Audio Transcript:

Welcome to Missions on Point, the Propempo perspective on church and missions.

Thank you for joining us for episode 225 of Missions on Point. Joel Hollins here again, filling in for David Meade. I am so excited to be back with you on this podcast talking about the things that excite me the most in life. Above all, it’s the glory of God, amazed in wonder at who he is and how he is powerfully at work in our lives. I’m excited about the word of God as our sufficient means for knowing God, being reconciled to him, and living in a manner pleasing to him. I’m excited about missions, God’s global purpose to bring glory to himself to the ends of the earth. I’m excited about the gospel of Jesus Christ, as the good news of salvation for sinners like me to be reconciled to God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. And I’m excited about the church as God’s means of spreading out and bringing this gospel to every nation and tribe. And all of these interests are not disconnected from one another. God has designed the church as his instrument in missions to preach the gospel to all peoples telling them of the glory of God and salvation through Jesus Christ alone.

Missionary and missiologist, J. Herbert Kane, put these same pieces together and wrote the following: "God is a missionary God. The Bible is a missionary book. The Gospel is a missionary message. The church is a missionary institution. And when the church ceases to be missionary minded, it has denied the faith and betrayed its trust.”

That’s a great pointed way of putting it.  If you’re a regular listener of this podcast, I assume that you too are excited about God’s purposes to use the church to preach the gospel to the ends of the earth.  And starting today and over the next several episodes, I want us to consider how these elements all come together in the central feature of a church’s worship service, the authoritative preaching of God’s word to God’s people. This will be our concern: how do we preach about missions? Does missions come up in every sermon? If you’re preaching expositionally through books of the bible, will you only sometimes mention global missions? How do we rightly preach about missions, while maintaining the commitment of every good preacher to remain steadfastly faithful to the meaning and intention of God’s word? The number one danger here of the zealous missions-minded preacher is to do eisegesis – to read into the text of scripture something that is not there. But, over the next couple of episodes, I hope to give you some guidelines on how to preach well and then give you some examples too. And we’ll talk next time more about what not to do. But today, I want to simply answer the question, is every sermon a missions sermon? And my answer is yes, every sermon should be a missions sermon. Of course, though, it all depends on what I mean by that.

I want us to consider those four short statements that J. Herbert Kane made about missions.  And if these statements are true, then this will necessarily change how we approach and preach the word of God.  So again, this is the quote, "God is a missionary God. The Bible is a missionary book. The Gospel is a missionary message. The church is a missionary institution.” Now, you’re not going to reiterate these four points in every sermon. But they should frame our thinking when we are preaching. Missions should frame every sermon. Missions will frame every sermon if the preacher is a missions-minded preacher. If you see missions throughout the Bible, it will affect what you say and it will come out in your preaching. Missions is the thread that connects God, the Bible, the gospel and the church together. It’s a ready application that can easily be drawn upon. You may not mention it specifically, and that’s ok, because you can never say everything in any one sermon.  But thinking about missions should be close at hand and influencing everything we do say. So here are those four ways to frame our thinking as we prepare and preach a sermon.

Number one. A sermon should be framed by our thinking about God as a missionary God.

The first truth about the Bible is that it is revelation, all of it.  It’s all revealing to us the character of our Creator and Redeemer.  Every sermon should be telling us something about who God is. Creation does teach us about the nature of God, his eternal power and divine nature. But we cannot know God in any redemptive sense, unless God initiates our salvation and speaks to us. We are in darkness unless the light of his word comes to us. God’s mission is to reveal himself to us through his word. And his word is sufficient to give us everything we need for life and godliness. God speaks, and God saves. He initiates our redemption, for we are lost unless God comes to rescue us. God is a missionary God. He is purposeful in his acts in history, and his redemption of mankind is at the center of his purposes. More specifically, the exaltation of Jesus Christ is at the center of God’s purposes. For there is no other way for us to personally know God except through Jesus. Jesus is the perfect and complete revelation of God that we need. For us to truly know God, he had to come to us. He put on flesh and became like us. He humbled himself and served us so that we could be reconciled to God and worship Him. God is not like the idols who are mute and immobile. And this distinguishes God from all other false gods. He does not wait for us to come to him. He speaks and he comes to us. God is a missionary God. And when you preach about who God is, let this frame your thinking.

Number two. A sermon should be framed by our thinking about the Bible as a missionary text.

