Bringing Hope to a Lost World

Our Fall Focus on Missions brought guest preach­ers to us who issued a number of challenges from God’s Word.  (If you missed either message, go to our YouTube page to listen.)

Mark from Interserve USA was with us on Oct. 24, and he spoke on “Our Great Missionary God” (John 4).  He asked us what grade we’d give the church for missions, given that in 2,000 years only 58% of the “nations” (i.e., people groups) have been reached.  Jesus commissions us to make disciples among ALL people groups (Matt. 28:18-20), yet 42% have no gospel witness.  Still, God is at work and we have reason to hope in our times:  each day 3,500 churches are planted and 178,000 new believers turn to Jesus (and the gospel is taking root in some very “hard” places!).

Jesus goes on mission when he addresses the Samaritan woman at the well.  John 4:23 gives the Bible’s message in a nutshell:  God is seeking worshippers—including one broken woman drawing water that cannot satisfy her deepest thirst.  She’s swept up in worship of the Messiah before her, which then overflows into compassion for her neighbors:  Come and see the Christ!

On Oct. 31, Rick James from Cru spoke from Ephesians 4:17-20, “A Warm Welcome from the Faculty of Futility State.”  Prevailing ideas in our world often have roots in the university—including postmodernism, post-postmodernism, post-colonialism, and all manner of God-avoiding ideologies so prevalent in our culture.

Rick asked us:  What question are we asking?  Is it how to save Western culture (the Bible says little on that)?  Or is it how to help people come to faith in Christ, regardless of the culture (on this the Bible says a lot)?  Rick urged us:  *Focus on evangelism, not fixing the culture.  *Let Scripture, not the culture, define the tone and rhetoric of our engagement with the world (2 Tim 2:23-26).  *Engage directly with the Truth—i.e., Jesus, who is the truth (John 14:6).  *Hold closely to Christ in this spiritual battle (Eph. 6:10-12).