The Lord desires us to go. The Lord desires us to go. And really that’s what I want to talk to us about this morning. If you have your Bible. I’m going to be in Luke chapter 24, verses 44 to 49. Luke chapter 24, verses 44 to 49.

It’s the very end of Luke’s Gospel. It says in 44, Then He said to them, These are My words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled. Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

And said to them, Thus it is written that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, and that repentance and forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all nations. Beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. And behold, I am sending the promise of My Father upon you. But stay in the city until you are clothed with power from on high. When you go to a place like Mexico or like Jessica said, India. You kind of go, hold on Lord. What is the plan here? Because I see just a vast country of people who have never heard of You. Or have heard of You, but they’ve heard it in a very twisted, broken way. They haven’t heard the full Gospel. And even on the home front here in America,

it’s just true that less and less people know who Christ is or know the Gospel. And it seems the world does get darker. And if we don’t keep our face to the Word of God, we will forget this, that God has a perfect plan.

You know that God has a perfect plan for what He’s doing? And that perfect plan won’t be thwarted no matter what we see. And I love just again to have the stories shared because it’s a reminder God knows exactly how He’s working. God knows exactly where He’s working. God’s plan is perfect for the preaching of the Gospel to all nations. God’s plan is perfect in your life.

You know that? So many times you come in. You know, we would go. We would go into these little, what we would not consider to be homes or houses. And these are homes where a full family is living. And these people are destitute. I think it’s the definition of abject poverty. And they don’t know the Gospel. And you’re going, Lord, there’s so many people like this. Like this is bizarre. But yet, you see the Spirit move. And you see that the Spirit knows exactly what He’s doing and the hearts that He intends to do. God has a plan. God has a plan. And that’s what Jesus is reminding His formerly discouraged disciples that God’s got a plan. As bad as it seems, this is God’s plan.

When the Old Testament ends,

it really doesn’t end on a high note. The last book of the Bible is Malachi. It’s the last minor prophet. And Malachi addresses a bunch of deflated, discouraged, aimless, disobedient Israelites. It took a lot of prodding, a lot of encouragement through the prophets for God to get the people to rebuild the temple. So they come out of captivity. The Persians let them go home. They start building the temple. They get discouraged and stop. They start building the temple. They get discouraged and stop. So they eventually build the temple. But that temple, it’s not as glorious as Solomon’s temple before the exile. And then they’re really not. They’re not independent either. They’ve got Persian governors over them. So they’re not hot, if you will, for the things of God as they should be.

Justice in the public square is not present. The law is not observed. Temple sacrifices were done wrong. Divorce was rampant. Tithing was not practiced. And you think, good night, people. God just sent you into exile for 70 years because you wouldn’t obey Him. And here we are back. In Israel, you’re not even as strong as you were and you still don’t get it. You still don’t get it. Yet in the midst of that kind of malfunctioning disobedience and that ignorance to God’s truth and God’s law, the same way that you and I see it, God is willing to say in Malachi that my name will be feared among the nations. God says at the very end of Malachi, the Son of Righteousness will rise, with healing in His wings. And the wicked will be judged and the righteous will be drawn in. God says it with certainty. He says it with certainty.

And how can He say it with such certainty when every interaction that God’s had with every person in human history in the Old Testament has not been a lasting, impactful change in that person? I mean, we see it in King David or Abraham or Moses that God does great things and there’s faithfulness for a long season. But you and I have never seen, even in the Old Testament, someone truly changed. Yet at the end of that, God says, still yet, my plan hasn’t changed. The Son of Righteousness will rise, with healing in His wings. It will happen. You see, just as much as God is God over all and He is God over everything good and bad that’s happening in your life and my life and the world, He’s God before all. And you know, because He’s God before all, whatever God says is going to come to pass, it’s going to come to pass. Whatever, the Word of God intends to come to fruition will come to fruition. The Scriptures say, the Word of God, it will not return void. So what I want us to remember this morning as we think about what it means to be Christians, what we think about what it means to be world Christians, particularly, it’s this, God’s perfect plan is from long ago. It’s from long ago.

