Family on Mission

Amen.

Well, it is great to see all of you this morning.

And um, we're gonna spend a few minutes in the Word uh this morning and come back and finish our time and worship.

Um right now I want to welcome um all of you that may be here for the first or second time, and also I want to welcome our social circle campus right now that's that's gonna be live with us.

And so would you join me in welcoming those that of our family and social circle?

We're so excited that you're with us, and we're also excited for those of you that are home and or maybe on vacation or you're not here with us physically or watching online.

Um, and we're in this series called Intentional Families.

And so we're gonna talk today about family on mission, that God has called us to be a family-on mission.

If you've ever interviewed for a job, or if you are a boss or a manager or a business owner and you've had to interview someone, one of the most important things you can do is to either receive a job description if you are the one that is interviewing, or if you are interviewing someone else, is to hand them a job description and make sure that there's clarity in what they've what they're signing up for.

There's clarity in their mission and in their uh objectives in their job.

And so when you when you work, when you go to work, you want to know how to be measured.

You want to know how um whether you're being effective or whether you're doing the right thing.

And so you need some kind of clarity in your job description.

You need clarity in your mission.

And it's the same thing for us as we follow Jesus.

God wants us to be on mission with Him, with Him, and He wants us to have clarity in our mission as families and as the church.

Last week we began this series and we talked about how God defines the family.

And we live in this Western culture that has that has kind of hijacked what family is supposed to be.

Family, um, after World War II, the family became known as this idea of the nuclear family, a husband and a wife and two kids, and and and that's kind of the American Western way of thinking about the family.

But in the Bible, the family is so much more than that.

It is a web of relationships where we are connected in an extended family.

And that might be those that are biological relatives in family, and it's those that are family by faith.

And so we're we're all connected through this through this web of relationships.

God exists in family.

God exists as God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

So God exists as family, right?

He is family.

God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit.

Listen to Genesis 1.

We're gonna be in Genesis primarily this morning, but here's what um what God says.

He says, then God said, Let us, let us, God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit.

So the Trinity exists even in the Old Testament.

God exists in family, he exists in the Trinity.

He said, Let us make human beings in our image to be like us.

They will reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals that scurry along the ground.

So God created human beings in his own image.

In the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them.

Then God blessed them.

He says, Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it, reign over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, and all the animals that scurry along the ground.

So God gives mission at the very beginning.

He gives mission and clarity to Adam and Eve.

He says, I mean, these are things you could circle or put a star beside in your Bible.

He says, rule and reign.

He says, take dominion over the earth.

He says, grow.

We're supposed to grow.

When our children are born, we expect them to grow.

We don't want them to stay babies, physically or emotionally.

We want them to grow.

He says, be fruitful and multiply.

Have lots of children.

Have big families.

And he says, fill the earth and govern it, rule and reign over the earth.

And so God is a God of mission.

He gives us his mission right there in Genesis 1.

And so whenever there is mission, there's always opposition.

Whenever there is mission, there's always opposition.

So even in the garden, God gives clarity of his mission.

But what happens in Genesis chapter 2 and 3?

Genesis 2 · chapter mention

We see the enemy comes to deceive, to confuse, to disorient God's creation and to make sure that there's not clarity for his followers.

And so there's always opposition.

We have a common enemy as followers of Jesus.

And I always like to take time to talk about spiritual warfare because it's so easy for us to forget that there's more to this world than just what we experience physically.

What we touch and what we can see, what we can feel.

There's a whole nother world that runs parallel to this world.

And it's a spiritual world.

And so, back way before creation, when all the heavenly hosts is worshiping God, one of the chief worship leaders was Lucifer.

And we now know him as the devil or Satan.

And he wanted to exalt himself above God.

He, for some reason, as he's leading worship, he desires in his heart to be praised and worshiped like God.

And because of his pride, he lifted himself up.

And God says, I can't live with that.

And he cast him out of heaven down to the earth.

And one-third of the angelic host came with him.

And those are all the demons and all the oppositional forces that want to get you off track and to confuse you, to deceive you, to thinking that you can't understand God, that you can't know God, that you can't follow God, to be enslaved to sin, to be enslaved to the human flesh.

And so we've got to realize that God has victory over the opposition, and there is an enemy that we must be aware of.

And so family-owned mission is something we've talked about a lot at Church of the Grove over the years.

We are a family-owned mission.

And we need to know that our mission is clear.

We are called to advance the gospel.

The family-owned mission is God's plan to advance the gospel.

It's God's plan for the Great Commission to be fulfilled.

