Missional Purpose

I am so glad that you have chosen to be with us this morning.

It's awesome to have you guys with us online.

We are broadcasting live online right now.

And so we know that part of our family is able to be here physically with us, but uh for maybe any number of reasons that many are able to worship at home online as we continue uh to grow our online presence.

And so it's exciting to have faces looking back at me.

I have found that cameras don't laugh at my jokes.

Now I understand when you don't laugh because it's not funny, but but there's no it can be funny and nobody laughs.

But I want to say happy Father's Day to all the fathers uh that are with us this uh this morning, and um happy Father's Day to those of you that are watching online.

Excited to be back with the church family.

Our team and our staff has been amazing and and to to uh encounter what we encountered back in March and in just a week's time to go with from no online presence uh to immediately begin to broadcast, record sometimes, uh, but to be able to continue ministry and and for you guys to be able to join us online.

And so, because of your generosity, we've had a couple churches that have that have donated money and allowed us to buy and purchase um new equipment to even take our online presence to another level.

And so we are so thankful for our team for the last few weeks.

We have been doing training and our servant leaders, the people that you see when you drove up in the parking lot, the our ushers and our greeters have been involved in training for for this new season that we are in as we want to get back together physically, but we also want to honor uh the authorities that are in place, and we want to we we care about your safety, and so um we might have to social distance a little bit and it may be a little different, but but nonetheless, man, our team has been amazing, and all of our tech people uh that have had to learn a lot of new stuff, so thankful for them.

Um but what I want to do this morning as we resume physical gatherings, as we um uh get back together and reconnect, I thought it would be a great morning for us to be reminded of why we're here.

And why do we do this?

Why do we gather as a church?

What is it that God has called us to?

And so I want us to just be reminded when everything else is stripped away, there's really one reason that God calls us to do what we do.

And that's to reach people that are far from God.

As a matter of fact, Jesus gave us our mission.

And we call it the Great Commission, Matthew 28, where he says, go and make disciples of all nations.

Now we've taken that Great Commission and we have put it in what we call a mission statement that says that we exist, and some of you, I know our staff better know this by heart, right?

To reach people far from God and to lead them to become followers of Jesus.

That's why we exist.

We don't exist to put out a political argument or platform.

We don't exist to try to change the social agenda of our nation.

We exist to reach people far from God, to share the gospel with people that maybe have yet to embrace what Christ did in his life and his death and his resurrection.

We are here to share the gospel of Jesus.

And so this is a great morning for us to be reminded, right?

As we kind of resume and as we regather and reconnect, let's be reminded of why we're here.

That's it.

That's it.

It all comes down to why we're here.

And there's no better place to look than Jesus' life himself, right?

Jesus is an example of understanding mission and then executing the mission that God, his heavenly Father, gave him.

He left the security of his throne in heaven.

He left the place of glory he had in heaven.

You know that Jesus wasn't born on that first Christmas night.

Jesus existed before he was born.

There has never been a time that Jesus wasn't alive and did not exist.

There will never be a time where he ceases to exist.

But he left heaven and he came and he lived among us.

He wrapped himself in human flesh so he could show us up close and personal the heart of the Heavenly Father.

And in theology, we call that the incarnation, the incarnation of Jesus, Him coming and putting on human flesh so he could tell us how much he loves us, so he could show us how we are to live, so he could live and then ultimately he would give his life to suffer and die on a Roman cross, and then he would walk out of an empty tomb, all so we could be reconnected and reconciled to our Heavenly Father.

He's called us now to be agents of reconciliation, to be ambassadors and messengers, to share with the world that there is hope.

Regardless of the pandemic, regardless of the crisis of racial tension, there is hope.

We can have joy even in the midst of what feels like chaos, we can have peace.

And then we in turn share this peace with the people closest to us, the people in our community, the people in our family, the people that we do life with, the people we work with, our neighbors, our coworkers, our family, all the people that, regardless of their race or ethnicity or their background or their socioeconomic situation, we're called to share this good news with the world.

I mentioned about Jesus' example.

John chapter 1, verse 14.

John 1:14

You don't have to turn to that, but but I just want to read a couple of passages that explain really what Jesus did.

And I'm reading out of the message translation because I think it just kind of jumps off the page and it gives you a little different perspective.

And here's what it says: John 1, verse 14.

John 1:14

The word became flesh and blood and moved into the neighborhood.

We saw the glory with our own eyes, the one of a kind glory, like father, like son, generous inside and out, true from start to finish.

