Church on Mission - Part 1 [Jesus Loves CA]

Good morning, church family.

My name is Nancy Martin, and our scripture passage is from John chapter 17, verses 15 to 26, and John 20, verse 19 to 23.

John 17:15–26 John 20:19–23

They can be found at page 903 in the church Bibles or right behind me.

John 17, 15 through 26.

I do not ask that you take them out of this world, but that you keep them from the evil one.

They are not of this world, just as I am not of this world.

Sanctify them in truth.

Your word is truth.

As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

The glory that you have given me, I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved even loved them even as you loved me.

Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.

O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me.

I have made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them.

In John 20, verses 19 through 23.

John 20:19–23

On the evening of that day, the first day of the week, the doors being locked, where the disciples were for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, Peace be with you.

When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side.

Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.

Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.

As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.

And when he said this, he breathed on them and said to them, Receive the Holy Spirit.

If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them.

If you withhold forgiveness from any, it is withheld.

This is the word of the Lord.

Thank you, Nancy.

Well, good morning, everyone.

Wonderful to be together with you here today.

Um, if you're a guest with us, my name is Sam, and I'm one of the pastors here.

And I did notice, Adam, in one of those pictures when you were golfing, that you buttoned your top button.

Are you just are you trying to copy me?

Is that you look really good.

I just want you to know that.

We're really are we really glad to have Pastor Adam back?

It is a great joy to be uh our whole team is back together as we get kick started this fall, so grateful for that.

Um also just a important note before we uh step into this sermon uh today.

We have our quarterly meeting after the 11 o'clock service, so about 12:30.

Um we have an important update for our property and our campus.

We've been sharing with you some of our plans and hopes and dreams about this campus, and so we want to give you an important update.

So encourage you to come to that meeting later today if you want to hear that update.

All right.

Well, today is our second Sunday of this campaign that we launched last week called Jesus Loves California.

And the really the purpose of this campaign for us as a church is to make the love of Christ known here in the place that we live.

Last week we talked about how California has gotten somewhat of a bad rap over the last few years, and uh, even in Christian communities, California has gotten a bad rap.

And what we as a church want to represent is Christ's love to the place that he has called us.

He has sent us here on mission.

That's part of the passages that we're looking at today as the church itself has been sent to display and to communicate the love of Christ to the place that we have been sent here in the state of California.

And this m this uh outreach campaign is gonna last a whole year.

We're gonna be in a sermon series for the next six weeks, but the campaign is gonna last a whole year.

There's three basic movements of this campaign that we're gonna be giving ourselves to.

The uh the first is intentional praying.

And this was our first prayer event last night.

We were up at Hollandia Park and we were walk went on a prayer walk together, and we um got to spend some time praying for our community, praying for the government, praying for our schools, praying for the college campuses, praying for families and neighborhoods.

We were uh spent a wonderful time praying, and then we spent some time worshiping together as a church family.

It was a really encouraging time together.

And not only that, but God kind of showed off last night.

You guys, um, did anybody see the sunset last night?

Yeah, it was absolutely spectacular.

And so being able to pray under the roof of heaven and in God's glory and goodness and grace was an incredible time together.

And so that was our first event kicking off as we are committing ourselves to praying for our state, praying for our community, praying for the neighborhoods around us, our places of business and work, praying for the government, praying for education, praying for places of recreation, praying for the people we know and love, and we want to be committed to that because that's one thing that Jesus has called us to.

In Matthew 9, he tells us to pray to the Lord of the harvest that he might send out laborers.

And so we as a church want to be committed to intentional praying.

The second is sacrificial serving, and so throughout the next year, we're gonna be committed as a church family to serving our community in all kinds of ways.

We'll have a service event coming in the month of November.

And we also want to be committed to gospel sharing, sharing the good news, the love of Christ displayed particularly in the cross and his death, sacrificial death for us and his resurrection from the dead.

And so we're gonna be having some gospel sharing events.

The first of which uh Pastor Adam shared with you was our fall festival that's gonna be here on our campus.

It's gonna be a great time to invite our community in and onto our campus.

And so, three basic movements and initiatives that are gonna guide this outreach campaign, and we want to call you all to join with us.

One of the ways we're doing that is as Pastor Adam shared, these um t-shirts that we have that we want to encourage you to buy.

Now, that's not the only way, and we're gonna talk about really the primary way we love our community, but this is one way that we can communicate the love of Christ to the place that God has called us.

And it's important to note here uh one of the major emphases that we talked about last week as part of this campaign is this campaign is not a church growth method.

It's not about getting the name of Mission Hill's church out there, it's about the name of Christ.

