A Message I was privileged to share at Lawrence Heights Christian Church in June of 2022

FOLLOW JESUS. LOVE PEOPLE. REACH THE WORLD.

Mission Statements come in all shapes and sizes. Look at any group or organization where people work together, and you will find mission statements. Schools have mission statements, governments have mission statements, businesses and corporations have mission statements. According to Wikipedia: A mission statement is a short statement of why an organization exists, what its overall goal is, identifying the goal of its operations: what kind of product or service it provides, its primary customers or market, and its geographical region of operation. This definition relates mainly to running a business, and the Church is NOT a business. Businesses are started and operated with the goal of making money, of seeing a financial return on investment for their efforts. These are all certainly worthy and honorable pursuits, but they are also TEMPORAL pursuits which only offer benefits for the short term, in THIS life. The Church is not a business, but it has business to conduct. Business that has exponentially greater value than money or temporary earthly things. The church is in the business of saving the souls of men and women from sin and the wrath of God. The business of the Church is to share the Good News about WHO Jesus the Messiah is and WHAT He came to do for all of humanity.

Here at Lawrence Heights Christian Church, we have one of the simplest and most straightforward mission statements that you will find anywhere. In fact, lets just lose the word STATEMENT and call it what it really is OUR MISSION ………Our Mission, the reason we exist, is to:

FOLLOW JESUS. LOVE PEOPLE. REACH THE WORLD.

I would like us to take some time this morning to look at each of these and consider in a bit more detail, WHAT we mean by them as well as HOW we might practically go about accomplishing them. Let’s also bear in mind that just because something is simple, that does not necessarily make it easy.  [ACTION, BE DOERS NOT MERELY HEARERS]

First- Our mission statement is PROGRESSIVE. That is to say, that it is written in order of PRIORITY and each thing builds on the previous thing.

FOLLOW JESUS- This is the FOUNDATION of all that we do here at Lawrence Heights. Unless we are committed to FOLLOW JESUS, first and foremost, then neither of the next two things matter. If we are not here to FOLLOW JESUS, we may as well all go home right now.  There are two words which, when you put them together carry enormous weight and meaning. Volumes have been written on what it means to Follow Jesus. For our purposes today, let’s keep it simple and take a look at a few passages from God’s Word. The words “Follow Me” or “followed him” appear quite frequently in the gospels. Nine times in Matthew, Five times in Mark, Seven times in Luke and Eight times in the Gospel of John. We may conclude from this that Following Jesus is a pretty big deal.

Following Jesus is not like following someone on Facebook or following a particular football team or actor or entertainer. Following Jesus is, to be unabashedly truthful a Life and Death proposition.

Jesus called each of His disciples with the words “Follow Me”, and in every instance they immediately dropped everything and followed Him. It is easy to read these accounts without ever stopping to think about the details of what it involved. So let’s take a minute and think about what it involved….

All of these guy’s had jobs that provided income. Some even had wives and children to provide for. Peter, James and John were involved in profitable businesses. Matthew, a tax collector, made very GOOD money. In every single case, these men immediately walked away from almost everything they owned to follow Jesus.

We might look at their example and rationalize, “Well, yes BUT….they were ‘SPECIAL’ because they were hand-picked by Jesus to be part of His inner circle. – Surely Jesus does not expect the average Christian person TODAY to give up and walk away from everything they own and have worked hard for…..DOES He?”

That’s a legitimate question. Rather than giving you my opinion, let’s see what God’s Word has to say in the way of an answer:

In MATTHEW 16:24 we read: “Then Jesus said to His disciples, “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me.”

LUKE 16:33 tells us: “So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions.”

MARK 10:28-31 states “Peter began to say to Him, “Behold, we have left everything and followed You.” ²⁹ Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, ^30 [i]but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in ^[j]the present age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions; and in the age to come, eternal life. ³¹ But many who are first will be last, and the last, first.”

Based on these verses, we may conclude that Jesus requires those who would follow Him, to forsake anything and everything that would stand in the way or hinder them from following Him 100%. We might rationalize that it is acceptable to enjoy and indulge in all of the wealth and luxury that this life has to offer, so long as our attitude is to hold on to it loosely, or to not be dependent on it. The problem with that rationale is that this is NOT what Jesus is saying in these passages. Personally, I am convinced that when Our Lord said these things, He was speaking literally, not figuratively. In fact, again this is MY own OPINION—That most Christians here in the United States would be better off if we took these verses literally and got rid of most of our STUFF. Let me share my own experience:

 A number of years ago, we were blessed with an old farmstead not far from here. In addition to a modest house and 10 acres, there were also three outbuildings which made it ideal for our business. Have you ever heard the phrase: “Be careful what you WISH for- you might GET it”? I can’t tell you how many Saturdays and sometimes entire weekends I spend mowing, burning brush, painting, fixing and maintaining all of that property, This is time that I will never get back. It is time that would be better spent to serve others, to share the Good News, and to advance the Kingdom of God. In real practical terms, we don’t own our stuff, our stuff owns us. You will never see a Funeral Procession with a U-HAUL trailer. We can’t take it with us. Better to ditch as much of it as possible while we are living and save our children the burden of inheriting our worthless junk. To quote Jim Elliot: “He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose”.