What do you think about these apostles again with me? These apostles,

are upside down. They’re Lord, this teacher from heaven, even the Son of God. They’ve confessed Him to be the Son of God. Here He’s been crucified. They’re holed up. They’re afraid. They don’t know what to do. And Jesus comes back to them. And Jesus says the most bonkers thing to them that He could say, Hey guys, as awful as it was when I was crucified and taken away, that was the plan. That was the plan. It was supposed to happen just as it happened. That was God’s plan. As bad as things were, it was God’s plan. You see, from the beginning of time, God has had a plan to save us despite even our best efforts to foil God’s plan to save us. That’s how much God loves us. You know, God gave the law and He gives His rules. But as much as God has given us, given the fullness of His law and His rules, we’ve been disobedient to that. If you want to think about the law of God like a strategy, God says, here’s the perfect strategy to be a person, to know me, to obey me. It doesn’t help, does it? Because you and I don’t have the energy. We don’t have the desire, the will to obey that. Even if God gave us His rule and law and God also gave us 99.9% of the spiritual energy we needed to obey Him, we might as well not even try because you and I cannot remotely do what needs to be done. What needs to be done to please God. The biblical reality is we cannot help our own spiritual welfare. You and I cannot help ourselves. The prophet Isaiah says it so clear in 64. He says, We have all become like one who is unclean and all our righteous deeds are like polluted garment. We all fade like a leaf and our iniquities like the wind take us away. There is no one who calls upon your name who rouses himself to take hold of you for you’ve hidden your face from us. And have made us melt in the hand of our iniquities.

So nothing about the Bible has ever said to any of us, God is on the lookout for somebody who’s finally smart enough, sharp enough, who cares enough to really help themselves out, to do their part, to really, you know, make it and please God. That’s not the story of the Bible. The story of the Bible is a God, who’s come down and he’s been preaching the good news of himself to all of human history. The gospel is the story of God. The gospel is God and what God is doing to save his enemies and that’s us. And God fancies often to use the dullest tact he can find to share that gospel for him because it’s all about him.

God has had great forbearance in passing over the sins of all the centuries of people until what? What could happen until Jesus, God in the flesh could come and Jesus could supply what you and I and the whole world needs. That was and always will be God’s plan. Paul says in Ephesians 1, blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him in life. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to what? According to the purpose of his own will. It was God’s plan. It was God’s plan before time began, when time began. And that’s what makes it so beautiful here in verse 45 when it says he opened their minds. He opened their minds. You see what’s what the wonder and beauty of the gospel is. The beauty of 45 is the gospel was supplied,

but these disciples who had been with Jesus for three whole years still didn’t get it. They didn’t have the spiritual capacity to even grasp who Jesus was. And it wasn’t until Jesus said, okay, here I’ve supplied the salvation that you need. But just like he did to Lydia, when Paul’s preaching and it says, the Lord opens Lydia mind to receive it and to hear it. It’s the very same thing. It says that Jesus opened their minds to finally see the beauty and the power of the gospel.

You see how Jesus was always and only God’s plan to save humanity. Jesus was always and only God’s plan to save humanity. Can I say to you this morning, Jesus is only and always God’s plan for your life.

Every trial you face, every, every difficult day, every great burden, every dark valley, every broken relationship, every sin temptation, every worry, every discouragement. Can I say to you, Jesus is God’s plan for that. Jesus is God’s perfect plan for everything in your life.

And you know, the empty grave is the proof that he is the perfect remedy for our deepest need, our deepest need.

Because Jesus, Jesus supplies the salvation and he supplies even the ability to see it and receive it. It really makes the thus beautiful in 46. Because you and I wouldn’t care what’s on the other side of the thus if Jesus didn’t open our minds before it. He says, thus it is written that Christ should suffer on the third day and rise from the dead. See, that becomes beautiful

only when you believe Jesus is what you need to be. What your soul needs. That becomes wonderful news to you only when you perceive in your spiritual parts Christ is the purpose of your own heart and soul. Christ is the need for every nation, every person, every world conflict, every sickness, every disease. Jesus is that solution. All of a sudden, Jesus saying, thus it is written that I was going to die this way and suffer this way. It becomes so wonderful and it becomes so beautiful.

