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Transcript February 15 & 16, 2014

What Should I Look For in a Church?: A Mission that Challenges Me Aaron Brockett | John 17:13-19; Matthew 28:16-20

Well good morning. It is good to see you guys. That worship set has gotten better and better each time. You guys were the recipients of that third hour. Hey go ahead and grab your Bible and find John 17. That is where we are going to begin. Then you might hold your place in Matthew 28, we are going to look at that passage together as well. We are going to study 12 verses this morning between those two passages. As you are turning there, I just want to ask you to be praying for us. This coming Friday afternoon I am going to be getting on an airplane with 15 other people from our church and we are going to be headed to Nairobi, Kenya for a few days. We have a whole bunch of medical people going, we’ve got some microfinance people going, and Matt Hessel and I and a couple of our elders are going to be spending several days just encouraging and pouring into the lives of some of the Kenyan pastors. These are some of the guys who are pastoring the churches in Kenya and we want to come along side them, and encourage them, and help them. I fully expect to learn just as much from them as they might learn from us. Our plane arrives in Kenya, you might be thinking about this next weekend, at 6:30 in the morning next Sunday morning Kenyan time. If I understand this correctly, I have to get off the plane, after traveling for about 20 hours, and drive to the church in Bondeni and I am going to be preaching there next Sunday morning. So, you might be praying for them. I am looking forward to that trip together. Next weekend Jake Barker is going to continue on in our series. And then March 1 and 2, two weeks from this weekend is going to be a really special weekend because one of my really good friends – in fact I love this guy like a brother – Derrick Puckett, who is one of our guys who is planting a church in Chicago is going to be here all three services to preach on discipleship. Right after he preaches, he is going to be joined on stage by some of our elders as well as another one of our young men, Jerrah Jackson. Jerrah and his wife Tammi are getting ready to move to South Africa as missionaries and our elders are going to be ordaining these two guys for the ministry. What that means is just a setting apart, a calling out, recognizing that these two guys have been called and equipped for ministry and we want to be their covering. Just like Paul to Timothy, we are coming around them, laying hands on them, praying for them. It is going to be a really special time in the life of our church and I don’t want you to miss it. Some of you may want to be a part of what those guys are doing, either financially supporting them or I believe God may call some of you to either move to Chicago or to South Africa to help them. In the first hour we had a couple of people laugh. I think by the end of this particular sermon they were feeling convicted by that. What we are talking about this morning is mission. What I want you to see is that a call to Christ is a call to go. A call to Christ means that you are going to be on mission with Him. Some of you, I think automatically, are uncomfortable with that idea, “Man, if I were to be really honest with you, I’ve grown up in the church. I’ve put off going ‘all in for Jesus’ for so long because of that idea.” Are any of you with me in that? You thought that if you fully gave your life to

What Should I Look For in a Church?: A Mission that Challenges Me February 15 & 16, 2014

Intellectual materials are the property of Traders Point Christian Church. All rights reserved. 2

Jesus, that He would take something from you. He would call you to live on the other side of the world, live in a mud hut, and eat grub worms and drink rainwater. Because of that, you just kind of settled for being a Sunday Christian. Just sort of being a bit nominal and not getting really serious about it. I want to try to challenge a little bit of that within you and I also want to dispel the myth of what that means because some of us are ignoring the call to go because we think that going automatically means living in a mud hut and eating grub worms and drinking rainwater. That is not necessarily what that means. It means being a missionary where you work, live, and play. So we are going to get into it this morning. Let me pray. Father we come to You right now and I thank You for this church. I love them so dearly and it is an honor to serve here. God, I pray in these next few moments You would help me to steward this message well, that Your words would come through me very clearly and that our hearts would be ready for them. We ask this in Jesus’ name. The church says, “Amen.” Well last week Matt Hessel got us kicked off in this series that we started called, What Should I Look for in a Church? Here is the big idea. This is not a commercial for our church. We are talking about the big “C” church, the church that Jesus died for. Listen, Jesus died so that we might become His people gathered together in the community of faith known as the church. So one of the things I need to just go ahead and make known is that I realize not everybody is looking for a church, but we live in a culture where, increasingly, people see the church as irrelevant, even among Christians. There will come a time, I fully believe this promise, as Jesus said, “If my name be lifted up, I am going to draw all men and women unto myself,” and I see it on a weekly basis. I talk to people. I just had first step this morning between hours and people were like, “I have no idea why we are here. God is like drawing us here. God has done some stuff in our lives.” That is a promise, that, until Jesus comes again, no matter how dark the culture gets, He is still at work. The Gospel is a very real thing. I believe even in this room here, if you are sitting here, the question of what church you should go to has crossed your mind in the past. Maybe you are wrestling with it in the present, or you will face it in the future. Maybe God will call you to move to another state, you will be relocated because of a job, and then you are going to be faced with the question, “We are trying to find a good church, what do we look for?” Something that I have just noticed, an observation, is that whenever it comes down to trying to find a church we start church shopping. We’ve got our list, we’ve got our criteria. I remember talking to a family in our church several years ago and they said, “We have 25 things we are looking for in a church. Aaron, this church only met two of them.” It is just like their shopping list of what they are looking for. Here is the thing. It is not that you shouldn’t have that criteria, it is just that in this series I want to challenge you to take it deeper. Oftentimes what we do is we say, “Ok, well, where is a church located? Is it geographically near where we live?” Now that is not necessarily a bad thing but the healthiest church may not necessarily be close to where you live. When I say healthy church, I mean a church that has a high view of the authority of God, an insatiable love for Jesus Christ, that is Bible teaching, and has a ferocious love for people no matter how messy they are, urging them towards maturity. Meaning you are not going to stay as you are, but you are going to move toward holiness. That is a healthy church. Some people will be like, “I know for sure I don’t want a big one.” That is always funny, because God might call you here. Or, “I don’t want a small one,” because it may be for similar reasons, because you are looking for some programming and some things a bigger church has to offer.