And so on these shirts, there's nothing about Mission Hill's church, it's about the name of Christ and his love for the place that he has called us to.

And so it's our hope and prayer that as this message goes out, that it blesses all the churches who proclaim the name of Christ in our community and in our state.

So I want to encourage you if you haven't yet to order a t-shirt today.

Um they will be coming, the orders will be coming into the next couple weeks.

So uh, with that being said, let's jump into our text this morning in John 17 and John 20.

Last week we looked at the Gospel of John, and in particular, the the many, many moments in the Gospel of John where we have this word sent being messed uh being used.

Fifty-nine times this word sent is used in the Gospel of John.

Uh many commentators and scholars recognize this as a major theme in the Gospel of John.

And last week what we saw was that God is the beginning and end of outreach, that God is the one who sends.

He sends his son and he sends his spirit, and he sends his son and spirit to bring people to himself.

That he is both the beginning of outreach and the end of outreach.

And that's as we think about our own call to reach out to our community, it happens within that beginning and that ending.

And so this morning, what we're gonna see.

Oh, can we go back to that first slide?

One more.

There we go.

The main point.

The sending of the church is an extension of the sending of Jesus.

The sending of the church is an extension of the sending of Jesus.

And this is a theme that's gonna come out throughout the Gospel of John.

So let's go to these next slides and look at in John chapter 17 how Jesus sends this, as you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world.

John 17 · chapter mention

John 20, verse 21, Jesus said to them again, Peace be with you.

John 20:21

As the Father has sent me, even so I am sending you.

And that's the paradigm, that's the model that we need to embrace as a church.

This, what I'm calling the as-so paradigm.

As the Father has sent Jesus, so Jesus has sent us.

That means that our sending is going to extend Jesus' own sending, and it's also going to conform to the manner of his sending, that we are sent in the same way that Jesus has been sent.

So this is gonna this invites a couple of really important questions as we begin.

What is the manner of Jesus' sending?

How and why did the Father send the Son?

And if we're to because if we're to adequately grasp what we're supposed to be up to as a church family in our sending to the place that God has called us to, we need to understand how the Son was sent.

As you have sent me, so I have sent you.

This is the basic paradigm of all Christian mission and Christian outreach.

As so.

So we're gonna look at three points that come from this main point.

The first is we need to understand the meaning of the sending of the Son.

What does it mean that the Father has sent the Son into the world?

And here, what we need to understand first is that the sending of Jesus is not merely to report, but to reveal.

Not merely to report, but to reveal.

Jesus is not just coming to tell facts or inform us about God.

That is not Jesus' only or restricted mission.

It's much bigger and grander and extensive than that.

Let's go to the next slide, John 17, verse 26.

John 17:26

Jesus says this, I made known to them your name.

In other words, what Jesus is saying is the purpose of his sending is to reveal the name of God.

And here, what this means when it says that I've made known to them your name, what a name is, is it contains identity, nature, and character.

Identity, nature, and character.

In other words, what Jesus came to do is to reveal who God really is, what God is really like, and what kind of being God is, what his life is like.

He came to reveal it, to make it known.

This is Jesus' primary mission to reveal God to a world that doesn't know him.

What this means is that revealing is going to be so much more than just reporting.

It's going to be so much more than reporting.

This goes beyond the mere communication of facts or information about God.

It will certainly include words and a communication through words about God, but it also includes embodied action.

And the action, or as Jesus will use in the Gospel of John, his works, what he does, puts God on display.

The way he lives, the way he acts, what he does reveals the very nature and identity and character of God.

Unfolds for us God's very own life.

This is what we're told in the very beginning of John's Gospel.

In John chapter 1, verse 18, we read this that no one has ever seen God except the only God who is at the Father's side.

John 1:18

He has made him known.

What John is launching into right at the beginning of the Gospel is that Jesus has a revelatory mission.

His mission is to reveal, to make known the invisible God, to reveal him in visible action.

And at the center, at the very center of this revelatory work, him revealing the Father, making him known, is the cross.

The cross is central to this revelatory work of Jesus.

That's why in John's gospel, if you read through John's gospel, Jesus is gonna say things like this over and over and over again throughout his gospel.

He's gonna say things like, My hour has not yet come.

Or when he gets closer to the cross, he's gonna say, My hour is at hand.

That the whole purpose, he's gonna even say things like this that the cross is the reason that he came.

Not only that, he's gonna describe the cross as his moment of glorification when we see God for who he really is.

The cross for Jesus is essential as an act of revelation communicating to us who God really is and what he is really like.

So, if that's the case, then the cross is the moment of revelation par excellence.

It's there at the cross that God's nature, God's identity, God's character are fully revealed to us.

