Breaking Cultural Barriers

SERMON: 2010-01-17--ac1040--breaking-cultural-barriers SOURCE DURATION: 00:51:47.000 PROPOSED CUTS: 2 CONFIDENCE: 0.95 APPROVED: false REASON: Candidates 0 through 14 contain continuous spoken material (likely a benediction or concluding thought). Candidate 15 is explicitly labeled as [Music], marking the clear transition from sermon content to non-sermon material. Therefore, candidate 14 is the last token belonging to the sermon. Acoustic segmentation found sustained music at the start and end edge and moved the boundary to the adjacent transcript segment. ACOUSTIC EVIDENCE: available ACOUSTIC MUSIC INTERVALS: 00:05:36.200-00:05:43.000, 00:05:46.740-00:05:50.240, 00:05:54.600-00:06:00.220, 00:06:07.820-00:06:10.940, 00:37:58.900-00:38:04.380, 00:46:59.100-00:51:46.240 ACOUSTIC SPEECH OVERLAP: yes ACOUSTIC BOUNDARIES APPLIED: start, end Inline CUT markers identify each proposed audio boundary after the relevant word. --- ORIGINAL TRANSCRIPT WITH PROPOSED CUTS MARKED --- [PROPOSED CUT 1 START at 00:00:00.000; remove through 00:05:43.000] [CUT] Well, I thought last week we were done with Acts chapter 2 verse 47, but in the course of the week I felt rather strongly there was an additional message the Lord wants me to share with you. So let's read one more time then, Acts chapter 2 verse 47. The Lord added to the number, this is the early church, daily those who were being saved. This church was a happening place because God was there and people's lives were being changed. Now in addition to that passage, to set the stage for what we're going to talk about this morning, one additional scripture passage from 1 Corinthians chapter 9. I alluded to this last week. This is Paul talking about his freedom as an apostle. He says, "Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible. To the Jews, I became like a Jew to win the Jews. To those under the law, I became like one under the law, though I myself am not under the law, so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law, I became like one not having the law, though I am not free from God's law, but I'm under Christ's law, so as to win those not having the law." And then he sums it all up, "To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men, so that by all means possible I might save some." Well, I want to pick up this morning where we left off last week, and if you were here last week, you might recall that we were talking about the fact that if the Church is to grow numerically, then it has to employ a two-fold evangelistic strategy. It has to employ the strategy of attractional ministry, and it has to employ the strategy of being missional. Attractional, as the word implies and as we saw last week, means that people are attracted to the Church and to the Lord. And as I've said repeatedly, don't ever underestimate how attractive a life lived in relationship with God, or how attractive life lived in Christian community can be to the world if it is lived in humility and in repentance. And one of the reasons we built this building, you will recall, on this location, in the way in which it is constructed, is to serve as an attraction to the community. And one of the reasons we put a lot of effort and energy into facilitating community events in this place is to help people to come through the door and to break down barriers. That doesn't lead them to faith in Christ, necessarily, but it reduces the obstacles so that hopefully, as they come to a service or as they come to a special event, they can be confronted by Jesus and by His Word, and their lives will be changed. I dare say many of us here have become Christians or have deepened our Christian walk, because somewhere along the line, we saw modeled in somebody's life something that attracted us to Jesus. Is that not true? Let me do a little tally on this. How many of you here would say that is true of you? How many of you would say you've grown in your relationship with Christ because you saw something in somebody that drew you? You've grown in your relationship with Christ. Look at those hands. How important is the attractional is, we saw last week, it alone is not enough. We also need to be missional, and to be missional means that we go to where the people are. Attraction is limited in whom you can attract. You're limited to geography. You're limited to language and to culture. There are whole people groups who will never darken the door of a church, who will never hear about Jesus, because they live in their own world or in their own subculture. And so, it is mission that Jesus mandates to the church in Matthew chapter 28, when He says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me, therefore go and make disciples of all nations." It's not enough to attract. The other wing of the bird of mission is to go. And in order to go means you step into a different world, a different culture, and that means breaking down cultural barriers. You can't expect people to understand our language. We need to learn to speak their language. And just to set the stage for that, as we talk about that this morning, a little video clip, a lot of you will have seen this before. It's called "Real Christians of Genius." Let's play that now. >> Real Christians of Genius. >> Real Christians of Genius. >> [CUT] Today we salute you, Mr. Christian-y speaking person. [PROPOSED CUT 1 END at 00:05:43.000; resume after this marked segment] >> Mr. Christian-y speaking person. When conventional wisdom said no one can understand what you're communicating, you dared to prove them wrong. >> Dared to prove them wrong. >> You knew your neighbor didn't know words like trinity, salvation, and eschatology, but you overused them anyway. When people told you what they believed, you had the guts to laugh in their face and wish them luck and everlasting retribution. So stand proud, chosen one, yea, though your