Now listen to me. Those are not necessarily bad questions. I’ll meet young couples at times and they will say, “Yes, we kind of grew up in church nominally and in college we fell away, we didn’t go, and then we got married and we started having kids. And then we started to feel convicted that we needed to have our kids in church, so we decided to go back to church. Then we were left with this dilemma. Where do we go? We never talked about it when we were dating, so we have totally different ideas on that. She grew up Catholic and I grew up Southern Baptist and we are trying to figure out where to go.” So we come up with this shopping list. Now hear me, we’ve got to go deeper. Trying to find a church because of denominational affiliation, or size, or programming is very similar to you trying to find a spouse when your only criterion is that they are attractive. Is that wise or foolish? Some of you are going,” it depends on how attractive.” It is like, how attractive are we talking about here? Hey man, here is the thing. Is it not true that somebody could be gorgeous on the outside and a nut job on the inside? Yeah, that is entirely possible. And there is a little bit of a nut job in all of us. Thank God that He is working on all of us. But that would be foolish to marry the first person that you were attracted to. In a very similar way, it would be foolish of you just to go to a church just because you grew up Baptist, or just because you have a thing for small churches, or big churches, or the geographic location. Does that make sense? You have to get beneath the surface and look at the root system. So in this series, that is what we are trying to do. So last week Matt Hessel kicked us off with the Gospel that confronts us. That was a subject that he was very passionate about, would you not agree? Go ahead and give him a hand for that. All I have to say, and Matt did a fantastic job last week, I have to say that I am way more insecure about my beard now. That dude has lost small animals in that beard. That thing has a whole other personality of its own. That thing is awesome. So he talked about Gospel, get back on track Brockett. Today we are going to talk about Mission. Then we are going to talk about Worship, Discipleship, and when I get back from Kenya I am going to preach on preaching. I cannot wait for that sermon. Theology, Membership, Leadership, Compassion, and then to wrap up the series, I am going to attempt to try to bring clarity around a very confusing and even hurtful subject for some of you, some of you have got some baggage with this, it’s called church discipline. It is in the Bible and we need some clarity on it to find out what that is all about. So that is what this series is about. We are trying to discern what Jesus has called us to as His bride. Here is the thing that we have said in the past, Matt said it last week, and I am going to keep pounding this drum, there is no such thing as a perfect church. I think all of you understand that. I think all of us know that, but we oftentimes don’t act that way. What I mean is that maybe you get into a church and some things happen or there are some imperfections. We are talking about style, or philosophy, or whatever, and immediately when my brokenness and my quirks start to hit up against you, you have a tendency to hit the red eject button and get out of here. I think this is what motivates a lot of church hopping. It is not that there is no bad reason to leave a church. There are certainly good reasons to leave a church, but oftentimes we leave a church because our immaturity gets confronted and we don’t like it. So we bounce out of there and go to another one, and what we are doing is we are short-‐circuiting the work of maturity that God might want to do in you and in me.



