To the Ends of the Earth

SERMON: 2008-10-11--ac0805--to-the-ends-of-the-earth-part-2 SOURCE DURATION: 00:26:50.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 1 CONFIDENCE: 1.00 APPROVED: false REASON: The sermon begins clearly with segment [0]. The sermon concludes with segment [274], which is the last spoken content before the sustained acoustic music interval (ending at 00:26:49.940) takes over. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:23:16.980-00:26:49.940 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- I want to begin my message this morning by telling you a little story. Last week we've been looking together at Acts 1 verse 8. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. We saw that the purpose of the Spirit upon was not just to give us liver shivers, not just to make us feel good and self satisfied, but rather to empower us to bear witness to Jesus and that this witness is to go to the ends of the earth beginning at Jerusalem. And you may recall too that some weeks prior to that we were talking about identifying where it is that the Spirit of God is working in the world and then coming alongside him. Well, one of the brothers here who doesn't want me to mention his name, but a brother who's got a real calling and a gifting in evangelism, decided to put that into practice and he told me his story and gave me permission to share it with you this morning. And he tells the story of how once in the afternoon at about 5 o'clock he was lying on his bed and he felt that the Lord wanted him to deliver his word. And he said, "Lord, just tell me where you were working so that I may give it to the right people." And he started his car and he began to drive and he sensed that the Holy Spirit was leading him to downtown Belleville. And as he was walking around downtown Belleville, he came upon an altercation, two young men beating up on a third. Maybe a drug deal gone bad, I don't know. But the fight gets so vicious that at one point one of these two young men took the other one, banged his head against the concrete wall and knocked him out cold. Well, the guy looked dead and our interpret evangelist turned to the Lord and said, "Lord, what do I do now?" And he discovered that all of a sudden it was like the power of the Holy Spirit came upon him. He says, "Suddenly I wasn't afraid of anything and I started going without hesitation towards the unconscious young man. His head had a large bump from where he was hit and he seemed dead. Another man came along, said he had first aid, but he did absolutely nothing. And so while the other two men had long since run away, he laid his hands on this young man, our evangelist did, and he started praying silently, "Lord, help this young man and give him a chance to know you as Lord and Savior." He says, "I put my right hand on his right shoulder and immediately he started to regain consciousness." And he says, "I didn't take my hand from him." Well, in the meantime, as you can imagine, all kinds of people are beginning to gather around. Somebody's calling 911 and among the crowd that is beginning to gather is this young man's girlfriend, 16 or 17 years of age, with a baby in a baby stroller and her mom. And of course, as you can appreciate, they're just freaking out what in the world is going on. Who did this? And things are really starting to get out of control. And so again, our evangelist prays and he says, "Lord, please help me help these people. I don't have any idea how to give you word in this situation." And as the story goes on, pretty soon everybody started to calm down. The young man was now regaining full consciousness and the first thing he did was let out a string of expletives. He said, "Get your blankety-blank-blank-blank hands off me." And he got up and in the meantime, you have two police cruisers pulling up, fire truck and an ambulance. And so one police car goes after the two guys who did this and the other policeman investigates and questions the injured man. And while this is all going on, our evangelist turns to the young girl and her baby and their mother and he says this to them, "Is this your son's baby?" And she said, "Yes, my son came to me this morning and showed me the baby." Well, he said, "I have something for him. Could you please make sure he will read it? And I will put it right here beside his daughter in the stroller." And he says, "I told her it's about Jesus." He put it in the stroller and he told her, "Madam, God bless you." And then he says, "As I was walking away, I prayed this time out loud, 'Lord, I ask you that this man and his girlfriend will read your word, take away his grief, make him conscious about his new baby. I just pray that this young family will have peace and find a place to worship you." And then I love the way that he ends his story to me with these words. Perhaps it would be interesting to mention that the name of the place where this happened is not the Bronx, New York, Miami, Los Angeles, or even Toronto, but downtown Front Street, Belleville, about three kilometers and three minutes by car from 100 College Street. But it was at 100 College Street in Belleville where I was first challenged, asking the Lord on that Sunday, "Take me to give your word to where you are working." And he says, "I'm positive there are a lot more young people in this city full of hate because of the ignorance of your word. That's what happens when you step out in obedience to the Holy Spirit." Now I'd love to be able to tell you the man got converted on the spot. Everybody knelt down the pavement and the sidewalk and gave glory to Jesus. But those things only happen in other people's stories, as you know. Reality is seldom that way. And not everybody has equally the gift of evangelism that this particular brother has. The gift of evangelism is given to certain people to give to the church to do precisely these kinds of things. But I tell you the story this morning because it's an illustration of what happens when in obedience to the Holy Spirit we become witnesses to Jesus beginning at Jerusalem, going to Judea, Samaria, and to the uttermost ends of the earth. And while not all of us are called to be evangelists in this sense of the word, we certainly are all called one way or the other to bear witness to Jesus. In the time that remains then, I want to talk just briefly about how do we do this? How do we do this? How can we sharpen our own willingness, our own skill to recognize the working of the Holy Spirit and then to be His hands and to be His feet and to sometimes share in the joy of bringing in the harvest? Remember, some