Clarify Your Mission

 “Clarify Your Mission”

 Message @ Jericho Ridge Community Church – Sunday, Feb 12, 2012

Text: Acts 20:17-38 // Series: “Now Is the Time”

Well good morning.  That clip which sets the stage for our teaching time this morning is a scene from the recent movie Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. But really, it could be from any mission impossible.  The phone booth.  The cryptic voice repeating “your mission, should you choose to accept it” and the sense of danger and thrill that comes with that genre.  How many have seen it?  My father in law and I completed the Christmas triad that being reading Luke 2, stuffing our faces with turkey and then immediately proceeded to blow our Cineplex gift cards we got in our stockings on an IMAX movie the last weekend in December.  So it was fun. 

But the thing I love about the Mission Impossible franchise is that little phrase: “Your mission, should you choose to accept it.”  And this week as we continue our study of the last half of the book of Acts in the New Testament, we’re going to see a person with such clarity about their mission and who accepted it despite the risks and challenges and suffering that was associated with that mission, that the gospel took root and grew and flourished in world-transforming kinds of ways.  And we’ll see how the gospel challenges each of us to ask ourselves “What is Your Mission?”    

Our teaching series in January and February is called “Now is the Time” and last weekend we left Paul in making a ruckus in the city of Ephesus.  And contrary to his usual modus operandi, we learn that Paul spent three  years in that place teaching and calling people to faith in Jesus; growing them in their maturity.  In fact, he wrote a whole book of the New Testament to the church there called Ephesians and you can tell as you read this book that Paul knows these people well.  So after spending three years there, Paul continues on his way and the usual stuff continues as we come into Acts 20.  There’s a plot on his life.  Then there’s this great story, which you can go home and read about where there is a sermon that is sooooo boring and soooo long that for one guy, it proved fatal!  Look it up, it’s in Acts 20:7.  I mean, have you ever heard a preacher so bad that it killed you to listen to him or her?  Not at Jericho, we hope J

So Paul decides after doing a circuit around the Mediterranean three times to plant churches and encourage people, he is going to head for Jerusalem.  We pick his story up this morning in Acts 20:18-27 [4 slides] and as I read, I want you to be looking and listening for Paul’s sense of clarity around his mission in life.  “When [the elders at the church of Ephesus] arrived, [Paul] declared…

Paul is at a place in his life where he is taking stock and evaluating the purpose and priorities of his life.  In fact, this is one of the only conversations recorded in Acts where Paul is speaking with people who are already Christians.  And Paul is pretty clear and pretty definitive about what he understands his life’s mission to be.  I know for me personally, when I was on sabbatical this past summer, I spent time thinking and praying and thinking through the questions of calling, vision, roles and goals that I have for my life.  And it’s not an easy conversation to have because it forces you to get clarity about what your mission in life is and is not. 

As we listen in on what Paul is sharing with the elders of Ephesus, we learn some things that will help you get a stronger handle on your own personal sense of vision and calling.  You see the first thing that Paul understands and shares in this conversation is that he knows definitively  

• Who was in charge (20:19) of his life. 

Paul says ‘the work that I’ve done? That’s been God’s work for me.”  It’s my assignment from the Lord he says in verse 24.  He didn’t craft it for himself and you and I don’t get to either.  Because if you say that you are committed follower of Jesus, you have then by definition, surrendered the helm of your life to God.  You have given up control and you don’t get to call the shots any more.  If you are here today and you are not a Christian, then this might sound like great news to you because you are off the hook. You’re still in charge of your life, God’s not.  So this part isn’t applicable to you and in fact, it just might be a reason why you have not taken that step said ‘God, I am actively giving you my life’.  But, if you are a Christian and God gives you an assignment – little or big - you say “yes, Lord” because He is in charge.  If God gives you an assignment that involves training for and heading to China to live among the people there and demonstrate God’s love to them, you don’t say “that’s an interesting thought, Lord but you know, I have become really enamoured with the suburban lifestyle and our kids are at a weird age to move…”. If God prompts you to practice hospitality and invite someone around you over for lunch, you say “OK. Grilled cheese and soup it is.”   If your commander in chief gives you an assignment, you say ‘yes’.  Paul understood this and it prompted a humility and an obedience in him that I am still working on in my own life.  You will never get your mission in life right if you don’t understand where it comes from.  So let me ask you this: today, who is really in charge of your life? 

The second thing Paul understood was that God also gives people  

• His unique role & gifts (20:20)

God had given Paul a unique set of life-experiences as a Roman citizen, a Jewish rabbinical scholar, a vocation as a person who made tents so that he could be self-supporting.  And the amazing thing to me is that God gave him all of these things before He met Jesus on the road to Damascus! God built into Paul’s life everything that Paul needed to do the tasks that God had given him to do.  Paul had the relational gifts necessary for his work.  He had teaching gifts. He was good with small groups and good with large ones.  He was a skilled writer and apologist.  He understood his role as a communicator of the gospel – telling people what they needed to hear.  Not simply what the might want to hear.  Paul understood that he was uniquely equipped with certain gifts and a role that God designed for him.  In all of the mission impossible films, there’s an IMF team that accepts the mission.  Sometimes to save time, God pre-assigns your team.  Like your family of origin.  But imagine what it would be like on an IMF mission if the technical specialist wanted to be the front man.  Or if the office-based analysis always insisted that even though they weren’t field ready, they should be the one defusing bombs. 