So I have made just this personal commitment. I have stated it publically before, and it has been the sincerity of my prayer, that God would allow me to pastor this church for 35 to 40 years because a lot of pastors leave churches because of the criticisms of fewer than five people. People will come after them or maybe there will be some times when they are not as popular or whatever. They end up saying, “Man, the grass is greener on the other side. I am going to go over there to that church.” I have just asked God, “God would you allow me to serve at Trader’s Point through the highs and the lows, knowing that in the lows it is for my good and Your glory.” Does that make sense? So I want to be here, I want to stay committed to this church. That is called covenantal love, not contractual. Contractual is, “I will be here just as long as you make me feel good.” Covenantal is, “I am in it even when it is hard.” So what the church is is a group of messy, broken, imperfect people whose lives have been fractured by sin and who are separated from Creator God. And God has sent His Son, Jesus, to atone for you and me and to make sacrifice for our sins so that we could be made full in our completeness under Jesus Christ. And He draws all men and women unto Himself in unity under the name of Jesus Christ. What that means, practically, is that a church should be made up of people who are different from one another. So maybe we come from different socioeconomic backgrounds, different tastes, and preferences, and the thing that we have in common is the Gospel. That thing that we have in common is the name of Jesus Christ. And so I can legitimately look at you and say, “Hey man, we may not agree on much but we can agree on Jesus and you are my brother, you are my sister.” And God does this supernatural work where He draws people together in the name of Christ and He says, “Okay, you are the body of Christ now.” That is what the church is and it means we’ve got to be committed to one another. So what that means is that in this room right now we could look around and some of you have grown up in church. This is not new, your parents did a decent job with you, and you went to church camp every summer, and you know the Bible relatively well. There are moments when you hear someone else’s really colorful testimony of overdosing in the back alley, and you are like, “Man, I wish I had that testimony. Mine is so vanilla. I never did anything wrong.” About the craziest you ever got is when you went to that New Kids on the Block concert in the early 90s and you liked it. So we’ve got some of us who, though we are not perfect, we have been relatively straight and we’ve not strayed too far off the path. And then there are others in this room and you have lived really hard. You didn’t even have a fair shot. You came from a broken home, you’ve had some unspeakable things done to you, and you’ve done some unspeakable things. You are carrying around a lot of baggage. You walk with an emotional and spiritual limp. There are still sometimes whenever you walk in here that you half expect the roof to cave in on this place, “Man, if the people sitting around me knew what was really in my heart, if they knew what I have done, then they would kick me to the curb.” You see God draws all of us unto Himself and says, “Hey, it doesn’t matter if you grew up in church or if you grew up in the back alleys, you are all just as much in need of Jesus Christ.” He draws us together. We may not have a whole lot in common, but we have Jesus in common. What this means is that in a church we have PhDs and GEDs, white collar and blue collar, black, white, Asian, Latino, and Hispanic all coming together under the name of Jesus Christ. I believe that a Gospel centered church will begin to look more diverse for this reason – in heaven all the nations will be represented, therefore all the nations should be represented in our church. Now, some of you are like, “Hey man, I’m looking around the room right now. Looking around the room right now



there are a lot of people that look like me, and there is a lot of mayonnaise white skin out there.” Can I just say it that way? Some of you have been in the tanning booth – it has been a long winter. I so desperately want our church to be a diverse church. Here is the thing. We’ve got such a long road to go but I will say this. In the six-‐and-‐a-‐half years that I’ve been here, we are more diverse than we have ever been. And it has been a battle in the sense that it seems, at times, that we take two steps forward in racial diversity and one-‐and-‐a-‐half steps back. There are a number of things resisting this; some of this is the sin of our own hearts, some of it is our selfishness, some of it is the lies of the enemy getting in there and swirling some stuff around. I said this a few months ago and I just feel convicted that I need to say this more often. If you walked into this place and you looked around and said, “I think I am a minority here,” thank you for having the courage to be here. And not only be here, but to stick with us. The only way that we will get over the hump of racial diversity is when you stick with us and you don’t hit the red eject button. I’ve had some of you come up to me, some of my African American brothers and sisters, you know who you are and I love you dearly. You came up to me and said, “Pastor Aaron, God has called me to this church and I have no idea why. I don’t know why I am here, this is so uncomfortable, but I am committed to being here. I have no other reason other than I just feel God has called me here.” I believe you are a missionary. You’ll be the one to turn the tide of this. I say all of that to say this. For people who have been recipients of the Gospel message, the only response to that is patience and grace rather than entitlement. People who are entitled spoil the health of the church. Here is what that looks like practically. When you walk into a church, I think this is the curse of the western church, it is called consumer Christianity. “Hey come to our church, we’ll cater to your needs forever.” There is nothing wrong with catering to needs. There is nothing wrong with having your needs met, just as long as that doesn’t terminate upon you. When it terminates upon you, then it spoils. So we walk into a church and we say, “Hey somebody better greet me. Somebody better say hi to me. Somebody better meet my needs. Somebody better take my kids off my hands so I can get in there and worship the Lord.” Instead of having a spirit of gratitude that says, “Who can I greet? Who can I serve? Whose kids can I watch?” 2 Peter 3:9 says, “God is patient with every single one of us.” Aren’t you thankful for that? I am such a bonehead. I am so stubborn and God is patient with me and He is patient with you and with your stumbling, not wanting anyone to perish, but that all might come to repentance. The only response for redeemed people is patience and grace with others. So I say all of that to say to be a Christian, to respond to the Gospel message, means that you are sent. We want to talk about what that means. So look with me in John 17. This is known as part of Jesus’ high priestly prayer. That is what this section of Scripture is called. You’ll notice if you have a red letter edition of the Bible that it is all written in red because these are the words of Jesus. Jesus is praying to God just before His arrest and crucifixion and the subject of His prayer is you. The subject of his prayer is the big “C” church, the bride of Christ. Even though she is messed up, even though she is broken, even though she has done some dumb things, Jesus died for her to be a new kind of people. So His final breath is praying for the local church. And verses 13-‐19 are all about mission. Look with me at your Bibles as I read this. Jesus is praying to God and He says, “But now I am coming to you, and these things I speak in the world, that they may have my joy fulfilled in themselves. I have given them your Word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I



