Mission Possible

[00:00:01] Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in to the Met Church podcast. Here at the Met, we are all about connecting people to God and one another. If you have any questions or want more information about what's happening here at the church, then head to our [email protected], we would love to stay connected with you throughout the week through social media, so be sure to connect with us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Now. Enjoy the message. [00:00:24] Speaker B: We are so glad that you were here this morning. We are in our series called Comeback. And you came back, so it must be working in the late 1960s, early 70s. I'm not going to ask you to raise your hand if you were alive then, but there was a popular tv show, and even though I wasn't alive, I still know about this show. Now, they've made movies about it, but it had a real catchy theme song with no words, and most of you know it. It's called Mission Impossible. In every episode, you would see James Phelps. He would go into this discreet location. He would go like he's looking around, go into this room that nobody knew about. He would go into the room, and then he would look around, and he would find a Package, and he would find a tape player. We're talking the old real tapes, right? And he would take it out and he would push play. And this is what it would say. Good morning, Mr. Phelps. Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to. And that's when they would tell you this crazy, difficult mission. They would go on and say, as Always, should you or any member of your IM force be caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. And then our favorite part that I used to say as a kid, this Message will self destruct in 5 seconds. And then the camera would zoom in on the tape player, and it would sit there for about 5 seconds. And then all of a sudden, back in the day, it was real cheesy. It was like somebody lit a cigarette underneath or something. Smoke would just come up. How cool would it be? I thought, growing up is if I was a part of a group that was given a mission. Like I was on a team, and I was given a mission to live out. And as I grew up, I remember one day when I read Matthew 28, and it says this. Then the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountains where Jesus had told them to go. And when they saw him, they worshipped him. But some doubted. Then Jesus came to them and said, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always to the very end of the age. This is called the great commission. It is a mission given to a group of people. It is a mission given to the church. It is a mission given to those of us who call ourselves Christ followers. Then we see a continuation later in acts one eight where it says, but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. It's like Jesus was saying, your mission, if you decide to accept it, and this message won't self destruct in 5 seconds. What if your bible just started smoking? But it won't. I don't know about you, but I love being on a mission. I love knowing the call on my life not just as a pastor, but first and foremost as a follower of Christ, to make disciples of all nation, to be a witness for Jesus to the ends of the earth, to show the love of Christ to the world. Now we as the Met have had some pretty cool opportunities to go in other places and share the love of Christ. I have a goal as overseeing our missions is to one day have a mission partner on every continent. How cool would that be? Now I don't want to go to Antarctica. I don't know, ministry for Penguins and polar Bears, so we're probably not going to do that one. But everywhere else, I don't want to just go and send teams. I literally want to have a mission partner there that we can support and be a part of their lives throughout the year. And we started to do that last week. We sent a team of students and I don't know if you know about met youth, but they're awesome. But we sent them to Belize. We have a mission partner there, a church called Bethesda, and it's in San Victor, Belize. San Victor is the poorest village in Corazol, in the whole Corazole district. And we sent our youth team last week and they were there and they did mini wow week. During the day they did vacation Bible school where these students did the worship. They preached and taught the lessons. They gave testimonies and then they spent tireless hours playing with these kids until the sun went down. They were there to share their love of Christ with others. One evening we had a family night where we invited the students to come back to bring their families. And we were going to do a movie night. But before we did that, we had our students do some of the songs they'd been doing all week. And then pastor Seth, our youth pastor, got up and he preached. And then we said, stick around. We want to give you some snacks. Free food is always good to keep people to stick around. So they hung out, we gave them popcorn, and then we showed them a movie that probably has impacted more people's faith in this past year than any other movie. Super Mario Brothers. It was just a fun night for them to hear the word of God and also just to hang out and have