Responding to the Promises of Jesus (Week 7)
2020: A Year of Celebration!
The Promises of God’s Mission!
Key Verses: Genesis 12:1-3 & Matthew 28:18-20)
I. First, Personalize the promise!
Realize that God is the One who calls people to respond to Him.
Listen to the Old Testament foundations:
TO ADAM & EVE AT CREATION: Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth” (Gen 1:26-28).
TO NOAH AFTER JUDGMENT: And God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth and upon every bird of the heavens, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea. Into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you. And as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything. But you shall not eat flesh with its life, that is, its blood. And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image. And you, be fruitful and multiply, increase greatly on the earth and multiply in it” (Gen 9:1-7).
TO ABRAHAM: Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:1-3).
TO MOSES BEFORE HE GETS THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: ‘Now then, if you will indeed obey My voice and keep My covenant, then you shall be My own possession among all the peoples, for all the earth is Mine; and you shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ These are the words that you shall speak to the sons of Israel (Ex 19:5-6).
TO A NEW GENERATION ABOUT TO ENTER THE PROMISED LAND: And the Lord has declared today that you are a people for his treasured possession, as he has promised you, and that you are to keep all his commandments, and that he will set you in praise and in fame and in honor high above all nations that he has made, and that you shall be a people holy to the Lord your God, as he promised (Deuteronomy 26:18-19).
This mission of God is a life of grace! Grace is a call and response; an invitation to participate. The promises of God are not given to people who deserve them, but rather to people God has chosen to make His own.
The same is true for you as well. If you belong to Christ, then you the promise of mission is yours. Listen to Peter in Acts 2:38-39,
Repent, and each of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins; and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and your children and for all who are far off, as many as the Lord our God will call to Himself.
“And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” The promise is: “in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen. 12:3).
II. Second, Practice the Promise!
“For the Son of Man has come to seek and to save that which was lost.”
Jesus didn’t have a separate part of His life which was outreach or evangelism or mission. His life was mission and it didn’t matter where He was or who He was with. Mission isn’t something you do; it is a lifestyle you live.
Don’t deform it into a church program or a special committee membership. The church is the mission committee of Heaven—may it be done on earth as it is in Heaven. We are all a part of it and it can’t be hired out to paid professionals, elected off to church officers, or abdicated through financial guilt offerings.
This is God’s promise of mission: We are God’s plan to bless the nations! But, we are easily overwhelmed by all this—the task seems to so big. But Jesus’ promise of mission is not a burden to bear heavily. Rather, it is a lifestyle that flows out of who you are in Christ. Listen to Peter from 1 Peter 2:9-12,
But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, so that you may proclaim the excellencies of Him who has called you out of darkness into His marvelous light; for you once were not a people, but now you are the people of God; you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy. Beloved, I urge you as aliens and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts which wage war against the soul. Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles, so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers, they may because of your good deeds, as they observe them, glorify God in the day of visitation.
The only way you can fail is to stop practicing. Practice, practice, practice. Never stop starting over…
III. Third, GO with grace!
The authority comes only through your relationship with Jesus Christ. Listen to Matthew 28:16-20,
All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.
The power comes only through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. Listen to Acts 1:7-8,
It is not for you to know times or epochs which the Father has fixed by His own authority; but you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you shall be My witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and even to the remotest part of the earth.
This mission of God is a life of grace—forgiveness and love. It should flow out of you like fruit upon a branch. It is a life of abiding in the Vine and then through grace bearing the fruit of what God is doing in the world. It is a life that puts flesh on Jesus’ prayer, “Your Kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in Heaven.”