And then the letter that Paul wrote to the church at Philippi, Philippians chapter 2, 6 through 8.

Philippians 2 · chapter mention

Here's what Paul says regarding Jesus' this incarnation, this principle that we're talking about this morning.

It says he had equal status with God, but didn't think so much of himself that he had to cling to the advantages of that status no matter what.

Not at all.

When the time came, he set aside the privileges of deity and took on the status of a slave and became human.

Having become human, he stayed human.

It was an incredibly humbling process.

He didn't claim special privileges.

Instead, he lived a selfless, obedient life, and then died a selfless, obedient death.

And the worst kind of death at that, a crucifixion.

So Jesus, Jesus set the example for us by leaving heaven and coming to this earth.

And so as a result, we are to be more like Jesus in our life as followers of Jesus.

That's our goal is to look at him and say, I want to imitate what Jesus has done, which means we humble ourselves, we become servants, we understand what our mission is, we understand what our purpose is.

And what we've been talking about in this series called family life.

The last uh two weeks, we we we've entered into this series.

We talk about how God puts us in in communities.

Sometimes it might be our biological family, but there's also spiritual family.

It might be a community group or a group of people that are walking together and discipling together.

And so God's called us to be a family on mission, right?

And so we threw this graphic up the first week, and we've been walking around what we call the family on mission triangle.

At the very top, it has the term spiritual parents, and it's this concept and idea that we are all part of a spiritual family, and God's called all of us to get to a point where we can move into spiritual parenthood.

What's the result of spiritual parenting is that you you are passionate about Jesus.

That's the first sign of somebody who's a spiritual parent.

They love Jesus with all their heart.

And then the bottom right part of that triangle we talked about last week is cut it's called predictable patterns.

And it's this idea that in the con in the context of family, we are to put predictable patterns into our life.

And what do I mean by predictable patterns?

We're talking about the fact that you take your rhythms and your everyday already established rhythms in life, and you get intentional about putting predictable patterns in place, reading scripture, being a part of a church family, studying scripture with maybe a small group of people.

Predictable patterns might be you as a family have breakfast together, or you have dinner together, and you bring conversations about spiritual growth and about following Jesus into those predictable patterns.

And the goal is in those predictable patterns that you talk about and you think about and then you live out the gospel of Jesus Christ.

And how does it apply to our life?

And so last last the first week of the series, we we we emphasize that family discipleship is God's design and it's initiated by spiritual parents.

Family discipleship is God's design and it's initiated by spiritual parents.

And I know the first response, as I've said every week, is sometimes if you're single or if you're divorced, you you kind of say, oh, this isn't for me.

Yes, it is.

All of us are part of a church family that call on the name of Jesus as our Lord and Savior.

And then inside the church family, there are spiritual families.

It can be a small group, it can be your student ministry, it can be kids grove ministry, it can be, it can be your biological family, but we're we're all part of a spiritual family.

And how do you know somebody is a spiritual parent?

It's somebody that loves Jesus with all of their heart.

They're passionate about their walk with Jesus.

And so that's what a spirit, that's the that's the main criteria for somebody who is a spiritual parent.

And then last week, we talked about the fact that family discipleship is cultivated in predictable patterns.

Family discipleship is cultivated in predictable patterns.

And we're talking about this, the rhythms that we already have in place in our life.

So that may be what time you get up, the meals you eat throughout the day, taking your kids to ball practice or to school or whatever their activities are, and you know, work and recreation and hobbies, whatever they are, that you weave into those areas of your life.

Conversations that are centered on Christ and on the word and in how we live out the mission that God's called us to.

You don't have to add anything new.

You don't have to cut anything necessarily, but you just weave those conversations where you're talking about and thinking about and trying to live out this gospel message that Jesus is alive and he came to save you, and he wants a relationship with you.

And so what is it this week that we're addressing?

This week is the bottom left corner of the triangle and it's missional purpose.

And here's the big idea for this week: the fruit of family discipleship is intentional missional living.

Let me say it again.

The fruit of family discipleship is intentional missional living.

It is the result of you walking with Jesus.

The result of these predictable patterns in your life is that you understand and you live out your life on mission.

Intentional, missional living.

And we're gonna look at a the scripture that we've been diving into the last two weeks.

It's an Old Testament passage out of Deuteronomy chapter 6.

Deuteronomy 6 · chapter mention

And so if you want to, you can you can look on our church app or you can follow along by taking notes on the screen.

I encourage you to download our app.