Now, if we hold that in mind, it begins to make sense why Jesus didn't come merely to report to us.

Now, presumably Jesus could have come to the earth, and his task could have been merely to say this hey, everybody, God is love.

And just give us that information, communicate that fact.

And it's it's a true fact, it's a right fact, it's a good fact, it's a beautiful fact.

That could have been all he set out to do to just merely report this information to us, to communicate that information to us.

But if that is all that Jesus' task was merely to report, what happens in that paradigm is that the cross becomes unnecessary.

If he came merely to report, then why would Jesus need to suffer and die and sacrifice himself?

Under this paradigm, if if he came merely to report, then the cross becomes merely a kind of strange and unfortunate event that happens in the life of Jesus.

That happens to a messenger of God who came to kind of tell us, hey, God is love, and unfortunately the guy who told us that he died.

But if Jesus came not only to report, but to reveal God's love, then the cross becomes absolutely essential.

You cannot understand or know the love of God appropriately without the cross.

You see, in a world torn apart by sin and selfishness and pride and violence, how will people come to see that God is different?

How will people come to see that the love of God is real and true and not like the broken versions of love that we see in our world?

How will they come to see it?

Well, when the love of God enters into a broken world and enters into a world of sin, what it looks like is suffering.

What it looks like is a sacrificial and dying love.

That's how we come to see what God's life is really like.

That God's very nature, it is God's very nature to give himself in love.

This is, uh we see this all over Jesus' prayer in John 17.

That the the fat the Son is in the Father, the Father is in the Son, and what we see over and over and over throughout John's gospel is that the Father gives himself and all that he is to the Son, and the Son gives himself and all that he is to the Father, that the Father's very nature, that God's very nature and character and identity is a being of self-giving love.

And when that self-giving love comes down into a world of brokenness and sin and selfishness, that self-giving love looks like sacrifice, it looks like suffering.

It's costly to give yourself in a world of sin.

And so the the sending of the sun reveals God's character, God's nature, God's identity.

So first we need to grasp the sending of the sun, and second, we need to grasp the receiving of the sun, what it looks like to receive the gift of the sun.

This is another major theme in John's gospel.

In receiving Jesus, we gain more than just his benefits, we gain his life.

You see, under this reporting paradigm, if Jesus came merely to just tell us, inform us that God is love, under this paradigm, salvation gets reduced to receiving the benefits that Jesus achieved for us.

In this model, it looks like this.

Jesus came to tell us that God is love, and the proof that God is love is that we get things like the forgiveness of sins.

We get to go to heaven when we die.

Now, to be clear, these are benefits.

They're real, these are true.

But the Gospel of John tells us that what we're given is so much more than just benefits.

If we're going to look under the reporting paradigm, then the proof of God's love is these things that He gives you.

Forgiveness or heaven when you die or new life, whatever it might be.

Jesus certainly does offer these things, but he offers something so much more.

In addition to this, under this reporting paradigm, if all Jesus came to do is just tell people God is love, the cross becomes nonsensical.

It becomes strange.

If he came, it would sound something like this, if he came to tell us that God is love, then why did he have to die?

Couldn't he have just given us those benefits without dying?

Couldn't he have just said, like, you're forgiven, I forgive you?

Couldn't he have just done that?

Couldn't he have just come and said, When you die, because you I've forgiven you, you're gonna go to Couldn't He just have said that?

Why did he actually have to die?

At best, under this model, the cross is just an unfortunate thing that happened to Jesus.

And at best, we as Christians might say something like this, well, yeah, that was a real bummer for Jesus.

But look at all the good things that we got because of it.

But at worst, under this model, at worst, it becomes something like this that God is a monster who did that to his son so that we could get all these really cool things.

That reporting model is just insufficient.

And John wants to drive home a deeper point that Jesus didn't just come to tell you about God's love, he came to reveal God's love.

And under this revealing paradigm, let's go to the next slide.

Under this revealing paradigm, what we're given is not just benefits, but we're Given Jesus' own life, John 17, 3, and this is eternal life.

That they what know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

This is what Jesus came to give, eternal life.

And he defines eternal life very specifically.

He doesn't define eternal life as going to heaven when you die.

That's not what he says.

What he says is eternal life is what?

Knowing God and Jesus Christ, whom he has sent.

That's what life is.

Life is not transactional where we get a bunch of benefits, but life is relational where we get relationship with God Himself.

It's not about the stuff that we get from God, it is about receiving God Himself, knowing Him, being incorporated, being drawn into Jesus' own relationship with the Father.

Did you hear it throughout Jesus' prayer here in John chapter 17?