some fun. We've sent a couple of construction teams to Belize. The first team went and built the restrooms that are at the church. If you ever go on a mission trip there, you're going to say, thank you, Lord, for that team. You don't have to go in a hole anymore. We think this may be some of the only restrooms in the whole village that actually. Are there a toilet that you actually have a toilet that you can flush. Then we sent another construction team that went and redid the outdoor kitchen that the family next door uses to make food when we're there, but also to make food for events for the church. It's been incredible. And then last year, for the first time, we sent a medical team who we saw over 100 patients. We worked with a doctor from Belize, and so we were able to treat, give prescription medicine. We had a little pharmacy set up and it was legit, a promise where the doctor would write prescriptions, they would come over, we would fill those prescriptions. They were able to take those prescriptions home and hopefully help them get healthier with all the point of everything, to point people to Jesus. We have a mission partner in Uganda through God care schools and members of the Met sponsor almost 300 kids that attend this school. You give these kids an opportunity to have one of the best educations in Africa, to have three meals a day, to have a safe place to live where it's surrounded by security. Twenty four seven. And most of all, for them to hear and learn and grow in their faith in Jesus Christ on a daily basis, it's incredible what they do there. Also, last year, we were able to cut the ribbon when we went to Africa for mom's village. Mom's village is something you guys did. Our church paid for the land, paid for the building, paid for construction. And it is a complex for single mothers to live where they are safe, where they are surrounded by other godly women. Who can pour into them and where they can learn a craft, which hopefully down the road, they can leave this facility, and they know how to make money and support their family on their own. And then this summer, we get to send a team for the first time to the Philippines. And if you know me and you know my diet, I'm a little worried about the Philippines. Everything that I see on tv that I watch, and I probably should stop doing that, but when I watch it, it looks slimy and chewy. But I know God's going to provide because I'm going to take peanut butter crackers. But we get to send a team to the Philippines to kind of scout it out and see if this is a place that the Met, our church, can partner with. So we can send teams throughout the year and also support them financially to the ends of the earth. But if you notice in acts one eight, where did it start? Be my witnesses. Where in Jerusalem. It's where they lived. It's their backyard. And so we want to do the same thing. We don't want to skip over our neighbors here to go across the world. And so that's why the largest supported ministry of the Met is the Cindy Ramsey center. And we get to help out thousands of families every week with some of their basic needs, which includes food. We get to help them with Cris counseling. We're starting to do a financial literacy class. We are trying to figure out other ways that we can be a part of our community and help them so we can point them to Jesus. What's really cool is this past week, we found out through our partner, the Terinary food bank, where they have almost 400 agencies that they send food to, and those pantries distribute that food, and they keep up with those records. And we found out in the first six months of the fiscal year, for Terinary Food bank, the Cindy Ramsay center ranks number one as far as the food distributed this year. Praise God. We as a church are on a mission. And this morning, I want us to look at a story that involves a few guys who were living out the great commission. They were some of the first missionaries that we know of, Paul and Barnabas. They were followers of Christ who have started on their first missionary journey to go share the gospel, to go disciple those who accept Jesus, and eventually to start the first churches. Paul, formerly Saul, who used to persecute Christians until he had an encounter with Jesus that totally, radically changed his life forever. And now he is being called to preach to the Gentiles while Peter is being called to preach to the Jews. Barnabas, such a crucial part of the early church of sharing the gospel in the book of acts, he was the one who actually introduced Paul to the disciples and vouched for him because of his story and his life before. Barnabas was given this name because it means son of encouragement. Now, I don't know about you, but in my 44 years of life, I can probably count on one hand of people in my life that I would consider a son or daughter of encouragement. I'm talking about somebody that is. That's what they do. It's constant. Like, when you're around them, you want to spend more time with them because they're just encouraging you, they're edifying you, they're uplifting. You know, people like that. Not many of us do. Those people are so special. And if you're in here today and you're an encourager, I'm talking constant encourager. I