do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.” Do you see a general theme that He is developing here? He keeps saying that over and over again. Verse 17, “Sanctify them in the truth; your word is truth.” And here it is in verse 18. “As you sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sake I consecrate myself, that they also may be sanctified in truth.” Now I want you to dial in on one word mentioned two times in verse 18 – it is the word sent. It comes from the Latin word missio, which is our word for mission. That is literally what that means; to be on mission is to be sent. And to be sent means a couple of things. First of all, it means to show something, sort of like an ambassador of a country goes to another country and they are representative of their country of origin. How many of you have ever met somebody and you maybe had a false impression of who they were, you didn’t really know them very well, you just saw them from a distance? Maybe it was a stereotype of a group of people, and then you became friends with somebody who represented that group and it changed your opinion of them. Did that ever happen? Have you ever met someone and thought, “I don’t like that person,” and then you get to know them and you actually find out that you really do like them. This is the idea that somebody is sent to show something. So Jesus was sent into the world, not just to die on a cross for our sins, but He was sent into the world to show us what God is like. Do you want to know what God is like? Then look at Jesus, listen to Jesus, follow after Jesus, and then you will know that Jesus is a missionary in the sense that He was sent to show us what God is like. I remember when I was in high school, there was another school that we played in basketball and soccer all the time and our two teams were pretty evenly matched. So we would always go kind of back and forth with this other team, we became rivals, and the two star players on that other team, they were two brothers and they were identical twins. We played them all four years in high school and I never really got to know those guys, I never knew their names, but every time we played them in soccer or basketball, I just hated those guys. We would take the soccer field and I would see the two twins and they had these identical bandanas on and every time I would see them, and I didn’t even know who they were, I just called them the evil twins. Man, I just hated those guys. Guess what happened? After we graduated from high school, one of them moved to my town. He was going to a high school in Oklahoma; we were in Missouri. Upon graduation from high school, one of them enrolled in the college I enrolled in. How dare he? He moved to my town, he came onto my turf, and I’ll never forget the first day of college. I am walking down the sidewalk and I see one of the evil twins and I am like, “What is he doing here? This is my turf,” and as I am walking by him I did one of these, “Hey bro, what is going on?” And he said, “Hey man, what is going on? It is good to see you.” Such hypocrisy, right? Here is the thing. Over the course of the next four years, he became one of my closest friends. I like totally had the wrong idea about him and as a result of my friendship with him, I became friends with his evil twin brother in another state as well. Guys, this is the idea of mission. Now here is why I bring all that up. Jesus was sent to show us what God is like, now you are sent into the world to show others what Jesus is like. You get that connection? Not like this idea that it is just Jesus and me, “Hey, I believe, I just don’t need to talk about it. I don’t necessarily need to live it.” Some of you have had arguments with your spouse about this issue. You’ll be like, “I am ok with attending the church every now and then, but we don’t need to get too serious about this because I believe. I believe in God and God and I have an arrangement. I just keep this kind of thing close to my chest. It is just between me



and God.” I hear what you are saying but John 17 won’t let you believe it any more. Jesus said, “As God the Father has sent me into the world, so I am sending you.” And we live in an increasingly post-‐Christian world. What that means is that there was an era of time known as Christendom, which means being a Christian was a very popular thing and it influenced everything in culture. In fact much of our westernized world is based on a Judeo-‐Christian ethic, meaning that many of our values came out of the Judeo-‐Christian world view. But Christendom died sometime about two years ago I think, and we’ve moved beyond human secularism to neo-‐paganism. So what this means is that here is what we have to look forward to in the future. In our world people will increasingly not have one meaningful relationship with a single Christian. It is already happening in the urban centers. You go to New York City, you go to San Francisco – I have friends in both of those cities who are in ministry, church planting, and they say this to me all the time, “Hey, our kids go to public schools, we get together for games, we sit next to the parents in the bleachers and the conversation comes up, ‘Hey, what do you do for a living?’ And we say, ‘Well, we are in ministry,’ and they look at us and their eyes get really big.” They say, “You mean you are one of those Evangelicals?” We never met one of them before.” This is the future. Now, I am not depressed about that. I am excited about it. Because there are a lot of people who are rejecting Christ because of religious baggage, and we get a clean slate to show them the Gospel, not only to articulate it, but to live it. I love how one author says this. He says, “The church should be the Gospel made visible.” So in these increasingly dark days, this is an incredible opportunity for the body of Christ, not to go run and hide, or get defensive, or get abrasive but to say, “Hey brother, you don’t have any religious baggage you are drawing into this, so let me show you the Gospel message.” We are missionaries where we live. You cannot meet Jesus and not become sent out. Here is what I want you to do. Some of you might get uncomfortable with this and you are like, “What does this mean?” Notice back in verse 13 of John 17, what does Jesus say there? He says, “That my joy may be fulfilled in them.” So I think many times we run away from what God might be calling us to, or we are afraid of going all in, because we think that Jesus is going to take some stuff from us. And Jesus says here in verse 12, “Hey, I want you to be on mission so that my joy might be fulfilled in you.” So here is what Jesus is doing. He is showing us this link between our “sentness” and our joy. And some of us know this to be true right now, we just never made the connection, that most of us in this room, we bought into the lie of pursuing happiness over joy. Happiness is where I am seeking my own comfort. I am seeking my own desires, chasing after that illusive happiness that always slips away from me. Happiness is a cheap substitute for joy. And Jesus says the only way to find joy is to lose yourself and you get found. But when you try to find yourself, you get lost. So He says here if you meet Me and you get sent, then I am going to fulfill My joy within you. Now here is the thing. Little kids already know this. Don’t they? And then they grow up and we teach them to be cynical like us and they forget. So when was the last time you asked a little kid what they want to do for a living? Just sometime this week, sit down with a kid who is 4-‐5-‐6 years old and say, “Hey, what do you want to be when you grow up?” I’ve never had a kid say, “Well, I just was thinking I would settle down and get an office job one day and push paper around a cubicle.” No, they never say that. How do they respond? I want to be an astronaut! I want to be a nurse! I want to be a fireman! They always associate their future vocation in terms of mission. I want to save someone, I want to help



someone else, and then somewhere along the line we grow up and we start getting very self-‐centered in our approach to life, chasing after happiness. And Jesus says when you come into contact with Me, I am going to send you out for My glory and your good. It is the only way to find true joy. When you meet Jesus the automatic response is that you get sent. I could give you a couple of examples of this. We could go Isaiah 6. In Isaiah 6, you’ve got this prophet named Isaiah and he comes into the temple and God is high and exalted and lifted up. Here is the thing. When you come into the presence of God, your insecurities immediately come to the surface. So, the first word out of Isaiah’s mouth is, “Unclean. I am a man of unclean lips.” And God sends and angel and the angel takes a piece of coal from the altar where sacrifices for sins were made, and he takes that coal and he touches it to Isaiah’s lips and he cleanses him. Immediately when Isaiah gets over his self hate, and self loathing, and low self esteem, he goes before God and God says this to him. “I am looking for somebody who will go and preach to a group of people who will never, ever listen.” Who wants to sign up for that job? And Isaiah doesn’t say, “Well, I’ll keep my eye out for someone. I know a guy. He is pretty good with words. I’ll go talk to him.” What does Isaiah say after he has been cleansed? “I’ll go! Here am I. Send me.” It is always the response when you have authentically met Jesus. We could go Genesis 12 – Abraham. God comes to Abraham and He says, “Abraham, I want to bless you” and isn’t that what we are all looking for? We are all looking for blessing. Maybe that is why you come to church. You are just looking for some blessing. And He says, “Abraham I want to bless you but here are a couple of things. You’ve got to go first, you’ve got to get out of here first for Me to bless you, and then I am going to bless you so you can bless others.” That is just fundamentally a different thing. So what that meant for Abraham in his context is that he had to leave the familiar for the unfamiliar. He had to leave his personal comfort and make himself a bit vulnerable and God blessed him so that he could bless others. So the question that I have in front of us as a church, and you individually, is what does that practically mean for you? If you do not feel sent I would go as far as to say that you have not truly met Jesus. Maybe you have heard about Him, maybe you have been very religious, but as we see through Scripture the automatic response to meeting Him is not a salvation that terminates upon yourself, “Thank you very much. I’ll tuck that away and keep it there until you come again.” But it is to be sent out authentically because of this truth that you possess, that has been revealed to you by the Spirit, and a ferocious love that you have for people churning around inside of you. So what does it mean? Some of you are like, “Aaron are you telling me I need to quit my job and move to Thailand?” Not necessarily, maybe, but not necessarily. What did Jesus say in the passage? “Just as I am not of the world, they are not of the world.” Some of you are too comfortable here. Even if you were born and raised in Indianapolis, you are not home. You are a foreigner, every single one of us, even in a cultural context where we feel the most comfortable we are still outsiders, not home. You are a missionary where you live, work, and play. So we’ve got to go Matthew 28. This is the Great Commission. If you have any background in church at all, you probably are familiar with this passage. But I want to break it down a little bit. In the beginning of chapter 28, look with me in your Bibles, you see that the beginning of chapter 28 is the resurrection; the end of chapter 28 is the Great Commission. Now I have grown up in church and I’ve heard sermons on both. I’ve never heard them together. But you have to read both of them together.



Here is what I mean by that. The implication of the resurrection is the Great Commission. The implication of the resurrection is the Great Commission and almost always we never think of it that way. Here is another way of saying it. Jesus is essentially teaching us in Matthew 28, “I walked out of a grave, not just so that you could go to heaven but I walked out of a grave so that you might be equipped to disciple the nations.” That is what chapter 28 means. That is the implication of the resurrection, it’s not just for you but it’s for others. Look with me in verse 16, “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. And when they saw Him they worshiped him, but some doubted.” So what happened here is that two ladies went to the tomb, Jesus wasn’t there and the angel said, “Tell the disciples to meet Jesus at Galilee.” So they give the disciples the message. The eleven disciples, Judas is no longer in the mix, they meet Jesus in Galilee and Jesus is physically standing there in front of them. And it says that some worshipped Him and some doubted. I love that that is included in that passage. It means that God is not intimidated by your doubts. He is not defensive over them. Some of you in this room, the thing that has been keeping you away from a decision to follow Christ is the doubts you are wrestling with. God has blessed you with an incredible intellect. Instead of asking you to check it at the door, He is asking you to come to Him as you are and it is ok that you have some doubts. It is just amazing. Jesus is physically standing there in front of them and some of them are immediately worshiping Him and others are going, “Hmmm, I don’t know. I do not know. I’ve seen someone else do this before.” I’ve said this before. It doesn’t even matter if God ripped open the sky and said, “Here I am,” it still wouldn’t be enough for some of you because faith isn’t just this blind thing. Faith has more to do with your own stubbornness. So it says that some worshipped and some doubted. What I want you to see here is that word doubt is not the word that we typically use for doubt. It is actually the Greek word distaso and it means belief with hesitation. It is the same word that was used with Peter. When Peter got out of the boat and started walking toward Jesus on the water, that would take tremendous faith, and Peter believed but then he hesitated. Why did he hesitate? Because he took his eyes off Jesus and he saw the storms of life, which is the same thing for you and me. So Peter believed but he hesitated. This is the same word. I think here is what is going on in the lives of the disciples. They had been hanging with Jesus for three years and He had been telling them that this was going to happen, and they never got it, this was going over their heads. Then all of the sudden they see Jesus standing in the flesh with the nail marks in His wrists and feet and they are standing there and what this means is hitting them like a tidal wave. This is no longer child’s play. I think this thought was going through their minds. I think they looked at Jesus and they were going, “Ok, right now we either deny Him or die for Him.”Those are the only two options. That either causes you to worship or to doubt. Some of you are like, “This is huge. I don’t know if I can do this or not.” I think Jesus could read that in their hearts. Do you know why I think that? It’s because of what He says next in verse 18. Jesus looked right at them, and said, “… ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.’” Now whenever I’ve heard a sermon on the Great Commission or I’ve committed this to memory and sometimes I recite it – did you ever notice that when somebody recites the Great Commission, they fly right past that verse? Then Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me … Go therefore and make …” They just flew right past 18. Look at 18 again. That is amazing! Who else can say that? He just said, “All authority in heaven and on earth is mine.” Whose side do you want to be on? Does it even matter what He says next? He could say, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been



given to me. Go therefore and grow a third arm.” How many of you are like, “Ok, where do I find three sleeved shirts. I’ll go and pick up a bunch of them.” He is sensing their doubt, He is sensing their hesitation. Listen man, in this world you will be, He says it in John 17, “You will be hated and despised because of the name of Jesus.” The question that you’ve got to ask is, “Who am I more afraid of, the despising of the culture or the One who has all authority in heaven and on earth? I think sometimes I am more afraid of what others might think of me than what Jesus may think of me.” This doesn’t give you a license to be abrasive, and to be mean, and to be a jerk. It just means to get your priorities straight. You cannot please everyone. To give into this desire to be accepted by the world quite possibly might mean that you are denying Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” That word go could actually be translated as “as you go.” You might even write that in the margins on your Bible. “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. So, as you go,” in other words as you live your life. As you go about your routine. As you get the kids ready for school. As you sit in on the business meeting. As you run your errands. As you get together with the ladies for tea, make disciples. It just brings it down into the ordinary and the routine. Some of us think, “Oh, make disciples, that is for the church leaders. That is for those leading a Bible study.” No, that is for you if you are following Jesus Christ. Here is what it means to make disciples. To make disciples is to come alongside other brothers and sisters who are imperfect in their faith, and say, “You know what? I am going to put up with your junk. I pray that you put up with my junk. And together we are going to mature in the Lord. That is discipleship. Then we are equipping, we are feeding one another, to then go and help disciple other believers into maturity as well. The church is a resilient thing. She is still around 2,000 years after we have tried to mess her up. She has had some very dark seasons in her past, and she is resilient because Jesus said the gates of hell will not prevail against her. She will last into eternity and the way that she prevails is through discipleship. The church, the only way it will prevail into future generations, is not just conversion, but it is through discipleship; coming along beside others and encouraging them in their maturity in the Lord. Now here is what I want you to hear. If you are in Christ, God has specifically equipped you, gifted you, and placed you right where you are to be the recipient of discipleship and to disciple others. There is no such thing as the peanut gallery in the church. You are part of the body and God has placed some people around you in close proximity that He wants you to urge toward maturity in Christ as they urge you toward maturity in Christ. What this means, church, is always having an eye for others. Here is what I want to say. In a big church you come in and say, “I don’t know who is visiting and who is not.” Just treat everybody as a guest and you can’t go wrong. Just treat everybody with patience and grace. Look somebody in the eye and say, “I don’t know what God is doing in their life right now, but I am going to anticipate that God has placed me in their path for a reason.” So it might just be a warm smile. It might be a kind word. It might be a, “Hey, I’ve noticed you doing that over there. Thank you for that.” And you never know what that might do in that person’s life. Some of you might recognize the name Howard Hendricks. Howard Hendricks was a distinguished professor at Dallas Theological Seminary for many years. He was 88 years old when he died in January of last year. Howard impacted the lives of hundreds of preachers, including mine. In fact, he was in his



seventies when I responded to the call of ministry and I was in Bible College. So he was on the tail end of his ministry, but I still read all of his books and I remember hearing some of his talks. I remember a talk that Howard Hendricks gave to a group of preachers where he stood up in front of us with his big, rich, raspy voice and he said, “Preachers, if there is mist in the pulpit, there will be fog in the pews.” And he was urging us to be clear in our preaching. I will never forget that. He impacted so many people for Christ. What I didn’t know about him was, in his seventies as he was recounting his story, that when he was a child, he came from a broken home. Because of that, he had a lot of emotional hurt as a kid. So his fifth grade year was a really bad year. On his first day of school he came into the classroom and the teacher got down eye level with him and she said, “Listen up, Howard. I’ve heard a lot of stories about you that you are a troublemaker. I just want you to know I’ll have none of it in my class.” He took it as a challenge. He began to go at her and do everything he could to disrupt the class and he was constantly getting sent to the office. She was constantly scolding him, and she was constantly telling him he was a bad kid, and he began to live up to that, or live down to that. It just kind of became part of his identity. He was growing to be more and more bitter. Then he said at the beginning of his sixth grade year, he walked into the classroom the first day of school. The teacher got down at eye level and she said, “Hi Howard, I’ve heard a lot of stories about you and I just want you to know I don’t believe any of them. I actually think you are a really good kid and we are going to get along great. I am so glad you are in my class.” Howard was in his mid-‐seventies when he told that story, and he teared up when he told it. He said, “That lady changed the trajectory of my life.” Friends, that is part of discipleship. It means pulling your head up out of your naval and looking at people around you and saying, “God, how might you use me to urge them on?” There are moments when I walk around our hallways, I walk down the children’s wing now and I see little kids, and I see some of our middle school kids, and some of our high school students. I see some young men, even right now, looking at some young men in our church, they don’t know it yet, but we are going to send them out as church planters and pastors. They don’t know it yet, but I am looking at them right now. I look around some of the hallways and I see some of these students. I see many of you who are wearing blue shirts, loving on these kids. I can’t help but think, “Is the next great missionary that they are serving. Is that the next great preacher?” God may not spark revival in our land under my ministry, but there might be a little kid in our nursery that may grow up to be one of the greatest preachers this nation has ever heard, and God might use them to spark revival in our land because you changed their diaper. Guys don’t underestimate this. Some of you, even now, may be on your last leg feeling burned out and in Saturday night services you are back there thinking, “Why am I serving back here in pediatric purgatory. I am suffocating. Help me out.” Every single person who I’ve ever talked to who is on the road to maturity in Christ always mentions a relationship. They always mention somebody who spoke into their life, somebody who called some things out of them. That is true for me. I never thought I would be doing this. It was men and women in my home church, an imperfect one at that, who called some stuff out of me that I didn’t even know was there. God has given you a ministry, lift up your head and see the people in front of you. Jesus goes on in the passage and He says, “Baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” I love the fact that He includes the Trinity because it takes all three to get you saved. God created you, Jesus atoned for you, and the Holy Spirit gave you eyes to see the Gospel and now He