words confuse the masses, thou knoweth what thy meaning. >> Thou knoweth what thy meaning. >> You gotta love that little clip. It's not only cleverly done, but it really captures the need to break down cultural barriers, to step into the world, and to speak their language. Now, a good many years ago, a missiologist, that is a person who is an expert in missions, a missiologist by the name of Ralph Winter, developed a conceptual model to help us understand what these barriers are and how they need to be broken down. It's a slide called Cultural Distance. I've modified his original thing a little bit, but it's very simple. Each of the Bs there represents a barrier to effective gospel communication, and each increasing number represents an additional barrier. So B0 is the people right around you, people who speak your language, who are part of your culture. B1 could be a group of people who do not share your language. B3 can be culture or history and so on. And the beauty of this, in all of its simplicity, is that it applies not only to foreign missions and foreign cultures and foreign nations, but it also applies to the separate subcultures and groups that we have in our own culture. Let me take just a moment or two and walk you through what each of these categories might look like in our own world. First of all, you have B0 to B1. Those would be people with some concept of Christianity who speak the same language as you do, have similar interests, are probably of the same nationality, and are from a class grouping similar to you or your churches. Most of your friends would probably fit into this bracket. The people you invite to services and who say yes are typically people who will fall into this category. The people that is a church we draw to Christ are people typically who have some knowledge of the gospel, who have a hunger for God, who understand some of our concepts and some of our language, and who are helped in their journey with God. Nothing wrong with that. This is starting missional work in Jerusalem, Jerusalem being home base in biblical language. Second group then, B1 to B2, this would be your average non-Christian. A person who has little real awareness of or interest in Christianity, but is suspicious of the church. They've heard bad things. I know that's hard for us to believe, but it happens. These people may be politically correct, socially aware, and even open to spirituality though, not necessarily biblical spirituality. May also include those previously offended by a bad experience of the church or Christians. Just go to your average local pub, bar, or nightclub to find these folks. People you work with, people you rub shoulders with, but who will not darken the door of a church except maybe for a funeral or a wedding, likely not even for Christmas or Easter, are people who fall into that category, and there are tons of those around each one of us. How many of you here would say that you know people that fall into that category? Let me just see a show of hands. Look at the evangelistic opportunities that we have. You already have the opportunity. Then the next group, of course, the third group, B2 to B3, people who have no idea about the Christian faith. They are perhaps part of an ethnic group with an entirely different religion or part of a fringy subculture. May also include people who feel marginalized by waspy Christianity, white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, which is what many, though not all of us, are. A marginalized community like that would include the gay community, for example. This group will definitely include people who are actively antagonistic towards Christianity, as they understand it. The group here will be smaller, but let me see a show of hands. How many of you think you know people who would belong to a subculture group like that? You see, the distance culturally is becoming greater, and the relationships that we have with them are lesser. And then, of course, there is the fourth group. This category, B3 to B4, might include ethnic and religious groupings that are historically very antagonistic to the gospel, such as, for example, the Muslim or the Jewish community, both of which have historical reasons to be suspicious. Both history and culture get in the way of a meaningful conversation. This category is often highly resistant to the gospel. Again, how many of us would have connections here? Far fewer, again. So you get the picture. The cultural barriers remove us further and further. We have less contact, less opportunity, and therefore much less success in reaching into these subcultures, because we have increasingly little in common. Now here's the thing I want us to understand. Not only does this apply to cultures around the world, but as our own communities become increasingly multi-ethnical or multi-cultural, and as our society as a whole becomes increasingly secular, what happens is that those barriers begin to increase. The cultural distance increases in proportion to the degree to which the Protestant ethic, if you will, is diminished in our society. You can see this, for example, in the public school system. There was a day when the public school system in Ontario was really the Protestant version of the Roman Catholic school system. You had the Lord's Prayer, you had Bible reading, you even had Bible classes, unimaginable today, because over recent years that has been increasingly removed from our public school setting. And so as society drifts away from biblical values, it is harder and harder for us to communicate the gospel because we don't speak the same language. That's why for all the talk about pro-life or all the talk about a whole set of values that most of Christian community holds very dear, we're not even being heard anymore because the underlying philosophical presuppositions are very different. And so just to drive that home, I've