And God’s perfect plan is from long ago. Despite our best efforts to foil it. How good is God in that He sent His Son to save us and we killed His Son yet it was through killing His Son that we are saved. How kind and good is God and gracious to save us who even when He dangles salvation in front of our face we reject it. Jessica was reading

Chronicles of Narnia the first book in the series to Darcy last night and you know Aslan the Lion kind of represents Jesus. He’s talking to a little boy and he says, you sons of Adam do whatever you can cleverly to guard yourselves from what’s good for you. And isn’t that so true about us? We are so good at guarding ourselves cleverly from what’s good for us. Yet Jesus and the power of the gospel breaks right through that and it finally comes to us. He finds us on our knees saying, Jesus, wow, look at your plan to save a people for your own possession and love us in the deepest part and all of our life and that’s how good God is.

Especially though, I want you to see what Jesus is saying here in this verse to these Jews. He’s saying to them

it’s written that He should suffer and rise from the dead. Repentance, forgiveness should be proclaimed in His name. It doesn’t just say and maybe they don’t even fully get this yet if we read through Acts we kind of see that Peter connects the dots as Cornelius comes and the Holy Spirit falls on the Gentiles but Jesus is saying something really crazy right here. He’s saying, I want this gospel to be preached not just to Jews but to non-Jews to the nations. I love in Acts chapter 17

1730 Peter says, the times of ignorance, God overlooked but now He commands look at this, all people everywhere. Who is the gospel for? What was God’s plan before time? When time began? When Christ suffered all throughout the Old Testament? All these books, all these prophecies, what was it all pointing towards? All people everywhere repenting. That’s God’s heart for the nations. That means that when you and I look up, and we see Jesus bloodied hanging on the cross, we see heaven’s beloved suffering, it’s proof that God is deeply invested in you and everyone on planet earth knowing about His Son and He deeply loves them. And let me ask you this, if God has that kind of heart for you and for people, friend, would He not want us to have the same heart as well and believe that this plan is going to happen the way God wants it to happen?

We were in one of those small villages and, I think Chris and I were together at that time. And we went to this, you know, again, this house. There’s a bunch of concrete rooms connected and there’s this woman there and her name was Dora. And so, you know, we started walking through. Hey, do you have a water filtration system? Okay, you do. Do you know how to use it? Are you cleaning it properly and all that kind of stuff? Well, then I asked her, hey, do you know who Jesus is? And she went, no, like that. So I was like, oh, great. So I start just sharing the gospel and sharing the gospel. And it looks like she’s so interested and she’s just paying attention. And so I finally get, so do you want to receive Christ as your Savior today? And I’m like, sure. She’s going to say yes. And she said, no. I was like, you don’t? And so I got, I started over and like I went through it again. I was like, hey, life’s short. Like, you don’t want to take this stuff for granted. Like, you know, and she’s like, no, just think about it. I was like, oh. And I left that house like so discouraged. Like, she was getting ready to like do it, you know. But we went across the street and I go across the street so discouraged. And there was this very young family. It was, you know, a man and his woman and their baby. And they hadn’t lived in that little house, I think, but six months.

And Chris began to share the gospel with her. And Archie came over and started really reinforcing it to this new family. And this boy, this woman just broke down weeping because she believed, but her husband didn’t. And her husband had, I think, been very hard-hearted. And his countenance just changed.

And we just got to talk to him and Archie talked to him. And it was so meaningful and impactful. And it was a reminder like, oh, that’s right. It’s not about me. This is God’s plan. You know, I can just show up and I can just do the things I’m supposed to do and leave the fruit of that to God because this isn’t Chad’s show. This is God’s show. And he’s working and his spirit’s moving. And he knows that lady, Dora, she heard, and God’s not done with her, I believe. And he’s moving and working and you and I can be at peace with that.