John 17 · chapter mention

He prays things like that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they may also be in us.

Verse 23, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one.

That what Jesus came to do is to open up to us his relationship with God.

From eternity past, what Jesus calls the glory that he had with the Father before the foundation of the world.

The glory that he had was a relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit, in which each person of the one God is giving themselves to each other in love.

The way that the scriptures, the New Testament describes this to us is that the Son is the beloved of the Father.

That passage that I quoted earlier in John 1.18, the one that's at the Father's side, that the actual Greek language there is much closer than just somebody that's side by side.

It's something like in the bosom or the embrace of the Father.

That what Jesus has known from all of eternity is the Father's generous and self-giving love, as the Father has given himself to his son throughout all of eternity.

And what Jesus has come is come to do is to crack that relationship open and say, you get to get in on the thing that I've known from all eternity.

You get to join in my relationship with the Father.

That's why Jesus uses language like, I have manifested to them your name.

He begins to teach us that God is not just a being or an entity or a force, that God is not merely some invisible movement up in the heavens.

God is not merely the universe, nor is God some bearded man in the sky.

God is the eternal Father who has given himself in love to his son.

And now you get to get in on that.

That's why John begins his gospel in John chapter 1.

John 1 · chapter mention

He says that to those that believe in Jesus' name, to them he gave the right to be called children of God.

You see, receiving Jesus isn't just about going to heaven when you die or getting your sins forgiven, as wonderful as those things are.

It is ultimately about being drawn into a life of profound relationship with God.

And not just any relationship, but the very relationship that Jesus has with God as the beloved Son of a loving Father.

And in this, the cross all of a sudden becomes not only intelligible, but absolutely essential.

How are we, you and I, to come to know the God whom no one has ever seen?

How are we to come to know that that God is a God of self-giving love?

How are we to know it?

And what Jesus is doing throughout John's gospel is saying, the cross is how you will come to know it.

Because there at the cross, what you'll see is that the Father has given his son.

For God so loved the world that he did what?

Gave his only son, that the Father gives his son, and that the Son gives himself to the Father's love.

Over and over and over in John's gospel, Jesus says things like, I have come to do my father's will.

It is my pleasure, it is my food to do my father's will.

That's what he comes to say and come to do.

He comes to reveal that this is who God is.

My work is to do what God has sent me here to do.

In other words, what we see at the cross is the Father gives the Son.

The Son gives himself to the Father.

And both the Father and the Son give themselves to us.

The cross is the moment in the Gospels in which we come to discover that God is a God of self-giving love.

A love, it turns out, that when you give yourself to others in love in the world that we live in, it's a love that's going to hurt.

It's a love that's going to be costly.

It's a love that's sacrificial.

It's a love that's going to suffer.

It's a cross-shaped love.

That's what it looks like when it comes into our world.

There at the cross, we see his love revealed.

I and them and you and me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and love them even as you loved me.

You see, Mission Hills Church, the love of God is not transactional.

It's not like walking into Costco and buying for getting forgiveness and life in heaven off the shelf, and then going to the register, and the Costco person, as awesome as this would be, says, Hey, you don't have to pay for that.

If that's our model, our understanding of God's love, that's a transactional understanding.

You get those things.

You get to leave Costco with those things right off the shelf.

But you leave Costco.

And you go live your life with the benefits that He gave you.

But what Jesus came to give is something so much more than a transaction.

You get something so much more than just life in heaven when you die and getting to see your dog and your grandma back up in heaven.

Now, I don't know about the dog, but I mean I hope you do get to see your grandma.

And those of you who love dogs, I'm sorry, I just I can't I don't know what's going to happen to them.

You get something more than that.

You get something more than just the forgiveness of your sins.

What Jesus came to reveal is that you get God Himself.

If the Christian life is about getting things from God, heaven when you die, or forgiveness of sins, or whatever else it might be, it becomes sort of mercenary.

I just get the stuff that God gives.

But if it's a revelation from Jesus, what you get is not just the stuff that God gives, but you get God Himself.

Jesus tells us over and over, especially in John 17, this is what you get.

It's a fundamentally relational gift.

Okay.

So now we have two points.

We understand what the sending of the sun is.

It's not about reporting.

Ultimately, it's about revealing.

We see that the receiving of the son is more than just his benefits, it's the gift of his life.

Now we are prepared as we draw to a close to hear what it means for us as the church to be sent in the same way that the Son has been sent.

Remember, that's the model.

As the Father has sent the Son, so the Son has sent us, the as-so paradigm.

We, in other words, are sent by Jesus not merely to report, but to reveal.