asked Beth Rigdonhill to do a little team teaching with me this morning. Beth has been teaching in the public school system now for 13 years and as a teacher for 25 years. Beth has a very keen insight into what's happening in this school setting because sometimes culture drifts away from us like the frog in the kettle in ways that we can't even begin to imagine. And then we wonder, how come all of a sudden this gap is so big? So I've asked her to talk a little bit about her insights into what's happening in the school system, recognizing that what you find in the schools today, you're going to find in the rest of society tomorrow. So preach it sister. When I was asked to share the trends that I see in the public system and in our culture, I knew I had to be careful because as we get older, I think there's a tendency to resist change and we see changes around us from when we were younger, and some of those things bug us. For example, I don't like when men wear ball caps indoors. I'd rather see a bald head with eyes than a cap with a chin under it. I brought some examples that you might be able to identify with. This is The Good Wife's Guide from 1955. It was published in Good Housekeeping. It says, "Have dinner ready wives, a good meal is part of the warm welcome needed by your husband when he comes home." And then I contrasted that with a 21st century copy, like a guide for wives, and it says, "Have a look at him when he comes home. Are you happy to see him? If not, have another drink." The old guide says, "Catering for his comfort will provide you with immense personal satisfaction. Show sincerity in your desire to please him. Remember, his topics of conversation are more important than yours." The 21st century guide said, "Listen to him. Listen hard. Is he talking?" The old guide said, "Arrange his pillow and offer to take his shoes." The 21st century guide said, "Don't worry about making him comfortable. Give him the remote control." The old guide said, "Remember, he is the master of the house and as such will always exercise his will with fairness and truthfulness. You have no right to question him. A good wife always knows her place." So, that's not long before I was born and that is very different than now, would you agree? At least in attitude. Then there's some other changes that kind of sneak up on us. Here are some Canadian statistics I was surprised by. 80% of homes in Canada are one or two child homes. 60% of women work outside the home. Some statistical norms, females start menstruation now between 8 and 10 years old and the first sexual experience now is about 16. 70% of children by the age of 13 leave organized sports and 25% of Canadian children are considered obese, one quarter of our children. 44% of the age group that is 20 to 29 years old still live at home. If you live in Toronto, it's 57% which would also include some ethnic and religious backgrounds where extended family stays living together. But it still is a lot higher than what I thought that it was. When you ask me what trends I see in the culture that I encounter, it's so big and so significant the ways that Satan is claiming our young before they get much of a choice. It's a much deeper and more alarming rate than some of us know or want to face. In my experience, 90% of my students don't know the Christian difference between Easter and Christmas or they're oblivious of any choice they have between our meaning of life with Christ and the world's meaning without Christ. When I was young, non-Christians knew what they were denying. Most of my students only know Jesus' name as a swear word and so a lot of them think Jesus must have been a really bad guy because people use his name when they're mad with other horrible words. There's a difference in phrasing over the years. No longer do kids say I don't want to get in trouble, instead they say I don't want you to get me in trouble even though they've done something wrong. No longer do I hear people say that was wrong as a reason to make a good decision. That would be wrong and I won't do it. I almost never hear that. I live in a day and age where there is no right and wrong and so adults need a softer way to reason their expectations on children's behaviors. Instead of hearing the word obey, I hear words like you should, okay, there's a question after it or let's cooperate. There's a difference between obey and cooperate. They're on the same continuum but there's a difference. I never hear that's a lie, instead I hear that's not what I remember or what I saw. These are some of the areas and there are so many areas and so I've chosen to really focus in on family life. Some of the trends I'm seeing in family life are that children are either in inconvenience or parents who care have little idea how to raise their children. Don't get me wrong, I see wonderful, healthy families that have their problems like anybody would but I see a lot higher percentage of families where these things I've mentioned are happening. Parenting has always included the quality of love which is sacrifice. I've seen a huge change where it seems that your freedom to choose as a parent doesn't include the choice of sacrifice. Many children are learning that the choice to do nothing still deserves a reward and I've been asked to share some experiences and examples. There's much higher incidence of split families now. I've had years where two of my 25 students had both biological parents in the home, two out of 25. And two ideas I see more common now, children have attitudes that the earth revolves around trying to make them happy because two parents are fighting about getting the child's favour or children who feel they're abandoned and they mean nothing. I had a boy who came to school almost every day with no breakfast. He had a banana in a plastic bag and that was it for the day. We have breakfast club, I think it's