It's now in the iTunes Store and online for Android and uh iPhone users, and so you can um uh take notes and follow along, and then you can save those in your phone or on your computer.

And I encourage you to dive in with us.

This passage of scripture is in the Old Testament, um, and it's it's it's Moses giving a declaration to the people of God.

And it's called the Shema is what it's called.

And let me read it.

Let's read it, then I'll we'll dive in to the last verse, a couple verses of this passage.

And so, verse 4, Deuteronomy 6 Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.

You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

And these words that I command you today shall be on your heart.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.

Verse 8, 9 are the pat are the verses we're gonna dive in today a little deeper.

He says, You shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.

You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your gates.

And so I said, This is this passage of Scripture is a foundational passage for the Jewish people.

It was a passage that all of them would have had memorized, it was a passage that they would have probably quoted and recited multiple times every day in their life.

It was just foundational for them.

It was a declaration of their doctrinal truth, saying, hey, we worship the one true God.

We are set apart, we are different.

And then it's also a directive to us.

It challenges us to live our life loving God with all of our heart and to live our life with passion where the community can see and understand our identity in Christ and who we are.

Jewish people would take, especially these last two verses, they would take it very literally, and they still do.

If you travel around the city of Atlanta or other cities in the United States, sometimes you may cross paths with what are known as Orthodox Jewish believers.

And so it's not uncommon, I've seen this especially in the airports as I travel, you'll see somebody that is from the Jewish faith wearing these little boxes and leather straps wrapped around their arm, and inside that little leather box is a scroll with this scripture on it, or some scripture, or the law, the Ten Commandments.

And you'll also see them with a little leather strap wrapped around their head, with a little box that hangs down between their eyes, and so they are taking it very literally.

You wear it on your hands, you wear it between your eyes on your forehead, and then if you approach the Jewish home, you would see a little scroll on their doorpost of their home as you enter their house.

And those, all of this was meant to be a sign and a symbol that they are followers of the one true God.

That they are devoted to the God of the Bible.

And so part of the challenge was you are to live your life unashamed and be willing to identify yourself as a follower of Jesus.

That's how it's applied to us as Christians.

And so verses five and six, two weeks ago, challenges us to be spiritual parents.

Verse 7 challenged us to establish predictable patterns when we get up and we lie down as we walk or drive on our way, everything we do.

And then verses eight and nine challenge us, listen, challenge us to live our lives so other people can look and observe and see that we genuinely love Jesus with all of our heart.

We genuinely care about people.

And so Jesus, Jesus quotes this passage in the New Testament, in Matthew 22, what we call the great commandment.

So they ask Jesus, hey, Jesus, of all the commandments, which one is most important?

Which one is the greatest?

And so here's what Jesus does.

He quotes almost word for word what Moses says in Deuteronomy.

And he says, Listen, you are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.

And then he says, the second commandment is like the first in that you are to love your neighbor as yourself.

And so Jesus takes it a little further.

He said, Yeah, love your God.

Love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.

But then he says, hey, you're also to love your neighbor as yourself.

You notice he doesn't mention the straps, he doesn't mention how we dress, he doesn't mention all the exterior things.

He said, you're to love people.

And it's it's supposed to be evident.

It is supposed to be clear that you love God by the way that you love people.

And you tie that in with the other teachings of Jesus and how we're to respond to people.

People that are different from us, people that disagree with us, people that are from different backgrounds and different cultures and different ethnicities.

He says, all of those fit into this.

You love people as yourself.

In essence, what Jesus does, he said it's not about it's not about the leather straps and the box and and and the outward appearance.

It's about your heart.

Right?

It's about your heart.

And he says, hey, he says, first, you've got to have the priority in loving God.

Love God with all your heart.

And see, when you love God with all your heart, and you open up yourself and you submit and humble yourself, and you realize that if I'm gonna be more like Jesus, I've got to lower myself to a place of humility, which means that, hey, I might be right on something, but it might not be the right time to share something related to the political chaos or the pandemic or the racial tensions in this world.

And instead of arguing and fighting and disagreeing, we just say, you know what, I'm gonna love people.

I'm gonna love people.

That's how I I'm gonna be known as a person who loves people.

And when when God gets a hold of our hearts like that, the rest of everything will take care of itself.

Matter of fact, Jesus said, seek first, Matthew 6, 33, seek first the kingdom of God, and all these other things will be added to it.

And so he challenges us to do a heart check.

Where do we stand in our relationship with God?

Where do we stand?

And part of this is making this critical connection between love and obedience a reality in our life.