What this passage, friends, what I really believe it wants us to do is ask, it asks us to really wonder who do we believe is in control when you turn on the news and it looks like the world is a mess and society is an immoral mess and when there is a pandemic going on and when you face so many difficulties and trials in your own life when you have so many burdens you carry and then, yes, when it comes to world missions and evangelism where we live in everything, who do you believe is in control? Who do you believe is good? Who do you believe loves you? Because I want to challenge you on this. If you believe, if you believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, being dragged away in the night and mistreated and killed and crucified and raised from the third day for your salvation has always been God’s perfect plan, could it be that even the great difficulties you experience in your life, they’re part of God’s perfect plan for you too? And just like those apostles said, this doesn’t make sense. This doesn’t make sense. Look how bad this is. Look how wrong this is. God has a way of taking those things and through those things showing Himself to be a Savior and a friend and a God. Like He couldn’t in any other way. So I want to encourage you this morning in your trials and your struggles. God has a perfect plan for everything. And He loves you deeply. Are you willing to believe that? Are you willing to believe that? Are you willing to see the empty grave of proof that God’s timing, God’s way is perfect?

But secondly, I do want to say to you on this, who and what is your real authority in your life? I hope it’s the Word of God. And this passage, I think, really reminds us of the importance of the Word of God when it says, thus it is written. When Jesus says, thus it is written, that is Jesus saying, if God said it’s going to be the case, it’s going to be the case. And the Word of God is that credible that you should be trusting it, reading it, knowing it, studying it, laboring, overing it. It’s so important, especially for the times in which you and I live a very liberal, quote-unquote, Christian magazine.

They released an article this past week by a Unitarian Universalist pastor. And his whole article was basically, Christians today, we rely too much on the Bible. We’ve even made an idol out of the Bible. We don’t need the Bible to hear from God. It was essentially the message that he was sharing in this article. And friends, that is so different. That is so deceptive. And that is so false. Yes, God does speak to us. And yes, we have the Spirit. But what we need is the Word of God so that the Spirit speaks to us through us, through it, and tells us what God is speaking to us. We need desperately to be good, old-fashioned, Bible-believing Christians. That’s the only kind there is. And as much as I say that, as much as I say that, Charles Spurgeon said, for every 10 men you find who are willing to die for the Bible, you only find one man who’s willing to, to read it. So yes, we need to say the Word of God in authority over us all, no matter what. We are Bible-believing Christians, but we can’t be that just word. If we’re going to do that, we actually need to break it open and we need to do the hard work of reading it and studying it and loving it and letting it saturate and inform our daily lives. I want to challenge you. Maybe you need to get back in a season of really loving the Word of God again and working through it and letting it spread and speak to you about God’s perfect plan for your life, for the world.

God’s perfect plan, it’s from long ago, but I want us to see from this passage, God’s perfect plan is unfolding right now. God’s perfect plan is unfolding right now. In verse 48, Jesus says, you are witnesses of these things.

And behold, I’m sending the promise of my Father upon you, but stay in the city until you’re clothed with power from on high. The amazing thing about the Bible

is it’s not a static book about some stuff that happened a long time ago and we can go to it and learn some moral lessons from it. It does have a lot of historical accounts and we can learn a lot from it. The thing about the Bible though is it’s living and it’s active. It is a story about what has been, but the Bible is literally unfolding right now. If you and I are in Christ, we are living in the biblical narrative. And the problem when you think about the Bible like this really awesome book from God and it tells us some stuff, you revere it, yes, you respect it, yes, but you don’t really let it control, shape your current life. But that’s, friends, why God gave it to us so that it would speak to us in whatever year we live that we would love and obey it right now. So it’s a terrible mistake for us to view the Bible that way. So the apostles, when Jesus says you were witnesses, they were witnesses. They did see it and they did hear it. But guess what they were supposed to do when they were witnessing?

Witness. And they went out and they planted churches and they made disciples. Well, what do you think happens when decades pass and centuries pass? Those men, the age of the apostles, passed away. And what are you left with? Their disciples? And churches? And centuries passed? And what do you get? More disciples? More churches? You see where this is going?

Whoever’s alive at the time, you’re the witnesses.

In other words, what does this mean? It means God’s strategy for how He’s reaching the nations hasn’t changed in 2,000 years. It’s still the local church. Which means your task and mission and my task in making disciples hasn’t changed either. God’s perfect plan is still going. It’s still going.