seals your salvation. Jesus says this in Matthew 16. “Upon this rock of a confession, Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God, I am going to build my church and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.” Baptism is a public demonstration of your internal commitment to Jesus Christ. It publically illustrates what God has done to your heart. You have been buried into the waters. That old Aaron Brockett died, with all of his sins, and insecurities, and shortcomings, and he came out as a new creation. So if you are here and you have said, “I’ve given my life to the Lord, and I believe, and I’ve repented but I’ve never been obedient,” it is commanded right here in the Great Commission to be baptized. If you’ve been kicking that decision like a tin can down the road in front of you, I just want to ask you to reconsider that and be as fully obedient as you can to this. It is a powerful experience where you are lowered in the waters of the grave and resurrected as a new creation. Here is the deal; it is not meant to be comfortable. It is meant to confront your own pride. Nobody looks good wet and I think that is why God invented baptism; to get us to swallow our pride. We come up out of the water, especially on the big megatrons where we magnify it intentionally. We magnify it and you come up and you have hair matted across your face and snot coming out of your nose and mascara running down your cheeks. The ladies don’t look any better. You come up out of the waters of the baptistery and you are a new creation in Christ. Let’s just stop all this needless arguing over, “Well, I don’t know. I did this and I was this as a kid.” Just be as straight-‐up obedient as you can to the Great Commission. There is a reason for it. Nobody is questioning your salvation. Jesus said, “Hey man, do this. It is important.” Verse 20 says, “Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” What this, very practically, means is that Jesus did not expect perfection, but aspiration. He doesn’t expect perfection from you, but He does expect you to aspire towards maturity. So what this means is that if you are I were to sit down this week and we were to have a cup of coffee and I would say, “Hey how is it going and what is God doing in your life?” You would probably share some things that you are really happy about, some things that you’ve gotten victory over. Then you would share some areas you were struggling in. Maybe through our conversation the Spirit of God would reveal some blind spots that we both have. In that moment of confrontation, which usually happens as the church comes together, God reveals some things, we confess some things, we repent of some things, and then we change some things. Then we do it all over again. That is what discipleship looks like. We just keep doing it over, and over, and over again until Jesus comes and takes us home and perfects all of it. So Jesus says, “Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” The way to stay in the world and safe from the evil one is to be sanctified by truth. You see the church that is on mission is the church that very clearly, boldly, and lovingly lays out the expectation that you will be maturing. You are welcome here just as you are, but when you meet Christ you are not expected to stay as you are. You’ll begin to mature. A church that just says, “Hey, just come on in here. It is all about you,” and you never grow is not a church that is on mission. My desire for you is that one day when you leave, whether you move, or go to another location, or your life situation may change that you walk out of here as a missionary saying, “I came to know Christ deeper at Traders Point. I know Jesus better as I am leaving than the day that I came. I know the Gospel better as I leave than when I came. I came here beat up and broken and I left here healthy and whole.” That is the goal.



I think Jesus could see that the disciple’s eyes were this big around and that is why He concluded with these words in verse 20. “And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” Man, how pastoral is that? He is like, “Hey man, I am not asking you to do this on your own. I just want you to know that when you are fearful, when you feel overwhelmed, I am with you.” Now I have been chasing Jesus Christ since I was 17 years old, I’ve been in fulltime ministry now since the year 2000 and as near as I can tell I’ve written and delivered roughly 1200 sermons. Still, every time I get on an airplane and sit next to a stranger, I go into a mild panic attack because I know they are going to ask me what I do. Every time I go to get my hair cut and it is somebody new and he or she asks, “So what are you doing this weekend?” I have to take a deep breath and buckle up and I think, “Here we go. I don’t know how this conversation is going to go.” What is that? Quite honestly, it is me being ashamed of the Gospel. What that means, practically, is I want people to like me too much. I want them to think I am really cool. I am so un-‐cool, even in the way I just said that. You have that desire too. What we need to realize is that in our desire to be liked, and that is not a bad thing, it doesn’t give us license to be abrasive and mean, but Jesus says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” You know what? When you get into those positions and your co-‐worker glares at you or when somebody says, “I never met an Evangelical Christian before,” you take a deep breath and you recite to yourself Romans 1:16. “I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation. I am not ashamed of the Gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation.” And you remember that you have some truth that you didn’t invent, but the Spirit of God revealed it to you. And you have a ferocious love, a broken-‐hearted love, for that person who is sitting across from you. That stuff is churning around in you and you look at them with heartfelt eyes and you share the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Here is what that practically means, Traders Point. To be a church on mission is to be a church that is broken-‐hearted over the souls of people who are not here yet. It should motivate all of our generosity, it should motivate all of our service, it should motivate all of our prayers, to say there are millions of people who are crossing over into a Christless eternity on a daily basis, and Jesus has given us the Gospel, not just for our own benefit, but the benefit of the world. You are God’s “Plan A”. There is no other plan, so we live openhandedly as a church. We exist, not just for the people here, but we exist for the people who aren’t here yet. Why? Because somebody prayed for us once. Somebody was broken-‐hearted over us once. Somebody gave generously for us once. Somebody served selflessly for us once. Maybe they never even met us, maybe they have gone on to glory and one day we will meet them. Now it is our turn. Jesus has given us the baton of the Gospel. That is what it means to be a church on mission; make disciples as you go. Father, we come to You right now. And I thank You for this church and I thank You for this message. I pray that it appropriately confronts us, without being abrasive and I pray that it heals us and pastors us in our own fears and insecurities. Father, we do not want to be a people who are abrasive with the truth, we also don’t want to be a people who shrink back. We want to be a people who are not ashamed of the Gospel for it is the power of God unto salvation. We can’t change anybody’s mind, but You can. We can’t save a single soul, but You can. All You have asked us to do is to come to You openhanded just like Isaiah and say, “I am a man of unclean lips. You healed me. You made me whole.” And I can’t just let that gift terminate in me. But I have to go. We have to be a church that is sent. May You find us faithful when You return. We ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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