Listen, we can follow all the rules, and you can be a rule follower, but your heart can be far from God.

That's why we got to get the priority right.

We got to love God with all of our heart.

And then we'll realize that it will be easier to love people when we're loving God and have our heart in the right place.

Here's what I found.

In my life, in the life of I think other believers, and I and you probably can identify with this, very often we we go to one or the other extreme with these two things.

Sometimes we'll say that we love God, but by the way that we live, by the way that we conduct ourselves, We really don't love people.

And I will say this that it's impossible.

It's impossible to love God and not love people.

It's impossible.

How sad is it when you see people that identify themselves as followers of Jesus or identify themselves as Christians, and they say, hey, I follow Jesus, or they put a sticker on the back of their car or a tag on the front of their car, or they have a t-shirt or whatever, and they claim all these things about loving God, but they treat other people hateful.

And everything they say in their life contradicts what they state they're about.

And so that doesn't represent Christ in the way that Christ wants to be represented.

The other extreme is you can say that you love people, but sometimes we love people without loving God.

And loving people and taking God out of the equation, pretty much we end up with social agendas.

Some might call it the social gospel, and you can be so caught up with trying to try to take care of social agendas and political activism and different things where we think having the right laws put into place or certain things changed in our society, but we take God out of the equation, it always ends us up back in the same place with more tension, more chaos, more problems.

No, Jesus says, hey, I'm gonna bridge the gap.

I'm gonna help you understand you can't separate the two.

If you say you love God, then you need to live as if you love people.

That's how that's the practical way that we show that we're followers of Jesus.

We're called to love God and love people.

That's the mission.

That's what we want to be reminded about this morning as we regather and reconnect into this new kind of normal or new segment or new phase in the life of our church and the life of our nation.

And so you got to have all three points on the triangle working together for us to be a family on mission, for us to be unified in what God's called us to do.

And there's no greater time than right now for us to get this right.

As a matter of fact, my prayer is that the church would lead the way, that Christians and believers would lead the way in showing the world how we are to love God and to love people the way that Jesus did.

And we live in a world where there's so much tension, there's so much chaos.

Let me tell you, we've got to be the ones, church, to lead the way on this.

We've got to get this right.

We've got to learn how to love God with all of our heart and to love people as ourselves.

And if we don't get this right, we're doomed to repeat the sins and the brokenness that we have received from previous generations.

We need to hand the next generation the gift, the gift of showing that you can love God and love people the way that Jesus did.

And so it's imperative that we get this right and we get this together.

Here's what I want to do is I want to spend a couple of minutes just giving you some practical next steps of how to implement this in your life.

And I'm going to share with you a couple of tools that we have put together and uh we want to pass on to you as followers of Jesus and members of our family on mission.

And so the first one is a tool, an online tool called bleseveryhome.com.

BleseveryHome.com.

Let me tell you what it is.

It's an online tool.

It's also got an app for your phone where you can put in, register with your email, and you put in your address, and this tool will pull up the neighborhood that you live in.

And it will put on a list and on a map the 40 people that live closest to you, and it will list their names where you can pray for them by name.

So when I registered for this a couple months ago, I set it to send me an email Monday through Friday.

And every Monday through Friday, I get an email that morning, and it has a list of five names of my closest neighbors in the neighborhood.

And every day it gives five new names.

And then once I pray over the 40 people that live closest to me, it goes back to the original first five, and we do it all over again.

And I love that because it's a reminder to start close to home.

It's a reminder that I need to start right where I live.

It's a reminder that God's called me to be the chief missionary in my village that I live in.

And so it reminds me every morning, and I try to walk as many days as I can in the morning for some exercise, but I use that time to pray over those homes in my neighborhood.

And so you can go to bleseveryhome.com, you sign up, there's no charge.

All you do is register with your email, you put in your address, and then you can go to the settings and you can have five.

You can you can change that setting.

You get emails Monday through Friday or Monday, Wednesday, Friday, ever how you want to set it up.

But the most important thing is it reminds us that God has called us to pray for, to care for, and to share the gospel with our neighbors.

He's called us to love people the same way that we love Jesus.

And the natural overflow is for us to put predictable patterns, and this tool allows you to make it a predictable pattern in your life.

And so we want as many people in our church family, whether you're watching online or you're here in the physical building, when you get home or you get to your, get where you can sign up using your phone or your computer, you get online and you start praying every day for people by name.

And I'm telling you, this is this is what you'll find.