The strategy hasn’t changed.

You, if you’re going to call yourself a Christian, you’re going to say, I believe, I’ve received Christ, I’ve turned from my sins, I’m secure in heaven, all that. You know what that means? At the same time, it means you’re a witness. You can’t be a Christian and not be a witness. And you may say, well, I didn’t see with my eyes the way the apostles did, so I’m not quite a witness. That doesn’t work. Do you remember what Jesus said to Thomas? He said, Thomas, you believe because you have seen. Blessed are those, what? Who have not seen, but believe.

In other words, friends, it’s not the eyeballs in your head with which you must see Christ. It’s with your heart, it’s with your mind, it’s with your soul. That’s the kind of seeing, that’s the kind of believing, that’s the kind of witnessing that God has been calling the local church to for the last 2,000 years. And if you have seen the goodness of the gospel, the plan of God for all time to save a people from every tribe, language, nation, tongue, that’s not something you can unsee and it’s not something you can keep to yourself. We should deeply desire to believe that just as God is working, He’s doing it, sorry, spit, He’s doing it through us. He’s doing it through the local church as we’re lights where we are and as we send people out to go to be lights around the world. It’s our great privilege to witness to the things that we have seen.

A candle you pass by that didn’t even catch your eyes, not much of a candle in a city on a hill that didn’t even catch your glance as you drove by, but it’s not much of a city, but God’s building up a much bigger city and He’s got a much bigger kingdom and He’s got a much brighter light, friends, that we should, like that old song you sing when you’re a kid, this little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine. Friends, if we really allow the Spirit of God to have His way in us, He would do such a work through us. You know, that’s heaven’s desire. That’s heaven’s desire to you small, weak people. And you say, I feel small and weak. That’s a good place to be because you know what Jesus said to you? To His disciples? Yes, He’d open their eyes to understand, but He says what to them? Hey, don’t leave Jerusalem until you have the gift from the Father because that same Spirit who alone can save, if you don’t have that Spirit working through you, you can’t do my work. You can’t spread the Gospel. It’s the Spirit working through you. So yes, you need the Spirit for salvation, but you need God to do anything for God. It’s God, Paul says in Romans, all things are from God, all things work through God, and all things go back to God. For what? For the glory of God. It’s God all in all. So do you have God for your salvation? And are you deeply desiring to have God for effective ministry to see His kingdom come as He works in and through you?

I want that to be the reality at Providence Fellowship.

I’m not saying that God is going to put everybody on an airplane and you’re going to go and be a world missionary in some remote part of the world, but I don’t know that it’s not true either.

I don’t want to live in some comfort zone where I think I know what life should look like for me and you think you know what life should look like for you. Friends, we should say, God, we don’t know what life should look like for us unless your Spirit’s got to tell us and if it doesn’t look like the way it does, change it. I can’t have earthly priorities. I can’t say, I want to work these many years and I want to work at this place and I want to have this house and I’ll graduate to this house and I’m saving up for retirement and it’ll look like this. Who knows? Let go of all that and say, Spirit of God, what do you want for me? Do you want me to stay here and live this life? Great. Do you want me to move to Mexico? Do you want me to do that? Lord, you have your way with my life because my life is yours.

And I think we have to get below the surface of witnessing

and stop seeing it as just like a function, like if you’re a Christian, you have to do it. What’s really beneath an effective Christian witness is the presence of love.

Jesus said what? If you love me, you will obey me. If you love me, you will obey me. So it’s not something that we should have to force ourselves to do. It’s something that again, just as God blows like the wind as the Spirit does, Jesus says, and called us to salvation. In the very same way, we should say, Spirit of God, blow like a mighty rushing wind in me and give me a greater love for Christ as you did at the moment of my salvation. So I’ll let go of what life I think I’m supposed to have and let me love you by doing your work and seeing your kingdom come in the hearts and lives of other people as it has in mind. Give me a love for people the way that you have loved me.

A light that can’t be used, a city that can’t be hidden, a city that can’t be passed by. Friends, that’s who God is calling us to be as a local church.