people sow, some people water, some people harvest. Sometimes we're the sowers, sometimes we're the waterers, sometimes we're the harvesters. It's a lot more fun to harvest, but you can't harvest without the sowing. Well, it starts, I believe, with this. We need to know who Jesus is. That is to say, we must know experientially that He is God's answer to everything that ails the human race. It's not just enough to know that He lived and died. That's where it starts. It's an important part. But what gave the disciples such courage to go to the ends of the world was because they knew that they knew that they knew that God had raised Him from the dead and that this Jesus could solve the problems of all the human race. And you and I, we need to experience that reality, and that's one of the functions of the Holy Spirit. We can only bear witness to Jesus to the degree to which we know that He's alive and real. And one of the things that you and I can do, and you see it all the time in the New Testament, is say, "Lord, grant me Your Holy Spirit. Open my eyes. Give me a revelation of who Jesus is." Because one encounter with Jesus is more powerful than going to church your whole life and hearing stories about Jesus. So we need to know who Jesus is, and then we need to learn how to bear witness to Him. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. And that doesn't mean we're all going to be street evangelists. It doesn't mean we get in our cars on Sunday afternoon and say, "Lord, where do you want me to go and how do you want me to witness?" But it does mean that in the practical realities of life, we learn to speak into situations as we recognize the work of God's Holy Spirit on the go. And so you're sitting at your kitchen table drinking coffee with your neighbor, and she spills her heart. How unhappy she is perhaps in her marriage, how difficult her children are, and you're listening all the time, "Lord, what are you doing in this situation? Is there a place that I can step into?" And when you sense that the moment is right, you say, "Let me tell you about Jesus. Let me tell you what He did in my life. Let me tell you what He did historically, and let me tell you what He can do for you." Or you're dealing with a colleague at work, and again, there is a great deal of unhappiness. Or maybe he just thinks he's got the world by the tail, but you know that all his bravado and all his carrying on is really just a cover-up for deep underlying issues of pain. And you say, "Lord, how can I bring Jesus into this situation? How can I show him that there's somebody who cares, and that there is somebody who is the solution to his need?" And you know what's fascinating about that? It's not our job to make somebody believe or to bring them to faith. It's wonderful when it happens, and it's wonderful when we're sort of at the end of that whole cycle, but our job is just to bear witness to Jesus. Our job is to testify that He's the one ordained by God to judge the living and the dead, and that He is the one who restores us to God and who restores us to the blessings of God. And once we do that, we will discover, and this is my third point then, what we discover is that Jesus bears witness to our testimony to His name. We need to expect the Lord to confirm His word with signs and wonders. One of my favorite stories, and a lot of you have heard me tell this before, many years ago Charles Spurgeon, famous English preacher in the middle 1800s, was approached by a young preacher student who said, "I preach and I give it my everything, and I seem to be getting no response from the congregation." And so Spurgeon, in his wisdom, turns to him and he says, "Well, surely you don't expect somebody to be converted every time you preach." And the young man sort of sputtered and he said, "Well, I guess not." Charles Spurgeon said, pointing his finger at him, "That, my friend, is your problem." Because whenever we proclaim Jesus in the anointing and the authority of God's Holy Spirit, we should expect God to be working, and we should expect God to be changing people's lives. If I thought for one moment that I stand here Sunday after Sunday just making a lot of hot air, keeping you in your little religious cycle, forget it, I would have quit a long time ago. But the word of God is living and active, powerful, it separates spirit from soul and bone from marrow, and wherever it finds a fertile soil, eventually it will take root and bear fruit, Isaiah, I believe it was, said many years ago, "My word will not return to me, void." And the alternate ending to Mark's gospel summarizes the words of Jesus to the disciples and he says, "Mark does, and the disciples went out and preached everywhere and the Lord worked with them and confirmed His word by the signs that accompanied it." And my experience has been that while the Lord is very hesitant to show His power and His glory to people who are just curiosity seekers and who just want Him to play a game with God, so to speak, the Lord is incredibly gracious to those whose hearts are hungry and to those who earnestly are desirous of truth. And in more ways than you can imagine, God will show up in that person's life as a result of your witness, and if not immediately, then sometimes many years later, that word will bear fruit. We didn't have a chance to do this last week, but I wanted to introduce you last week to one of my early spiritual mentors. It's a man by the name of Jake, Jake Redyk, I discovered in more recent years as Brother to Peter. Now I know Jake from years ago in Grand Rapids when we were involved in the early days of the Catholic Charismatic Movement. And he was part of a group that, you know, we periodically met together and we spoke about things. And the reason that Jake stands out so much in my mind is that in one of those Bible studies or one of those little get-togethers when we were talking, he turned to me at one point and he says, "It would appear to me that the Lord has given you the gift of teaching." First person who ever said that to me, and it resonated with my soul, and I thank him to this day for the role that he played in my life. You never know what God will use in somebody's life because you're speaking into it by the power of God's Holy Spirit. So we need to know who Jesus is, we need to learn how to bear witness to Him, we need to expect the Lord to bear witness to us, and then of course we need to develop a global vision. Remember again how Scripture puts it, "You will be my witnesses" where? In Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria and to the ends of the earth. If