three days a week and it's always packed with kids. These children never eat with their family in the morning. There are snack bins in every classroom. These kids walk to school, they do not go home for lunch. They have no lunch and they have no breakfast. A lot of families can't afford shoes. There's no hats, mitts, boots on winter days. The zippers on coats don't work and a lot of kids are not cared for with the clothing they do have. I had a girl who wore the same clothing every day for two weeks and I am sorry I had to leave it for two weeks but I had to record what I see because I had to report this to CAS. But she wore these clothes day and night and she smelled so badly that I couldn't stand within eight feet of her without being overwhelmed. There's a boy who came to school with no socks in his boots, just his bare feet in the middle of winter. I told him where I'd left some socks for him in a place he could get to them when he wanted and he could put the dirty ones there and I'd wash them, keep them there for him. And I got a note the next day from his mother telling me to mind my own business. A colleague reported to me that students are coming to school without sleeping much and I see that too. The kids are really cranky. They've watched TV or played video games for a lot of the night. There's been arguing in their homes and they couldn't sleep. The police have been called. This happens a lot. The Canadian Pediatric Society says that the average child spends more time watching TV than sleeping. On top of all of this insecurity and challenge that kids have to deal with, the incidence of anaphylactic allergies is way up. There's a bulletin board at our school with plastic bags with EpiPens and the bulletin boards covered, there's like 10 students in our school who have a life-threatening allergy. There's a lot of emotional and the development of the children's hearts is really being stunted and assaulted as well. I didn't know when I started teaching that I would be teaching broken hearts. When I spoke to some colleagues about this, one of them said that imagine the worst that you can imagine and that won't be it, you will have to go further. You couldn't read about it without thinking that it must be made up, what a lot of our kids are going through. Some things I see from that emotional bruising is that many kids don't make eye contact unless they're told to. I have students who come to school, I have a few every year who to me are like emotional zombies. They can't do any learning because they're in this emotionally induced comatose state and I don't know how to describe it. It sounds severe but it is. Their minds aren't there. There are children who talk out loud because they can't think internally and that's a character trait of somebody who's younger but not 10 years old. A lot of kids have stunted language development, their delays and slurs and something I noticed more lately is volume problems. Kids who speak so softly and it's very hard to get them to speak up and there's not a lot of financial support. They may see a speech therapist once a week for 20 minutes or half an hour. It may be because children grow up in groups nowadays. I've looked for ways to figure this out. All their day is part of a group for some of them and so they're not always with a qualified caregiver or an attentive person who would be as attentive as their parent might be. I don't mean to criticize daycare. I know that it's necessary in our society but not all daycare has qualified people and sometimes there are large groups of kids together. In the past with large families the children would be all different ages and so the developmental needs were staggered for the kids but now the children are often the same age group together. Another thing I see is that adults think that the way they think as an adult is the way children think. I saw a mother walking along the road with her very, very small child and because the child couldn't walk at the pace of the mother, the mother yelled at the child. What are you supposed to do if you can't walk that fast? I've been in movies where children were crying, begging their parents to let them leave the movie because it was too scary and the parents said, "No, you need to stay. It's just make believe." But children don't have the brain development to understand the differences between make believe and real when they're very young and it takes a while for them to figure those things out and they know it's wrong and their conscience is being bruised and their fear is being developed that this world isn't a safe place. I've overheard or I've been a part of conversations where people were speaking of very delicate things within earshot of kids that those kids should not have heard and adults think, "Well, they're busy doing something else or they're just on the other side of the room. They won't hear and yet I know that those children are hearing the messages of what those words are." Other family things, parents are dating by moving in with each other and that's part of the dating process. There's a lot of family instability where children gain new siblings, they've got new brothers and sisters, they just start trying to figure out how to cope with that and find their place in the new family and they get somewhat adjusted and then they lose those siblings because someone moves on. I had a student once who made a Father's Day gift and he asked, "What name should he put on the gift?" I was thinking he meant which father's name and he said, "No, I want to know which name I should put on because the different fathers in my home each call me a different name." And there were six fathers at that time. I was thankful that God put one little student in my class, he shared the same birthday as I did so he made a big deal of it and then I found out that in his home they didn't acknowledge his birthday in any way, nothing. And there are religions who have that worked into their process of thinking but this child just was ignored even on his special day which was one day a year. I have children who are often abandoned by their parents and their grandparents look after them. I have a student whose mother abandoned the home very suddenly, a while later she came back, got reconnected and again abandoned suddenly the child and he's been told that if he's a good boy and does his homework then he'll be allowed to see his dad and if he's really good then his dad may get custody of him. A lot of kids are afraid of foster care that if the adults get mad at me then I'll be given away and it'll last forever. One mom said to me, "I gave my daughter to my mother, the grandmother, the child because the child's so hard to handle." And she said that in front of the child and the child's eight years old. I had a student misbehaving all day, I didn't know what was going on, the only chance I had to go to the office was at the end of the day and I wanted to find out if there's something I should know or something I could do to help this child and I found out at the end of the day that this child lived with his parents and an uncle and he was very close to this uncle who lived in their home and the night before the uncle committed suicide and that child came to school and I didn't know it all day. And sometimes the school's very busy and they don't have a chance to let me know and I try to be understanding of other people's perspectives. I wish I had known and that's a big responsibility for me, for the teachers, besides the fact that we're supposed to teach them to read and do their math and learn their social studies at the same time they're dealing with all of these things. It's so hard for kids to develop properly when the risks in their lives are so big and there's no hope of safety. There was a boy who took a skipping rope to the end of the schoolyard by the trees and he tried to hang himself with the rope. I was on duty at the time and before I go in I always just make an eye scan of the yard and I noticed something going on way in the back so my class had to wait and I went out and this is what he was doing. I see a lot of changes in parenting. We know that parenting is about equipping our kids with skills to cope and to manage life and the risks of living and I witnessed many cases where this is underdone and overdone. Because of the breakdown in the family, I've noticed too that marriage now seems to be more about a party than about a relationship and it's not that people aren't staying together and living together but they are living together first and then they have a marriage as a way to have a big party and celebrate and I saw my marriage very differently. It was a day of commitment and it was a day of a decision to love and there's all these differences just in that alone that affects how family life goes and it just makes a big difference on the direction and the future of the family. Often there's no expectation at all that marriage means that you will live together for a lifetime. In fact, that notion of living with one person for a whole life is seen as immature. You're silly if you think you can be with one person for a whole lifetime. What a difference from when I was in grade seven and eight and I had a huge school of fourteen classes and out of all the kids that I knew, I only knew one child whose parents were divorced. I see many parents who are giving no discipline to their children because they want to be favored over the other parent, some don't know how to discipline, some don't want to discipline too early but if it's not too early then a lot of times it's too late. Often discipline is yelling at a child, just yelling at them and that's supposed to mean that they'll change what they're doing. There's no alternatives given, there's no instruction given, it's just this huge loud blast at this little child and I see that over and over again. There are two discipline expectations in the mom's home and in the dad's home and sometimes those can be outright opposite so it's hard for the kids to realize that there's an absolute truth in the universe because what they do in one home is disciplined and in the other home it isn't, right and wrong can be changed. A lot of these problems are compounded by the composition of families. There's a family that I know where I met the mother when she was with one man, she had a son with that man, she'd been married before and had two sons with previous relationships, that man left and a new man moved in, he had six children with other women, he had many relationships as well before this relationship when I knew the couple, one of their children died, one of their children was on drugs, she married that second man that I knew when I knew her, it's hard to even explain it. He fooled around with her friend and then he left and within a few weeks another man had moved in who also had a child. So who do you visit at Christmas and who do you contact for Father's Day? It's just so complicated, it's so full of pain too. We have students who are shocked because we're married or because I come from a family of six, I have three brothers and two sisters and they're all from the same dad, it's not even normal for a lot of the kids. You've probably heard of friends with privileges, this is something that is a reality even on the staff of schools and there are teachers having babies when they're not married and these are the people who are teaching the kids about family life and how to date and how relationships and there's a big contrast there between what Christ has given us as guidelines to live by, to do what's right for him. There's a big loss of commitment, not just in relationships but in activities that people do. There's a very low level of involvement by a lot of kids, there's no drive and no follow through for activities, there's always been a problem with homework. But in the first three months of school in my classroom 50% of the students had one to ten outstanding assignments of homework, 23% had over 20 incompletes and three had more than 30 incompletes and that's just for three months of school. Some kids come to school at morning recess so they've missed the whole first block of school which is two hours and this happens on a daily basis. Some kids will miss 15 days of school which is the legal limit until you are reported. The child will come back for one day and then be gone again for 15 days. Parents aren't as involved in education, I have a class of 30, there have been years when I've had two parent teacher interviews unless I contacted the people. This year I've had six unless I made personal calls to families which I do. Some families are over planned, I just saw yesterday on a program that two thirds of British children ages 8 to 12 have never played outside on their own, two thirds. So these kids don't have a lot of free time, they are scheduled for all different activities so there's a big challenge with kids being overstressed by their lives being over planned. When kids don't play together they lose the opportunity to learn things like negotiation and compromise because a lot of these activities they're scheduled for are supervised by adults who are telling them what to do at each step of the way. So the kids don't learn how to solve problems on their own, think of alternatives on their own, prepare for future uncertainties, do conflict resolution that a lot of kids do when they're out climbing trees in the backyard. There is so much, kids move so much, there's one teacher told me that she was with a class of 25 kindergarten children, she was at the same school until they got to grade 5 and only three of those original 25 were still at that school, the rest of them had moved. One grade one student had moved seven times in grade one. My school has a 30% turnover every year, 30% new students in and kids out. There's a whole realm of media and how media has taken over so much of our kids lives. Kids find refuge in the pleasure of the media and in the aesthetic quality of forgetting their own lives because they're in the lives of what they see on TV and in movies. We know that communities raise children and the media is now the community for a lot of kids. The media is the family and the teacher and what they're watching are the values that they're learning and kids repeat the stuff to me that they've seen on television as authority on how to treat other people and what Sponge Bob says about how people get along and what relationships are about. I've read enough time and I know that there are good marriages and it's also down what I've said and I want you to know that there's such a sincere need for Christ, it's so hard to go to work every day when the heart of Christ is in you and you want to reach out to these families. So I ask that you pray for the teachers in the schools and pray that God would really pour his love out to the community and there are things we can do, there are ways we can get involved and I think once we hear some of the things that are going on out there we have to decide like now that we know when we see the pain that's out there, the heart of God will reach through us to the kids that are out there and as Pastor John said the future that's going to come out of all of this, thanks very much. Now lest you think that Beth's school or situation is unique, let me assure you that it is not. I was talking to my sister Willie who is visiting with her husband Brom this weekend and also last weekend she is a supply teacher at a junior high in PEI. The school has a hundred and eighty students, out of those hundred and eighty students the office has files on eighty of them, you know what that means, almost half those kids have either learning problems or behavior problems and as Beth says we can lament the situation as well we want to but we can also recognize that there is a whole mission field right in front of our noses that the Lord might well call us to step into and in the few minutes that remain let me just walk you very quickly through three steps where you and I can make a difference in this world today. First thing that I think we need to do is we need to ask the Lord for wisdom as to what direction to step into, I find it fascinating in the New Testament that when Jesus gives the great commission to the disciples they don't just all run out to be busy about the work of the kingdom, no they wait in Jerusalem as He instructed them to wait for the Holy Spirit and then as they listen to the Holy Spirit they step out in obedience and so in Acts chapter 10 we have Peter being led to Cornelius' house, the Gentile and you and I can begin to believe the huge cultural shift that took place in the church when the Gentiles were included as a people of faith and then of course in Acts chapter 13 we have that passage where the Apostle Paul and a number of the other prophets they were worshiping the Lord and fasting and the Holy Spirit said, "Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them" and that is the beginning of world missions. How do you discern what your call is? It's usually a combination of your passion, your gifting and the circumstances in which you find yourself and one of the things I'd like you to think about and pray about in terms of your own life is where does my heart beat? When I hear stories like Beth was sharing or when I see what happens with my co-workers or in my family or in the relationships that I have, what makes my heart beat faster? What gets me going not only but what are the gifts that I bring to the table and what are the opportunities that the Lord is presenting? In the context of community that is a place then where we can discern