When we say that the Bible is a missionary text, what we mean is that it does the work of a missionary, and it is effective in God’s purpose to save sinners. What we mean is that God’s word is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword. It can do the work that no one else can, piercing to the division of soul and spirit, revealing our hearts, convicting us of sin, and bringing the only comfort of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ. I like how Psalm 107:17–22 puts it. “17 Some were fools through their sinful ways, and because of their iniquities suffered affliction; 18 they loathed any kind of food, and they drew near to the gates of death. 19 Then they cried to the LORD in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress. 20 He sent out his word and healed them, and delivered them from their destruction. 21 Let them thank the LORD for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of man! 22 And let them offer sacrifices of thanksgiving, and tell of his deeds in songs of joy!” God’s wonderful work here is that he sent his word to heal and deliver.

The God who spoke the universe into existence has now spoken into our hearts, declaring us to be justified through the blood of Jesus, calling us as his very own children. And when God declares it to be true, no one can speak a word otherwise. This is God’s intention with his word, that it would be carried forth by his children to all creation, so that Jesus’ sheep would hear his voice and respond in faith. A missionary who does not use the word of God is not a missionary. The Bible is the missionary text. That’s its purpose. And when we preach it, we pray every time that if there are unbelievers in our midst, that they will respond like I Corinthians 14:25 says, where “the secrets of his heart are disclosed, and so, falling on his face, he will worship God and declare that God is really among you.” The Bible is a missionary text.

Number three. A sermon should be framed by our thinking about the gospel as a missionary message.

This, of course, goes hand in hand with the previous point. But this point can be made by being thankful about how many people have emphasized the centrality of the gospel in the Bible and in preaching. The gospel is the central message of scripture, and whenever we preach we are recognizing how each passage leads us to Christ.  And only when we have the gospel central to our thinking are we able to rightly interpret and apply every passage of scripture. The gospel goes before and behind us.  It begins and ends our thinking. This makes preaching a different kind of speaking than any other event. We must keep in mind what Romans 1:16 says, that the gospel is the power of God for salvation. If we want our hearers to be saved, we must preach the gospel. It’s what makes our preaching distinctly Christian. For without the gospel, and without preaching about mankind’s absolute necessity for Christ, then it becomes simply a moralistic religious lecture that adherents from other religions might be perfectly happy with. Bryan Chapel says it this way that preaching is not just an instructional lecture, it’s a redemptive event. And so the gospel is a missionary message. With this one message, every human being on the face of the earth is called to repent and believe.

Number four. A sermon should be framed by our thinking about the church as a missionary institution.

When anyone preaches a sermon, the primary audience is the church. Believers gather to hear the word of God and be edified. Likely your sermon is going to have some application for the church. I hope it does. Our sermons should always apply to the church, not just to individuals. There are many applications. We need to obey the command to love one another, be reminded of our need for the various gifts in the body of Christ, and so on. But when we think about the church we need to think of it as the missionary institution that God has designed. The local church is the city on the hill, the shining light in the darkness that contrasts with every other institution on earth. The encouragement to every church in the first chapters of the book of Revelation is to be on guard against potentially losing their lampstand in this world. The church’s charter is the Great Commission. The church is a missionary institution, and when we speak to the church and apply God’s word to it, we must think of it as a missionary institution so that we can equip the church to fulfill its mission. 

"God is a missionary God. The Bible is a missionary book. The Gospel is a missionary message. The church is a missionary institution.”

When we begin to think in this way, to frame all of our thinking with missions, then it will be difficult to not preach a sermon that doesn’t touch on missions in some way. God’s global purpose throughout all of time to bring glory to himself through the preaching of the gospel by the church to all nations is such a thoroughly biblical idea that we won’t be able to do anything other than bring it up at least a little bit in our sermons.

Much more could be said about how the Bible shows us that missions is central to the church. To read a more thorough case laying out the biblical apologetic for the centrality of the church in missions, please get David Meade’s book called, Missions on Point: The Local Church at the Heart of Ecclesiology and Missiology.  The first third of that book points to the biblical evidence that the church is at the center of missions and missions is at the center of the church. 

Thank you for joining us today, I pray that you begin to see these truths in scripture more, and that you will faithfully preach the whole counsel of God.

Thanks for joining us today on Missions on Point. We trust that you'll find more help and resources on our websites at Propempo.com and missioserve.org. We are so thankful for those who support us, enabling us to produce this podcast. Now to God be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen.