an interesting thing to navigate as I'm sure many of you are finding as well. One of the things we didn't do real well in modernity is we made faith this intellectual thing. Right, we systemized our theology, we came up with a list of things and if I believe this then I'm on the inside and we made it very intellectual and there were really positive sides to that, really good, some really good theology developed out of that, but we made it too intellectual and here's the problem, the demons believe in Jesus and they've got the good sense to tremble. So it can't just be about knowing who he is and agreeing with that. we actually have a picture of Jean Francois. I forgot to put him up there. Thanks. Something about believing on Jesus requires some risk on our part. Maybe you've been in the wheelbarrow when Jesus was driving it. Maybe you've felt that before. ⁓ Maybe you know what that's like. I do. When I went to France, it was all wobbly all the time. And I couldn't tell where we were going and I had no control over anything. You ever ridden in a wheelbarrow? It's kind of an electrifying experience. It's also horrifying and terrifying. Something about this walk with Jesus, like, I don't know, I've learned that when my life feels comfortable and when I feel like I'm in control, I have to look back and say, wow, am I in the wheelbarrow? That doesn't mean that life can't ever be comfortable and you can't ever have a plan. That's not what I'm saying at all. But if your life is always comfortable and there's always that sense of control. wonder if we should be checking to see if we're actually in the wheelbarrow of faith, if we've really put our faith on Jesus, if we're really willing to take those risks. You know, I was at a church about four weeks ago and a woman, I was sharing this same message and ⁓ a woman came up to me, I put her in her late 70s, she was very diminutive, very quiet, very calm, and she said, you know, Jesus has been telling me I'm supposed to start a knitting group in my home for my neighbors. and I haven't been willing to do it, but I'm gonna do that now. That could be getting in the wheelbarrow, right? I don't know what your wheelbarrow looks like. I don't know what that's like for you. But we are now not only citizens in this kingdom of heaven, we're not only on the inside, but we're actually foreigners in this world. Philippians 3.20 tells us that our citizenship is in heaven and from it we await a savior, the Lord Jesus Christ. But we're not just passive citizens, right? We're actually representatives of this kingdom. Not just your IWs that you send to other countries, but every one of us, regardless of where God calls or sends or pushes or pulls or tips us, right? Sometimes I found the places where God was using me the most, I feel like he just kind of dumped me out there. It's how I got there and it hurt and it bruised and it wasn't where I meant to be and God still used it. Acts 1-8 tells us that you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and to the ends of the earth. Here's another sermon for you sometime. If you haven't already done it, Pastor Andrew, you can. What is your Jerusalem here? Is it the Highlands? Is it your neighborhood? I can tell you how to get to the ends of the earth. have 22 locations that will help you with that. But what's your Judea and Samaria? What are the areas that maybe take a little bit of risk on your part, but are achievable without any special fundraising or? We now have the assignment to welcome the outsider, and this has just been God's plan all along. That's what he does. He welcomes outsiders. He makes them family, and this is what we've been assigned to do. Next slide, please. Last slide. Thank you again for your partnership. ⁓ We could not be welcoming outsiders into God's kingdom over in France if you weren't partnering with us. We couldn't do it. You can scan that code or go to EnvisionFrance.com slash partners. You can sign up for prayer newsletters there if you'd like to kind of follow along with our journey. ⁓ I can't get you connected with the whole team there. It would be too much. But if there's any particular person on the team in France that you'd like to connect more with, I've got their personal information right here on my phone. Glad to get you connected, get to their prayer letters, that kind of thing. Thank you for your ongoing support through the Great Commission Fund. Every one of the 650 workers around the world is dependent on that. and we are grateful for your giving, for your sacrificial giving. Let me pray for us, and we'll be done.