Jerusalem is your home base and Judea is next door and Samaria is somebody else's culture and somebody else's location, perhaps further removed from you, and the ends of the earth literally global in nature, then the mission of the church is in ever increasing circles to proclaim the good news of the Lord Jesus Christ. We talk a lot these days about global village, global economic meltdown, we talk about global economy increasingly, a global culture, people far across the other end of the world are listening to the same popular music and being entertained by the same kind of media as we are today. But I want you to know that long before global became popular and became a reality through the means of communication that we have established today, the gospel and the church was already global. And I love the way Russ Blowers, a preacher who last year went on to be with the Lord, put it a number of years ago when he was invited to speak at his local Indianapolis Rotary Club. Here's how he put it, he said hello my name is Russ Blowers, I'm with a global enterprise, we have branches in every country in the world, we have representatives in nearly every parliament and boardroom on earth, we're into motivation and behavior alteration, we run hospitals, feeding stations, crisis pregnancy centers, universities, publishing houses and nursing homes, we care for our clients from birth until death, we're into life insurance and fire insurance, we perform spiritual heart transplants, our original organizer owns all the real estate on earth plus an assortment of galaxies and constellations, he knows everything and lives everywhere, our product is free for the asking, there's not enough money to buy it, our CEO was born in Hicktown, worked as a carpenter, didn't own a home, was misunderstood by his family and hated by his enemies, walked on water, was condemned to death without a trial, and arose from the dead, I talk with him every day. How's that? For a global vision. The Holy Spirit always gives the church a global vision and locally how do we do that? We do that by being engaged in evangelism in our community and you'll see more initiatives I'm sure as time goes on and the Lord raises up more evangelists in our midst, I think this brother that I just talked about is one such person. We do that by engaging with other churches in inter-community kinds of outreach ventures, we do that by sharing with other churches in this classes and in Classes Eastern Canada in the sponsoring of the Seaway Ministry Montreal or Geneva House in Kingston at Queen's University, church plants, supporting the work of missions both local and international and of course as we took the offering this morning for Christian Reformed World Relief. The church, if you were to add up what the church does for society in bearing witness to Jesus in word and indeed is incredible and we're all invited to be part of that, we're not all called I believe to travel to the ends of the earth, we're not all called to beat on doors and we're not all called to be evangelists in that sense of the word, we are all called to be part of the body of Christ and the body of Christ collectively through the people God appoints engages in that kind of ministry. Now one of the ways in which we do that is through our internet ministry and I had hoped we'd be able to have Gabe here this morning to walk us through that, we've not been able to pull that off and perhaps we'll need to come back to that at another point but you know that in our grand opening we had fifty people online around the world tuning into our services here and if you have a family member that wants to watch a wedding or a funeral or see what happens in these services it's as close to them as our internet connection and the video streaming that we do and while there are all kinds of downsides to the internet and all kinds of opportunity for wickedness and for sin and everything else the fact remains like all technology it can actually be redeemed and used for the Lord so if you get a chance take a look at our webpage there is an incredible pile of stuff on it and if you're on vacation or if you're traveling and you have access to an online connection you don't have to miss the action here because you can tune in and we are now thanks to Gabe's efforts in the last year or so operating with a state of the art technology that is getting better and better all the time. So how do we fulfill our mission? We say Lord Jesus make yourself real to me, Lord Jesus help me to see those moments those opportunities when I need to be speaking about you, confirm what I say by signs and wonders so that I know that I'm on the right track and Lord increase my heart burden me not just for my own family not just for my neighbors next door but give me truly a global vision because you see Jesus cannot come back Jesus will not come back until all the nations of the world all the ethnic groups have had an opportunity to deal with the claims of Jesus Christ. [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:23:16.980; remove through 00:26:50.000] Jesus [CUT] hope of the nations, Jesus comfort for all who mourn, you are the source of Heaven's light on earth, Jesus light in the darkness, Jesus to live in circumstance, you are the source of Heaven's light on earth, in history you lived and died you broke the chains you rose to life, you are the hope living in us, you are the rock in whom we trust, you are the light shining for all the world to see, you rose from the dead, conquered in fear, our Prince of Peace drawing us near, Jesus our hope, living for all who will receive what we believe, Jesus hope of the nations, Jesus comfort for all who mourn, you are the source of Heaven's light on earth, Jesus light in the darkness, Jesus to live in circumstance, you are the source of Heaven's light on earth, in history you lived and died you broke the chains you rose to life, you are the hope living in us, you are the rock in whom we trust, you are the light shining for all the world to see, you rose from the dead, conquered in fear, our Prince of Peace drawing us near, Jesus our hope, living for all who will receive what we believe, in history you lived and died you broke the chains you rose to life, you are the hope living in us, you are the rock in whom we trust, you are the light shining for all the world to see, you rose from the dead, conquered in fear, our Prince of Peace drawing us near, Jesus our hope, living for all who will receive what we believe, what we believe, what we believe, what we believe. 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