Four things our church needs to do - #4 – Outreach
Acts 1:6-11
By James Galbraith
First Baptist Church, Port Alberni.
May 27, 2007
Text
6 So when they met together, they asked him, “Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
7 He said to them: “It is not for you to know the times or dates the Father has set by his own authority. 8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
9 After he said this, he was taken up before their very eyes, and a cloud hid him from their sight.
10 They were looking intently up into the sky as he was going, when suddenly two men dressed in white stood beside them. 11 “Men of Galilee,” they said, “why do you stand here looking into the sky? This same Jesus, who has been taken from you into heaven, will come back in the same way you have seen him go into heaven.”
Expose Yourself
A funny thing happened to me a few years ago in Prince Rupert.
- it happened to me because of me
- humorous T-shirt at a local newspaper office
called the Northwest Weekly (don’t tell yet)
I knew the publisher a bit, so I said to him jokingly,
“Would you give me one of these if I wore it Sunday morning?”
To my surprise, he handed me one of the shirts! I don’t have it anymore, but I have made a copy for you to see on the powerpoint:
“Expose yourself to the Northwest”
Now, what this has to do with today’s topic, you’ll just have to wait and see.
Review/Introduction
We’ve been working through the four essential ingredients of any church or ministry.
We’ve covered worship -
the direct praise and admiration and respect and awe that we give to God
We have also talked about nurture; which I define as the deliberate teaching and training of Christians for service in the church.
We’ve covered fellowship – our activity which promotes and edifies RELATIONSHIPS within the church body, both local and abroad.
And we’ve packaged these into a paragraph which brings all of these activities into a description of love:
If worship is our love shown to God,
and nurture is our love for learning and growing in his word,
then fellowship is our love for each other, modeled on God’s love for us.
Let’s talk about outreach today.
OUTREACH includes activity which is targeted towards those outside of the church, whether local or abroad.
It can include meeting physical needs and teaching Christian beliefs.
It’s primary goal is to bring those outside of the church back into relationship with God, and into the local church.
It is meant
to demonstrate Christian love in a tangible way to a needy world,
to carry out the call of God to reach out to the lost, and
to bring people into a personal and corporate relationship with Jesus Christ.
SO if worship is our love shown to God,
and nurture is our love for learning and growing in his word,
then fellowship is our love for each other, modeled on God’s love for us.
Than outreach is Christian love shown to a world that desperately needs it.
Now here’s the connection to my T-shirt story today.
The shirt is a playful way of encouraging people to learn more about the newspaper in question. The newspaper, in order to be read, has to be taken out of the printers and put out on the street.
The newspaper needs to “expose itself” to the public, if the public is going to read it.
Outreach is essentially exposing ourselves, and by that I mean our faith and our God, to those who will never walk into this building on their own.
If we want to see people learn more about Christ, draw closer to Christ, know Christ and eventually find their way into our church, we have to take him out of this building and show him to people, by word and deed, so that they can see the love of Christ in action.
Outreach is also the key to our own faith being alive and vibrant.
because if we don’t participate in some sort of outreach,
everything about our faith becomes bottled up inside us,
and the effects of that can be extremely detrimental.
A Tale of two lakes
To explain what I mean by this, I’d like to talk about one of the two famous bodies of water that occupy the land around Israel.
Jesus spent much of his time around the Sea of Galilee, a body of water to the north of Jerusalem that would compare well to our Sproat Lake.
- a moderate size, fresh water lake
fed by mountain run off and teeming with fish
Water comes in, leaves the lake through streams, and the lake thrives.
Think of that kind of lake as a healthy Christian:
fresh, deep and full of good things to share with others.
Now, as healthy as the Sea of Galilee may be,
that’s not the body of water I want to focus on today,
You see, the Jordan river runs dues south from the Sea of Galilee for about 120 km, dropping elevation along it’s entire route (as most rivers do), until it empties into what was called the Salt Sea, and we now call the Dead Sea.
The Dead Sea
- far bigger than Sea of Galilee (77 km long, 10-15 km wide)
- surface of water is 427 m, (over 1300 feet) below sea level,
and deepest part of the actual sea bottom is another 430 m down.
- concentrated chemical deposits
(salt, potash, magnesium, and calcium chlorides and bromide, 25% of the water) give the Dead Sea both buoyancy and its fatal effects on fish,
- so toxic that some believe that the Sea may well have ignited
during an earthquake and caused the rain of brimstone
and fire that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah.