Who, or I should say, what are the priorities of your life?

What are the priorities of your life really?

I think sometimes we just want to exist.

We just want to make it to the end of the day. You know, like, I just want to eat at my favorite restaurant once a week and I’ve got my show that I watch or holidays are coming and we just get in these rhythms and I think the gospel and the kingdom of God and just like Jesus and his kingdom, it just becomes like, oh yeah, it’s like this thing I attach to it all and it’s in the mix and we just need the Holy Spirit to just like hit the reset button and refresh us and go, no, it’s all about Jesus and anything in my life, like these good little pleasures God’s given me, let me part with him if it’s getting in the way of this like radical, radical, faithful life. And again, I’m not preaching to you before I preach to me. I want to live that way. I don’t want to live in a comfort box. I don’t want to live with, you know, my comforts and the things how I want. Like, Lord, teach me, show me, build me up in the Spirit, like set me loose for you.

Are you a world Christian?

Are you a world Christian?

If God isn’t sending you to go, that means we should be sending.

And even as we’re sending, we should first be praying. So I want to encourage you, maybe if you’re thinking about world missions, like your first step in this isn’t to get on a plane and fly to Mexico yet. I want to encourage you just to build the spiritual discipline of praying for the world church, praying for the persecuted church on a daily basis. You know, I email out all the time stuff about India, stuff about Nigeria, there’s plenty of websites where you can find, people are keeping tabs on what’s happening with the church around the world. Pick a country. If you don’t like India and Nigeria, pick your own. There are plenty. And just see how God will change your life when you start investing the sweat of prayer daily in what Jesus is doing in His church around the world. See if you don’t get a big old heart for world missions. See if it doesn’t turn your Western agenda of prosperity into a world mission. And you’re ready to live for the kingdom in a way that you never have before.

I’m so grateful for Send Me a Refuge and that relationship we’ve started to build with Archie and Annette. And I deeply pray that we can continue to support them financially.

I deeply pray and hope we’re able to send more people to go. I do pray that someone among us, the Lord calls you to the mission field and we can say, wow, look how God raised that person up and gave them a passion to go and to be used around the globe. Friends, that’s what God desires to see the church be and do. Do you desire to be the local church? To be on fire for Him?

And as Chris talked about, as we’re not going around the world and the Lord hasn’t said, hey, sell everything and move to Romania. Hey, sell everything, move to China. Let’s be sharing now. Let’s be the local church here. Let’s be evangelizing. Let’s be making a difference. Whether we’re trying to do stuff at the Huntsville Pregnancy Center or we’re going to Big Spring Park like I know some of y’all did a few weeks ago or we’re encouraging one another in our own lives. We’ve got to be a proclaiming, preaching people. You know, one thing I talked to Archie about and it really, it surprised me in a great way. We were riding down the road in this truck and I said, so I said, you know, what would you do if you had to move back to the States? I mean, you know, here you have so many opportunities to share the gospel all the time. I said, like, how, like, what would that look like if you moved home? He said, that’s actually the opposite. He said, I have more opportunities when I come home to America to share the gospel. He said, when I come home from Mexico, I’m not sharing the gospel any less.

So, so, so you see how God has the opportunity everywhere. It’s a question of whether or not you and I see the story is unfolding right now and God desires for us to be part of that. He desires us to be part of it. Do you desire to be part of it? Do you desire to be part of it? Revelation chapter five,

verse nine and 10, it says, and they sang a new song saying, worthy are you to take this scroll and to open its seals for you were slain and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God and they shall reign on the earth.

See, the Bible doesn’t just tell us what has been. It doesn’t just tell us what is. It tells us what will be.

Jesus will come back through the clouds and He will gather all of His people from all the nations and we will worship Jesus forever. You know, so whose story do you want to be a part of? Your story? You might have a little fun, but you’re going to go poof.

God says, hey, be a part of my story. It’s an amazing story and it’s so full of glory and it’s so full of joy and it’s a life that you never ever could have imagined. Knowing God and making God known to live for His glory, to live for His fame. That’s who we want to be as a church. Amen?