can be encouraging, and then if I'm hungry, not so encouraging, right? If I'm tired, not so encouraging. I'm talking about constant encouragers. If that's you this morning, God bless you. You have a special place on this earth and a special place in my life. If you want to meet me later, because I need those people. But that's what Barnabas was. He was a constant encourager. So much so, they gave him that name. Another person that was going to join these two on their first journey was someone called John Mark. It was Barnabas's cousin. And John Mark's family was very important to the early church. His mother Mary, had a home that they knew would be a place of prayer and of worship, and anybody could come at any time to spend time there. There was an instance in the Bible where Peter gets arrested and he's in prison and he's got shackles on, and then an angel comes and meets with him. He lets the shackles go off of Peter, and he leads Peter out of the prison. Do you know the first place that Peter went when he left that prison? He went to Mary and John Mark's house, because he knew other believers would be there with him. So Paul Barnabas and John Mark, the three amigos, they're going on their first missionary journey to tell people about Jesus and to disciple those who want to follow him. And as they're going on their way, we see along the way that all of a sudden, John Mark just leaves. He says, I'm leaving. It says in acts 1313 that he says he went home to Jerusalem and he quit the journey now, if you read in scriptures, in acts, you don't really know why he quit. It doesn't say a lot about it, but there are some people that have some ideas of why he quit. Some people say that he had a disagreement with Paul on how he treated one of the converts. Because, remember, John Mark was a big Peter fan. And so everything that happened, he probably looked. I wonder if Peter would do this. And so some say that there might have been a disagreement about something in that area. I think about it this way. Have you ever been on a trip with somebody and you stay with them for 24/7 when you've never been on a trip with somebody and stayed with them 24/7 it can be tough. I mean, we get comfortable in our life and how we do things. And then when you get around somebody else, maybe it rubs you the wrong way, maybe it's a little tough. Maybe that was a reason. I know that the persecution was probably really tough. I mean, we talk about persecution as christians today, and I do believe it's there. But it was on another level when it started. Everywhere they went to talk about Jesus, there was a threat of prison, there was a threat of death, there was the threat of being beat up. It was very real. I think we can all relate to this because I think we've all quit something before now. I remember when I was 19 and I was working in a mall, in a clothing store. I still don't know how to fold shirts. It's crazy. And I'm not going to tell you the name of the store, but it rhymed with the knuckle. And I worked for a little while, and I was there, and me and some of my coworkers, we realized that our boss, at certain times during the shifts, would actually go in the back and do drugs for me. I was like, okay, I'm not seeing it. I'm not a part of it. I'm just going to keep trying to figure out how to fold shirts. And one day I was there, and it was an afternoon shift in the middle of the week, if you know anything about that. Nobody was there in the mall. And so I'm out there and I'm doing things on the floor, and all of a sudden I knew she was back there doing whatever she was doing. And she came out and she was horrible. She treated me. So she just started cussing at me. And I'm just sitting there like I'm just trying to learn how to fold church. What do you want from me? And so I just kind of got tired of it. So I put my chest out, I looked her straight in the eye, and I said, that's it. I quit. And I walked off all big to go get my stuff. And I heard Johnny Paycheck in my head singing, take this job and shove it. I ain't working here no more. And I got my stuff, and I went out into the mall, and I was walking to my car, and then I heard the words of my dad say, never quit a job till you have another job. And that music stopped. It stopped quickly. Now, I don't know if any of that was the way it happened with John Mark. I'm pretty sure it wasn't, because Johnny Paycheck wasn't alive back then, but we know something happened, and it caused him to leave. So Paul and Barnabas, they were finishing their first missionary journey. They finished it. They went home. They were at home for a little while, and then they decided they were going to go back on a second journey. And this time they were going to go visit the people that they discipled, that they led to Jesus, and they were going to go and encourage them, and they were going to go help the church. And so as they were getting ready to go, Barnabas wanted to take John Mark with them again. But guess who did not Paul, who knew that he left on the first journey. And so this actually became a big rift between the two. And we see in acts 15 that Luke describes it this way. There arose a sharp disagreement, so they separated from each other. Now, sharp disagreement. Have