- although it’s water and minerals can be quite therapeutic,
nothing lives in the water, except the simplest of micro-organisms,
because of the high mineral content.
My reason for bringing all this up is this –
The Dead Sea is dead for one reason:
the water that flows into it has no where to go.
All the minerals that are brought downstream,
all the good things that can help so many people,
get trapped in a deep gorge and never come out,
so they build up and up until they become lethal to almost all forms of life.
Many Christians are feeling “dead in their faith” for much the same reasons
- everything is coming in, and nothing is coming out.
Do you feel fed?
Bible studies, church services, religious shows, prayer meetings, books,
are all important for the believer to grow in his or her faith.
But without some source of output for all the input,
the good gets bottled up inside of us and can become a little overwhelming.
Now, it won’t choke the life out of us, the same way the Dead Sea’s accumulation of minerals chokes off any significant life within,
but without some source of output for our faith, we can become listless,
spiritually dead people who do nothing but complain that “we not getting fed”,
when in fact what we need to do is step back from the trough and invite someone we love to join us!
This “output” is an essential part of our faith, without it we become bloated, stagnant Christians that simply build up our reserves.
This output is also the central theme of our passage today.
Exegesis
Jesus has finished appearing to the disciple after his resurrection,
and is now returning to Heaven,
leaving them to carry on the work of building the church.
They are worried at his departure, not know what lies in store for them, hence the question,
“Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?”
They want him to finish the work they thought that he came to do, to make everything right for Israel, God’s people.
The first part of his answer tells them that this final reckoning is coming,
but that they do not need to know the exact time of it.
The last part of his answer is what I want to focus in today,
for in it Jesus clearly expects the disciples to take
what love he’s given them and spread it around.
But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
“receive power from the Holy Spirit”
- means that God will not leave them to their own strength, but that when they follow his word they will have the power of God on their side
“be my witnesses”
- share God’s love and message with those who have not yet heard
- a witness in court shares his experience
- we share ours as Christians, our experience of God’s love,
not just our viewpoint,
- we’re not all public speakers,
but as Christians we have been loved and are being loved,
and that’s what we “bear witness of”
in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth
- Jerusalem – home
- Judea, Samaria – neighbourhood, nation
- ends of the Earth – world
So Jesus calls them to share his love,
with the power of the Holy Spirit ready to help them.
That means that we don’t have to trust in our own strength,
but rather in God’s, to do this witnessing.
It also means that the way we witness is as varied as the ways in which God works.
Sometimes he speaks and sometimes he acts,
and very often he works in a combination of the two,
and we can follow that same logic when we serve as witnesses to his love and his message.
- some of us talk about Jesus, while others live out his love in many different ways
- sometimes, the best outreach is a combination of both
- free car wash, with a note of encouragement based on God’s love given away
- etc, etc, etc!
The point is that all of us, in the way that the Holy Spirit gives us strength to act, are called to reach out with his love to those who need to hear about his love and experience his love.
The last word
To wrap this up today, we’ve been looking at four different parts of church life that, if they are done well and in balance, will help us thrive as a healthy, active church.
Worship - the direct praise and admiration and respect and awe that we give to God
Nurture; which I define as the deliberate teaching and training of Christians for service in the church.
Fellowship – our activity which promotes and edifies RELATIONSHIPS within the church body, both local and abroad.
Outreach - activity which is targeted towards those outside of the church, whether local or abroad.
And we’ve brought that all together under love:
Worship is our love shown to God,
Nurture is our love for learning and growing in his word,
Fellowship is our love for each other, modeled on God’s love for us.
Outreach is Christian love shown to a world that desperately needs it.
To see what we should so now, I’ll turn you back to our passage,
for after this experience, the disciples were a bit overwhelmed,
and were standing around looking somewhat shell-shocked:
To them two anonymous figures, possibly angels, appear and say,
“What are you standing around for?
He’s coming back when he’s ready, now you all get to work”
Those are good parting words for us as well.
If you are not a born again Christian,
then you need to know about the love which we’ve been talking about,
and I invite you to come and talk after the service.
If you are, then you do know this love,
and the message of salvation that God brings to us all,
now stop standing around and start reaching out to those who need to know it !
Think of these four vital functions as the wheels of a car – all needed to get the car moving.
Don’t think of them as the legs of a chair that you can sit down on and rest!