the Lord's call and that is a place that we can step into. Second quick observation is this, having discerned the will of God in these places we need to step out in faith. I love that verse as you know in Joshua 1.9, "Have I not commanded you be strong and courageous, do not be terrified, do not be discouraged for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go." Our tendency of course is always to say I'm under qualified, I don't have the skills, I don't have the abilities, somebody else can do a much better job. That may or may not be true but when Jesus said to the disciples in the context of the great commission, "I am with you always even to the end of the age," that's precisely what he means. And hard it is for Beth to go to school every morning to let her light shine in that place as it is for some of you others who are teachers particularly in the public school system though Christian school systems are not immune to these problems either. You will know that when you are in the place of your calling there is an anointing of the Holy Spirit that comes along that gives you the ability to step into these places to really make a difference and that's true for every last one of us. The mission fields are right at our doorstep, it's your neighbors, it's your family, it's the people you work with and all you and I need to do is to try to listen a little bit to what the Holy Spirit is saying, what makes our heart beat and we need to learn to follow those impulses. And you never know what a difference you can make. Sometimes a single word, sometimes a single smile, most people are dying for somebody to just love them, hear them out and know they matter. In a world that is filled with all kinds of evolutionary thought, what happens to most people is that they get lost in the shuffle and they don't know that anybody really cares. And what a place for you and me to show the love of God. Very quickly, step number three I would recommend is live authentically. Scripture says love must be sincere, hate what is evil, cling to what is good. Sincere means without wax, it means not covering up the flaws. Our tendency is to think sometimes that we can only give a witness if our lives are really all together and so we have to hide our failures. All that does is number one raises a barrier for people because they can't identify with our supposed togetherness. And number two, what happens is we're not able to connect with them in their places and in their pockets of pain. All they see is the hypocrisy because they usually see through the wax. And I don't mean let it all hang out, but own our failures, be honest about where we find ourselves, show authentic love and authentic concern and again the world is dying to meet us there because they don't know any other life. And then I may have to come back to this in more detail at a later point, expect opposition. Remember the words I spoke to you, no servant is greater than his master. If they persecuted me, they will also persecute you. If they obeyed my teaching, they will obey yours also. I love that passage in Matthew 25 where Jesus talks about all the nations being gathered before the judgment seat of Christ and he welcomes those on his right hand into his kingdom. He rejects those on his left hand. He separates the nations as the sheep from the goats and then of course he says those interesting words, what you have done unto the least of these you have done unto me. And most people's interpretation of that passage is that we're going to be judged on the day of judgment by how we have treated the poor. That is not in my judgment the correct interpretation of that passage. The least of these my brethren in that passage represents the apostles of Jesus sent to the nations to proclaim the kingdom. And nations are going to be judged by what they have done with those who are representative of Jesus. If they love you they will love me, if they love me they will love you and vice versa. And so yes, as we let our light shine and as we address the culture of our day, there will be those who turn against you because you're exposing things that are not right. And if you've ever been at the receiving end of that, the temptation is to throw in the towel, but remember God has his elect everywhere. And under the opposition and under the pain often lies a heart that is desperately longing to know God. And if you and I can listen to the Holy Spirit, speak God's truth into those situations and walk it out with people, lives will be changed forever and ever. [PROPOSED CUT 2 START at 00:46:59.100; remove through 00:51:47.000] That's the mission of the church and it [CUT] starts right here at home. You're the God of this city, you're the King of these people, you're the Lord of this nation, you're the hope to the hopeless, you're the peace to the restless, you are. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. You're the God of this city, you're the King of these people, you're the Lord of this nation, you're the light in this darkness, you're the hope to the hopeless, you're the peace to the restless, you are. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. You're the light in this darkness, you're the hope to the hopeless, you're the peace to the restless, you are. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. You're the God of this city, you're the King of these people, you're the hope to the hopeless, you're the peace to the restless, you are. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things are still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have yet to come and greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have still to be done in this city. There is no one like our God, there is no one like our God, but greater things have still to be done in this city. [Music] [CUT] [PROPOSED CUT 2 END at 00:51:47.000; resume after this marked segment]