It is a family connected to a bigger family called the church.

That's God's plan.

But the enemy wants to confuse you.

The enemy wants to get you off track.

The enemy wants you to doubt your clarity.

He wants to deceive you.

And so here's the pitfalls that I think we all fall into.

I'm going to go through this quickly and then come back and we're going to spend a few moments in prayer.

Here's the pitfalls for family and what God's called us to as a family-owned mission.

The first is family or mission.

Family or mission.

And this is the idea of the a family or an individual that associates God with simply showing up to church, but then walks away disconnected from having God in their family or their everyday life.

Let me kind of put this in modern terms.

This is kind of the idea of a family that makes God a priority simply when it's convenient for them.

When my kids aren't busy in an activity or a sport or whatever kind of hobby that we all have as a family, then we'll show up occasionally at church.

And we want to make sure that our kids know who God is, know what God's plan is, know who Jesus is.

But when you don't show up at church, nobody ever has a conversation about Jesus and his plan for your life.

And it's family or mission.

And even those of us that are Christian families, those of us that proclaim Jesus as Lord, we can fall victim to showing up and attending church, checking a box, walking away, and never integrating Jesus into our everyday life, our habits and our patterns, and the ways that we do life with us in our marriages and our families.

Even men of God or women of God, great people throughout history.

And as I've read over the years that I've been in the ministry, I've discovered that even some of the people that we quote or we refer to or we've put on a pedestal, some of them have broken families and crumbled lives because they put ministry ahead of the mission.

Because that's family or mission.

Another pitfall that we have is family and mission.

This is a little step closer to family on mission, but it but it's it's it's a it's similar to the family or mission.

It's a family that does do life in the church, but sometimes the programming and the scheduling involvement in the church, that becomes their object of worship over Jesus.

And so we have a mission and we have ministry and we stay busy and we're in programs, and so many of you probably that are older like me remember the days when you went to church on Sunday morning, when you went to church on Sunday afternoon, and you went to church on Sunday night, and then you came back and you went to visitation on Monday or Tuesday night, and then Wednesday night, you had a Wednesday night family meal, and then you had Wednesday night prayer meeting, and then and then you add in all the other activities.

And but when you step away from all of the activities, there's no prayer, there's no discipleship, there's no connecting the dots to your family and to Jesus.

And so you're busy, but you're busy with religion.

And you're not healthy spiritually, emotionally, and you are just exhausted.

Many of you feel that way today.

You're exhausted because you bought into the American dream, but you have forgotten about the mission that God has for us.

As a family-owned mission.

The next pitfall is family as mission.

Family as mission.

This is the pitfall where we make family the mission.

One of the common aspects in the modern culture is where we we want to build a wall and protect our family from the world, and so we separate from the world completely.

And we have things we have we have churches that literally don't want to have anything to do with anybody outside the church or the community, and this is where a lot of homeschooling has come about.

And listen, I'm not anti-homeschool, my family homeschools, but there's an aspect to homeschooling where instead of investing into the life of our children for us to be on mission, we separate from the world so we can protect our children.

And we build a fence around our family, hoping that we can protect it.

And then finally, this is what God has called us to: family on mission.

Family on mission.

Genesis chapter 12, we see where God calls Abram to leave his extended family to go on mission.

Genesis 12 · chapter mention

He says in Genesis 12, he said, The Lord has said to Abram, Leave your native country, your relatives, and your father's family, and go to the land that I will show you.

I will make you into a great nation.

I will bless you and make you famous, and you will be a blessing to others.

I will bless those who bless you and curse those who treat you with contempt.

All listen to this, listen to this.

All the families on earth will be blessed through you.

All of the families on earth will be blessed through your family.

And this is where the nation of Israel begins to grow.

You know how they as Abraham is following God.

Um, he has a child named Isaac, and Isaac has a child named Jacob.

So God, God communicates his identity through generational blessing.

So when God speaks to Moses through the burning bush, what does he say?

He says, I am that I am.

I am the God of your forefathers.

I am the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

And so even to even today, those that are Jewish in their faith will say, We follow the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, multi-generational, family-oriented, a family of families, if you will.

And so family is about being on mission with God.

And you look at the big picture of the gospel throughout the Old Testament.

It's God's people as a family learning how to obey and follow God, learning how to repent, learning how to realize that they are they are tempted and potentially enslaved to their sin.

And you see the cycle, generational sin, and then they they have revival.

There's somebody that steps up, brings the word, and they repent and they have revival.