You'll find that God will eventually bring some of those people across your path for some great conversations that might end in you being able to share where your hope and where your joy is.

Now the other tool is not necessarily a new one, but it's one that we implemented this past fall, a campaign, so to speak, and it's called Who's Your One?

And it's this idea that in that list of 40 names in your neighborhood or your family, that there's probably one person or maybe one couple or one family that needs to be at the top of that list that you're praying for, and you're asking God to give you an opportunity to show God's love to them in a practical way, eventually leading to an invitation to either join you at church or for you to share your hope and where you get your joy from, to share your faith in Jesus Christ.

And so I want to ask you to do those two things.

I want you to go to the website and register and make that a part of your predictable patterns, to pray for the people around you.

And then I want you to zone in on maybe one person or one family that God puts on your heart that you can really begin to invest in, and it hopefully leads to an invitation to share your faith.

Now those are practical, practical tools, but they really won't make the difference until we get our hearts lined up with the heart of God.

And that's that's to live our lives like Jesus.

It's to love Him, all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love people as ourselves.

And I showed this graphic to you the last couple of weeks.

It's got a it's got a heart.

And it said, it says there at the top, it says, until you fix it here, which is the heart, it's gotta be a heart-level transformation.

It can't be external, it's gotta go deep down to the heart, until you fix it here.

And then it's gotta it's gotta work its way out into your home and your family, and until you address it there in the personal home and in the personal family, nothing changes in the whole world.

Let me say it again, until you fix it here at the heart level, and until you address it here in the home level, nothing changes on the world level.

And so, church, we got to get this right.

There is a generation waiting to see how we respond to what's going on in our world.

Your children, your children are watching, and they're listening and they're looking online at how we interact and how we handle some of the crisis that we're in, how we handle the racial tension that we're in.

They are watching.

And listen, if we don't get this, if we don't apply this, if we don't allow our hearts to be transformed, we're doomed to repeat the cycle of sin and brokenness over and over and over.

It's why we're in the situation we're in.

The next generation is watching.

And here's what I want for us for the I want us to be able to hand the next generation the baton and hand it to them with confidence and hand it to them understanding that we want to pass on a spiritual blessing to the next generation.

Not cursing, not not the same chaos that we're living in now.

We want to pass on blessing to them.

We want them to walk in freedom.

We want them to take it to a whole nother level and how they walk and do life and how they interact with people.

And so we've got to get it right, church.

So I ask you to pray with me.

And then we're gonna close this time, singing a song called The Blessing.

And it's a challenge to us for us to get this right and to pass on to the next generation, the blessing that God has given us.

Let's pray together, Father.

Thank you for how you speak to us and work with us and the grace that you give us.

Father, thank you for loving us in spite of our imperfections.

Thank you for caring enough to put people in our life where we could hear, we could, we can visibly see the transformation that takes place when somebody turns and puts their trust in Jesus Christ.

And Father, I pray, I pray, I pray, and I plead with you.

Would you work in our hearts?

God, would you transform us and start at the heart level?

Start with me.

And God, let that um let that work its way into our homes and our families.

And Lord, ultimately we will see a difference in our world as we hand the baton to the next generation because we have turned and put our faith in you and in you alone.

So, Father, would you work?

Would you speak to us?

I pray for those that are here this morning and those that are listening online.

Maybe you've never put your faith in Jesus Christ and made him your Lord and Savior.

And we say that's as simple as ABC here at Church at the Grove.

Admit that you're a sinner, admit that you need something outside of yourself to save you and believe in your heart that Jesus came and he lived and he died and he rose again to provide for our redemption and our freedom.

And then confess him as Lord of our life and turn everything in our lives over to him.

And so if you want to pray that prayer this morning, you can.

You can, if you're sitting at home, you can you can click on your computer or online and let us know if you are putting your faith in Jesus Christ.

If you're in in the room here, uh you can go on our to our app and you can let us know that you have put your faith in Jesus Christ by filling out an encounter card, and we want to follow up with you.

Make sure that you have the discipling care that you need.

And so, Father, I pray that you'd work, continue to work in our hearts and lives.

We want you to be glorified.

We want you to be lifted up, and we know that you get all the credit when we see things happen like Katie shared, where there's healing and there's miracles that take place.

God, we need a miracle.

We need a miracle in our culture, we need a miracle in our society, we need a miracle in our country.

I pray for healing.

I pray for relational healing.

That you would do a work to relieve the tension that's there.

God, we thank you.

We pray for your blessing.

It's in Jesus' name we pray.

Amen.