God has given each person a set of gifts which will work themselves out in the roles that God has called you to.  Paul understood his role as a pioneer missionary and so if someone had given him a role that said “Paul, we have a position for you as a chaplain to senior adults at the retirement residence in Jerusalem” he would have had the sense of mission clarity to say “no thank you”.  Because he understood his gift set was not a good fit with that level of stasis.  So let me ask you: how well do you understand your gifts?  How much clarity do you have about how those gifts will be worked out in the unique roles that God has called you to play? 

You heard me say that I spent some time on sabbatical working on one my personal mission.  Part of what this expresses is my sense of my gifts and my purpose.  Who God is calling me to be and do.  It’s a work in process but my best understanding currently of my Personal Mission is this:  The because of my gift set and experiences and responsibilities, that God has called me To lead with humility, and teach with integrity as I encourage & develop the gifts and character of the people around me  

You see how this flows out of an understanding of both my gift set as well as my roles.  This starts in my home and with my family and then flows out into my vocational and volunteer work.  Paul’s statement would have to do with evangelism and sharing the gospel where it had not been preached before because that was an outworking on his personal gift set.  And a personal calling statement is much broader than this (look at your insert)

Because some people understand what they want to do but they don’t have a clear understanding the backdrop to this.  The question of why they exist;

• The purpose of his life (20:21)

Not Paul.  He understood the purpose of his life to be making it difficult for people who God brought across his path to go to hell.  Jews, Greeks, anyone he came in contact with he saw the purpose of his life to be about declaring three things to them.  1) Repent from sin (turn away from evil).  2) Turn toward to God (search for Him).  And 3) have faith in Jesus Christ (his substutionary work on the cross that opened up a way for you and I to be in right relationship with God).  He wanted everyone to know those things.  And friend, let me talk to those of you who are listening but who have not made that decision.  You may have done one of those three things, you may have tried to turn away from evil and tried to come to God by being a better person.  It’s not going to work.  Repentance is step one.  Or you may be here searching and you’ve been around JRCC for a while listening and thinking and considering.  Maybe you even think you’re a Christian.  But if you don’t link your search with that last action, faith in Jesus Christ as the only way of salvation, then friend, you have yet to discover the true purpose of your life.  The reason you exist is to know God and to experience the life that He offers that starts now and goes on forever.  Don’t miss out on discovering your purpose.  If today is your day to say yes to God, do it right now and then come and talk to me before you leave today so we can celebrate together with you.     

Are you beginning to see why it is so vitally important for each person to understand your mission?  Because it helps give healthy definition to everything else in your life.  I have found for me, that coming back from sabbatical and working on getting clarity on this, it has given me freedom around what I say yes and what I say no to.  Otherwise I might make decisions based on other factors such as what might be expedient or what the path of least resistance is.  But let’s keep looking at Paul’s life because he makes his decisions based on how they align with his mission as opposed to what’s the easiest thing to do.  This is because he understands         

• The risks involved (20:19, 23)

Paul talks several times about the hardships challenges that he has experienced as part and parcel of his mission.  Verse 19 - the trials that came to him from the various plots of the Jews to take his life and shut him up.  He talks about how often he shed tears over those who were lost and wayward.  He says in verse 22 that “I have this inner compulsion – I am bound by the Spirit – to go to Jerusalem and I don’t know what awaits me but I do know (verse 25) that this is last time I will see you.”  “Oh, wait”, he says “I do know a little bit about what awaits me: the Holy Spirit did give me that info.  Yeah, in city after city it’s going to be jail and suffering.”   This is intriguing to me on so many levels…  Firstly, that the Holy Spirit reveals part of the picture to him but not the whole thing.  God’s not in the usual habit of giving us a crystal ball to let us see the future.  And even if He was, if you are Paul, would you really want to know?  If I’m Paul and God says to me “your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves jail time, public beatings, almost drowning and other various and sundry significant hardship”.  If I’m Paul, I’m looking for the escape clause or the “opt out” button.  But he doesn’t.  Why?  Because he understands that part of the Christian life is accepting the call to suffering.  This is very clear all throughout the New Testament – that following Jesus ought to come with a label: Warning: Risks and Turbulence ahead.   

The question that plagues me is this: “If God gave me an assignment that I knew would be hard but that I knew was from Him, what would my response be?”  If God said to you, “I have a child that I need to assign to a loving and patient parent.  This child is a difficult child and will require extra grace.  Can I trust you with this child?” What would you say?  If God said to you, ‘this family relationship, this is going to be very hard.  But don’t bail out.” What would you say?  If God said to you “you job which you experience as boring and mundane, I have you placed here for a divine purpose but you won’t bump up against it for a long, long time.  It’s going to be tough but I need you to stick with it.” What would your response be?  You see so many of us are risk averse in our spiritual lives that we can sit here at say “I surrender all” but when things get tough, we say “God this isn’t fair”.  Paul understood with such clarity what his mission in life was that he could say with conviction “my life is worth nothing to me unless I use it for finish the work assigned me by the Lord Jesus”” (20:24).  Are you willing to suffer, because it is likely a part of your mission.