What this means is that the manner of our sending is going to look like a cross-shaped love, a love that is sacrificial, a love that suffers for those that we have been sent to.

It is when we suffer, when we sacrifice for our neighbors, for our community, for the people in our lives that God has sent us to, it's then that the message God is love gets grounded in reality.

To say this somewhat differently, you know, if I was going to say give this message to a class of second graders, I would say something like this: God's love is a show and tell love.

You guys remember show and tell?

Yeah, I loved show and tell.

I don't know what kid didn't love show and tell.

You got to bring in something that was awesome and show everybody in your classroom what it was, and then you got to tell them all about it and why you liked it so much.

It was a show and tell movement.

And God's love is a show and tell movement.

He doesn't just tell us that he loves us, though he does do that.

But he chose us.

So that when we hear the words, we attach it to his action and we see, oh, that's what he means by loving us.

Romans 5.8 says it this way, but God demonstrates his own love for us in that while we were yet sinners, what?

Christ died for us.

It's a show and tell love.

I don't know about you, but I've known many, many, many people in my life who have said words like, I love you.

Right?

I mean, how many of you have listened to anybody remember Kixie 96.5?

Right?

I grew up on Kixie, right?

It's all the great love songs, and I remember riding in the car and I remember hearing all these songs about you know rock stars proclaiming their love for whoever it is.

And amazing songs, right?

Chicago, who doesn't love Chicago, right?

But then you look at the lives of the people who are singing it, and their words don't match their actions.

You know what I mean?

Now, there are some rock stars who really have like given up their lives for their spouses, but many of them they sing these powerful love ballads, and then they sleep around with a bunch of other women.

And it's hard to take their words seriously.

You following me?

You with me?

God's love, he tells us, I love you.

But it is a love that is shown and demonstrated, so that our idea of his love is shaped by his action.

It's a show and tell love.

And so, in our sending, we, Mission Hills Church, we as followers of Jesus have been sent by him.

He has sent us into the world to manifest, to display, to put on show that same love, to reveal God's love.

Now, let me just give this some little a little bit of practical action.

Let me just say it this way.

What does this look like in day-to-day life?

Well, it looks like this: love until it hurts.

And then when it hurts, keep loving.

You with me?

Love until it hurts.

And then when it hurts, keep loving.

Husbands and wives, love your wife till it hurts.

And when it hurts, keep loving her.

Fathers and mothers with your kids, love your kids until it hurts.

Not only when it's convenient, not when your child is refusing to go to bed and just, you know, hoping that you can say a magical word and they're finally doing it.

But what does it look like to love until it hurts?

To be patient all the way to the end, even if it's one o'clock in the morning.

Love when it hurts.

Your neighbors.

Up and down the street or in your apartment complex or in your mobile home park.

Love your neighbors until it hurts.

Until it costs you.

Your coworkers.

What does it look like for you not just to be nice to them or be kind, but to love them till it hurts, to sacrifice for them?

When is it costly for you?

So as we think about our own vocation, our own calling to our community, to San Marcos, to Escondido, to Carlsbad, and Vista and the North County area, as we think about our calling.

Our calling is to reveal, to continue the very work that the Son began and continues by the power of the Spirit to reveal the love of God to our community.

It is a telling love, but it is also a showing love.

Amen.

Let's pray.

Father, we take a moment here as we draw to a close to consider your son Jesus Christ.

To consider what he has said in his word.

And what that means for us.

Even as we have sat here this morning and listened and considered together, these words have met each of us in different places.

Would you just take a moment before the Lord to speak to the Lord about what you hear him calling you to?

What his response from you might look like.

Or if you are, you're so distant as to be irrelevant.

Maybe others have come with darker thoughts about you.

That you are a god of power and control.

A monster who forces people to do things they don't want to do.

Father, for those who have come in here this morning, I pray that your Holy Spirit, even now, would be working in their heart.

To reveal to them the truth about who you are on the cross of Jesus Christ.

That they would come to see your true nature, your true character, your identity, that indeed you are love.

And I pray that they would receive your invitation this morning to come into that love, to receive that love.

To be received as Christ himself.

And Father, I also pray for us here at Mission Hills Church.

As we think about the spaces and places of our lives.

Some of us it's schools.

Others of us it's places of employment.

Some of us it's places where we interact with lots of other moms.

Sometimes it's places of sports and recreation, rehearsals.

Others of us, it's community centers and living rooms of our neighbors.

Father, I pray that in all of these places wherever we find ourselves, that what your Holy Spirit would be doing within us is revealing the love of the Father for each person that we interact with.

That the way that we interact, our actions, our words would make known the love of God in every place you have called us.

And I pray this in the name of Jesus.

Amen.