you ever had a sharp disagreement? Raise your hand if you've ever had a sharp. What you would think would be a sharp. All the married couples are raising their hand right now. What does it mean to be a sharp disagreement? This is what I think. I think that when it stabs, when it cuts, and when it hurts deeply, that's pretty sharp. It was so bad, whatever words they had amongst each other, that Paul and Barnabas decided to split. They decided they weren't going to go on the next journey together. So what happens is Paul takes a man named Silas, and Barnabas takes John Mark, and they go on their ways. We know that Paul ended up going on three missionary journeys that traveled over 10,000 miles and lasted around nine years. And we know because of his commitment to the gospel, he helped spread God's word and the message of Jesus throughout the Near east. But not a lot of details were said about this specific incident in the Bible. So why is it in there? Why would you put something. They split ways, but you don't give a lot of details, because I think sometimes in those few details, we can learn a lot of lessons. And the first one is this. If you're taking notes, failing is not always failure. Failing is not always failure. Something we need to know about life is that we will fail. We are not perfect. We are human, which means there are mess ups, there are mistakes, and there are things that we do wrong. Did you know, on average, you and I make 35,000 decisions every day? See, you don't believe me, but then you just made a decision, so you're just adding to it, right then, 35,000 decisions every day, which means this, we're going to make some bad ones. When you have to make that many decisions, you're going to make some bad ones. Cognitive scientists call this problem decision fatigue. As the volume of your decisions increase, the quality of your decisions decrease. New York Times, they wrote a story about this on some research that they did on three parole officers, and they looked at 1100 decisions that were made by each officer, and the decisions were this, yes or no on parole. And it's real interesting what they discovered, because the research found that a third of the yeses, a third of the total were yeses for the parole. Out of the third that got a yes, 70% of those yeses came in the morning, and 10% of those yeses came in the afternoon. So what's my point? Well, my first point is this. If you're ever up for parole, get a morning meeting. My second point is this. Sometimes, just because we're tired or just because it's the afternoon, our decision making could change. Which means if that's the case, we are going to make some bad decisions as humans. But I want you to hear this. You and I have been giving so, been given so much grace from God. Accept that grace when you make a bad decision. Not only that, give that grace away when other people make bad decisions around you. What if this. What if Paul and Barnabas actually didn't make a bad decision? What if, in this instance, neither man was wrong? I mean, think about it for a second. Paul, the persecutor of Christ followers, turned to a devoted follower of Jesus Christ, wrote most of the New Testament, a majority of the. I mean, he's pretty legit. He knows what he's talking about. Perhaps he discerned that John Mark wasn't ready to participate in the trip Paul was about to go on Barnabas. Maybe he rightly discerned that John Mark needed to go on a mission with him. I mean, think about. Barnabas was very trusted. He was a big part in telling people about Jesus in the early church and planning churches. I mean, he was the man as well who followed Christ. What if neither of them were wrong? What if Silas was ready to endure the dangers that was about to happen in Paul's ministry? What if John Mark needed to be under the leadership of Barnabas, where he would have patience, where he would have encouragement that would contribute to him being very useful in ministry? What if neither men were wrong? See, if we think that way, the possibility of jumping to conclusions when people make failures could help us realize maybe there's more to the story. Maybe it was a mistake that's going to end up for something for good, for God. Because maybe they're not all failures to God. And that leads us to the second thing, because the foolishness of God is wiser. The foolishness of God is wiser. Now hold on before you start sending emails or you get mad and you want to cut a clip of me just saying the foolishness of God, and that's all you hear. Listen to this one. Corinthians 125 says this, for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. What does that mean? It means the foolishness of God is wiser than men because God's wisdom far exceeds human understanding and knowledge that people can process. It doesn't mean that God's a fool. But it does mean sometimes in our tiny understanding of the fullness of God, we look at situations sometimes and think we know the best outcome. We know how it should work, how it should come out, because we know what's going to happen next. And the reality of it is that's foolishness. We understood what God understood. If we knew what God knew, if we saw things the way God sees things, we would understand that