We need to exercise caution here. Jesus never says anywhere that it is a sin to own property or even to be wealthy. We know that there were wealthy Believers in the early church because Paul gives Timothy instructions for them in 1TIMOTHY 6:17-19, which says: “Instruct those who are rich in this present world not to be conceited or to fix their hope on the uncertainty of riches, but on God, who richly supplies us with all things to enjoy. ¹⁸ Instruct them to do good, to be rich in good ^[m]works, to be generous and ready to share, ¹⁹ storing up for themselves the treasure of a good foundation for the future, so that they may take hold of that which is life indeed.”

Certainly there is a lot more to following Jesus than financial considerations. Following Jesus means emulating Him, following His example. PHILIPPIANS 2:5-8 tells us to “Have this attitude ^[e]in yourselves which was also in Christ Jesus, ⁶ who, although He existed in the form of God, did not regard equality with God a thing to be ^[f]grasped, ⁷ but ^[g]emptied Himself, taking the form of a bond-servant, and being made in the likeness of men. ⁸ Being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death ^[h]on a cross.”

Also MATTHEW 20:28 “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His ^[n]life a ransom for many.” 

Following Jesus means voluntarily humbling ourselves and becoming progressively more obedient to Him. It means putting the needs of others ahead of our own needs. It means surrendering our will and our life to Him every day. It means having the willingness to affirm to God as He did in the Garden of Gethsemane: “THY will not MY will be done”.

To sum up: Following Jesus means giving up/setting aside my will and my life for God and others.

The next brick we’ve built into our MISSION is

2 LOVE PEOPLE

Every person that has ever lived anywhere or at any time in history is loved by God and highly valued by God because every person that has ever lived anywhere or at any time in history is created in God’s image. Every person is loved by God because he or she bears God’s image.

I think we say “Jesus loves me” or “Jesus loves you” so frequently that we gradually lose sight of the incomprehensible meaning that is concentrated into those three words. Jesus loved us to the point of giving up His life for us. If we are to truly FOLLOW JESUS, we must do the same.

God speaks to us about loving people through John, appropriately the disciple “whom Jesus loved”, in 1^st JOHN 4:7-11 saying: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is ^[a]born of God and knows God. ⁸ The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. ⁹ By this the love of God was manifested ^[b]in us, that God has sent His ^[c]only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. ¹⁰ In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. ¹¹ Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.”. 

As God’s children we have an obligation to love others as Jesus loved us. He gave His life, so we must give ours, if we wish to be successful in accomplishing our mission.

No other writer of the New Testament writes with greater poetry or greater beauty than John. Reading this passage gives us warm fuzzy feelings, but we must be careful to not get so caught up in the beauty of the words that we miss their practical application. As a husband, I am instructed to love my wife as Jesus loved the church -to the point of giving up my life for her. In my old sin-natured brain, I picture myself rescuing her from a burning building or pushing her out of harms way from a speeding car, and then dying as a result of my selfless, heroic actions, and all the people at the funeral marveling over my remarkable sacrifice. Such a thing could certainly happen, but the practical reality of this kind of love has more to do with far less dramatic things. Things like picking up my socks or washing the dishes or cleaning the kitchen or giving her a back rub even though my back hurts like the devil at that particular moment. The same hold true for the manner in which God wants us to LOVE PEOPLE. Unconditional love, as heroic as it might seem, is more practically reflected in little actions that we might see as dull, mundane and even downright boring. The great thing about this is that there are a multitude of ways we can express our love for people in this manner: shoveling snow for an older neighbor, taking a meal to someone who is sick, stopping to help the person with a stalled car, volunteering at the hospital or local free health clinic -the options are limitless.

LOVING PEOPLE will come about as one result of FOLLOWING JESUS. We will recognize that we have begun to have success at LOVING PEOPLE when we find ourselves seeking opportunities to serve or help others where there is nothing to gain personally and when we find ourselves more concerned with THEIR NEEDS than OUR OWN.

When we FOLLOW JESUS, we will find that we LOVE PEOPLE as He does. When we LOVE PEOPLE as He does, we will find that we have a desire to tell those people about Who Jesus IS and What He did for us, We will have a desire to REACH THE WORLD with the Good News about Him!