And then before they can make sure to transfer their faith to the next generation, they begin to worship idols again.

It's this cycle over and over and over.

And then finally, Jesus steps into the darkness.

Jesus steps into the picture.

God brings fulfillment to his plan by bringing Jesus, who's born on that first Christmas celebration in front of all the heavenly host, in a humble way, in a manger, not at a palace, not on a throne.

He's born in a stable.

And he would live a sinless life so he could become the perfect sacrifice for all of us.

That through his life and his death and his resurrection, that we would put our faith in him, make him our Lord, and then turn and repent of our sins and follow his great commission to go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded them.

And he says, I will be with you until the end of the age.

And that is the mission he's given us, his family.

And so the church is the modern day family.

It is the age that we are in where the church is the family of God.

And we're called to be a family of families on mission.

And that is the means by which God will advance his kingdom.

And so I want to ask you.

I want to ask you.

Are you victim to one of the pitfalls?

Family or mission, family and mission, family as mission?

Have you bought into the idea that we can be religious, we can physically gather and check a box, and then completely disconnect our faith from the rest of our lives.

Hoping that our kids will catch enough of Jesus through youth ministry, through children's ministry, through our programming, through vacation Bible school, summer jam, through youth camp, through our student ministry camp.

They'll catch enough of Jesus and we'll one day see them baptized.

But what'll happen is they'll grow up and they'll make their family mission their mission, or they will make the culture their mission, and there will not be clarity in their mission, and there'll be a continual cycle of generational brokenness and disconnecting from God's mission.

And so maybe this morning is a morning of repentance.

And a morning where we just stop, examine where we are in this picture of family-owned mission.

Do we fall within one of these pitfalls?

And I would say a lot of us either do or have our struggle.

And join with God's family in fulfilling his great commission.

And so what I want us to do this morning is I want to close our time with prayer.

And as we continue this series, we're going to give you opportunities to continue to understand what intentional family is all about.

But if you don't stop and examine yourself and maybe come up with a mission statement for your family, one of the authors of one of the books I've read for this series, Jefferson Betke, he he literally, his family came up with a mission statement for their family.

And his the mission statement says we exist primarily to fulfill Jesus' words by living out your kingdom come, your will be done in our city as it is in heaven.

And that we do this in our neighborhood, relationships, vocation, and all that we do.

So I want to ask you, would you stand?

Let's all stand together.

And I want to give you an opportunity to close our time in prayer, but I want you to do it.

I want you to do it in groups.

Because we are a family of families.

And so you might be here with your family.

And I'm going to ask you to maybe to close this time praying together, either as a couple or as a family.

Now you say, Russ, what about I'm I'm single?

I'm not, you know, I don't have any family here.

Then I want us as a church to make sure that we pull people in.

That's our role.

And that's one of the practical commands of the church.

Take care of widows and orphans, right?

Take care of those that don't have biological connections.

We adopt them into our family.

And so as we as we gather and close this time with a brief prayer, I want you to I want you to circle up.

So go ahead and start, circle up, circle up, gather together.

You can come up to the front in the altar area.

Or right there in between the seats.

Those of you that are in social circle, I want you to gather.

There's lots of open space in social circle.

Gather as a family, and I want you to look around the room.

And I want us to make sure.

Let's turn, can we turn the lights back up?

Let's do that.

Let's keep our light.

This ain't.

Some of you couples might be tempted in the dark.

So let's look around the room and let's make sure there's not anybody left out.

You get over here, Miss Claudia, Robin, y'all.

Family.

Y'all are family.

And I just, one person, preferably father, husband, if not, um maybe the person that feels most comfortable.

Just kind of whisper a prayer in your group right now, out loud, that just says, you know what?

We repent and we turned and we want to follow you in obedience as a family on mission.

And God, would you reveal to us how we're to do that?

Just just in your own words, right where you are.

In Jesus' name.

Amen.

I'm sorry.

We got some of y'all gonna start preaching.

I'm the only preacher in the room right now.

And I, by the way, this group back in here, I y'all cheated.

That's the whole church.

And we're gonna we're gonna send y'all out.

I mean, yeah, y'all just plant a church back there.

I think y'all cheated back there.

A lot of people got out of praying back there.

So I'm gonna ask for for Hannah to lead us in a closing chorus.

And uh Jonah's gonna come up and close us out with prayer.

And um, and I want you to continue to come back.

Come back next week.

Come back the next week and continue to flesh out what it means to be intentional in our families and live as families on mission.

Father, would you continue to work, speak, and listen?