sometimes when we think it's a failure, God says it's just another way to get where he wants you to go. If that was the case with Paul and Barnabas, couldn't it at any time the Holy Spirit come to both of them and give clearly the truth so they would have understanding, so they could say, hey, you know what? This is really what God wants to do. We're in this together. Let's continue on. Couldn't the Holy Spirit do that at any point? He could. Why didn't he? Because you and I, Paul and Barnabas, are not privy to the millions of present and future visible and invisible factors that go into God's providence and God's understanding. Of life. So maybe we should realize that God is the master orchestra conductor when it comes to all of these things that are going to work out for his good and we get to be a part of it. The cool thing is this, because Paul and Barnabas didn't let their emotions destroy the big mission because the sharp disagreement actually went down. Look at this. How many missionary groups do we have now? Not one, but two. Why? Because God knew what he was doing. Now the effort to get the gospel out is doubled. Not only that, but maybe we should realize that sometimes a setback is not a set up for a comeback, but instead a call to come on. Maybe things fail sometimes in your life because you need to get your eyes on what God really wants you to do, not what you want to do. Maybe it's just God saying, hey, I'm over here, you're going that way, I'm over here, come this way. Maybe he's changing the direction of where you're headed, but not changing the mission, not changing. The whole point of why we're here is to share the love of Jesus and to tell people about him and to make disciples. But I know this series is called comeback, so I don't want to leave it there. So where do we see comeback in this story? In two Timothy 411, Paul is in prison. They're in prison a lot back then. That's what I'm noticing. All for the name of Jesus. It says this in prison. Paul says, only Luke is with me. But catch this, get John Mark and bring him with you. Why? Because he is helpful to me in my ministry, redemption. He might have quit the quest, but he didn't quit the mission. He stayed on mission. John Mark went from being someone who caused a sharp disagreement to now being referred to as someone who helps me in my ministry. Not only that, but God allowed him to write a book of the Bible that continues to share the good news, the gospel of Jesus, even today, because he's one of the gospels. Because you may also know John, Mark as Mark, as in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. See, failure is only final if you allow it to be. This morning I want to ask you this question, because we're all called to mission. It's very clear that this mission is for the church and this mission is for us today. My question is, is God calling you to come back? Come back to him in your faith? Maybe you've strayed away. Maybe you're doing your own thing. Maybe you're just trying to figure it out. Is he calling you to come back or is this morning he calling you to come on because you have a different direction that he wants you to go in? Maybe there's a failure or something that's happened in your life that you've allowed it to help you stray away from the mission that God has put you on. And this morning he's saying, hey, I'm still here. Come follow me. Because here's what I want you to know this morning. We serve a God who loves you. We serve a God who is for you. And as you go on mission for him, get this, he goes with you. Are you on mission this morning? I think it starts on the way home. I think it starts in the car with your family. Bill tells us all the time, our first ministry is not the Met. It is our family. It starts with you on the way home and it ends with you one day when you're gone from this earth and you're in heaven with the Lord almighty. Let's pray together. God, we are so grateful for a clear mission that you have given us. There's a lot of things in this world that are confusing, that we don't understand. There's a lot of things that make us go astray. There's a lot of things that we can focus on that take us away from you and God. I know some of us are in here today. Maybe we're looking for a job. Maybe we're looking for a spouse. Maybe we're looking to take care of our kids, whatever it is, God, we know that you have been very clear that in all of those things, we need to share the love of Jesus. We need to make disciples. We need to teach people about your ways that you have commanded us to do so. God, give us the courage, give us the strength, give us the will to live every day on mission for you so that people can come to know you and the grace that comes through your son, Jesus Christ, when he went to the cross and died for our sins. God, we love you so much. Continue to call us back, continue to call us on and continue to call us towards you and your mission. We love you and we thank you. It's in Jesus name that we pray. Amen. [00:33:01] Speaker A: Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you have any questions or prayer requests, please contact us by visiting metchurch.com so that we can follow up with you this week. We look forward to seeing you next week.