Paul could say these things with confidence because he had a sense of clarity about his mission that allowed him to see and know when it was accomplished. He could evaluate his life effectively because he knew

• The finish line (20:24-25)

Most of us allow our definition of success to be shaped by cultural expectations and norms.  We are considered successful if we can make it to a comfortable retirement.  If we can get out of the basement suite and buy a white picket fence with 2.5 children, a dog, 2 cars in the garage and enough money in the bank or room on your credit card to holiday in Mexico once per year.  But friends, that is not God’s ultimate vision of a life well lived.  You’re not getting a “well done, good and faithful servant, enter into my rest” for winning at the game of suburban comfort.  If that is your end goal, however, your mission and your actions in life right now will reflect that.  You’ll keep money instead of being generous and giving it away.  You’ll choose safe friends for your kids and you’ll live a risk-averse spiritual life that doesn’t involve taking with your neighbours about your faith for fear of offending them.  You’ll take that path of least resistance to the finish line and at the end of your life, we’ll all gather around as your body is lowered into the grave and the sum total of what will be said is “they were such a nice person.”  Trust me, friends, Pastor Keith and I did 20 community funerals between us last year.  And when you don’t have a clear mission, any finish line looks like a good finish line.  But Paul understood and could say with conviction “I have been faithful.  I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race I have kept the faith.  And now there is in store for me the crown of righteousness.  Which the Lord, the righteous judge will award on that day.  And not only to me but also to all those who long for His appearing.”  Some of you today need to change your finish line.  Your priorities are not biblically defensible and God is speaking to your right now about adjustments He wants you to make. 

In the month of February, we are reminded of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s “I have a Dream” speech where he painted a clear and compelling image of what a transformed nation would look like.  He did this not merely as a motivational tool, but also as a way of painting a clear finish line so that when people got there, they knew that they had arrived.  So let me ask you “What does your personal finish line look like?”  You won’t know unless you get clarity on your mission in life. 

Getting clarity also allows you incredible freedom.  It seems almost crass to hear him say it but his mission allowed him to be very clear on

• What he was not responsible for (20:26)

Paul was convinced of his faithfulness on mission to the point where he was not responsible for those who rejected his proclamation of the message.  To me, this is an incredibly sobering thought…  If the people on my block (my neighbours, my extended family members) were to perish this week, would I be able to say with Paul.  “Hey, if anyone on 199 Street suffers eternal death, it’s not my fault.  I am innocent of their blood. I made it hard for people God placed around me to go to hell.”  The image here is drawn from the Old Testament book of Ezekiel 33:1-6, where God appoints a watchman to sound the alarm. And God says “listen, if the watchmen is faithful and sees danger coming and sounds the alarm but the people choose to do nothing about it, the watchman is innocent if bad things happen to that city.  But if the watchman sees danger coming and doesn’t do anything, and the city, gets burned to the ground, that is the watchman’s fault.  And I will hold them accountable for their silence.  It’s crass and perhaps bold to ask this but church, could we legitimately say “we have done everything we can to see everyone we can reached in our city? We have been faithful in the task that God has called us to do?”  I would say we’ve got a ways to go, there.  We have personal invites not extended yet, mission opportunities to reach young families in our neighbourhoods not launched yet, issues of justice and compassion untapped.  There are gaps between where we are now and where we want to be as a church family.  You hear this in our mission statement:

We aspire to be                       

a loving & listening people,

extending God’s hope and reconciliation                 

to our community                 

in all of life,                           

all of the time.  

There’s growth room for us in listening to God and to those around us.  There’s lots of things to celebrate as we come into the last few weeks before the team leaves for Guatemala and all of us together lean hard into one expression of the extension of God’s love to people on the margins of society.  We’re launching a summer day camp for kids July 3-6 so that we serve our community.  Lindsey’s headed back to Haiti to extend hope and reconciliation to people ravaged by the earthquake…  Friends, this stuff is happening and the exciting thing is that as you and I get increased mission clarity, it gives us a sense of courage and urgency that allows us to know   

• How & when to be bold (20:27)

Just like Paul didn’t shrink back or hold back from his mission in any way, God is calling and inviting you and I to be bold and to take risks in extending the Kingdom here in our community and around the world.  I want us to be a church and I want you to be a person that doesn’t shrink back.  Who has the infilling and empowering of the Holy Spirit to do the work that we have been called and gifted and equipped to do.  The team is going to come and they are going to lead us in a song of surrender and celebration that invites us to offer ourselves fully and completely to God again and to allow Him to use us both individually and collectively to accomplish His mission and His purpose for our lives and in the world.  Let’s pray together as we sing.