Since it has been two weeks since we gathered together for worship, let me briefly remind us that we are in the closing weeks of our series on God’s vision for us. And what is his vision – that we be a fully following and faithfully functioning church.
For the past four weeks we have focused on the second half of this vision – faithfully functioning and I remind us that there are five main functions of the church – worship, outreach, fellowship, discipleship, and service. So far we have examined the first function – worship.
Today, we look at the second function by starting with a very familiar and tasty product -M and M’s. I love m & m’s! Don’t you?
I recently asked some of us via e-mail what your favorite M & M color was. And this is what you told me:
· Red (7)
· Purple (3)
· Green (2)
· Pink (2)
· Yellow
· Variety
· What’s Inside
I checked the m & m website, www.mms.com, and found out a little more about m & m’s.
The concept for M & M’s began during wartime – the Spanish Civil War that is. Forrest Mars, Sr. of the Mars candy company, discovered on a trip to Spain that soldiers were eating “pellets of chocolate that were encased in a hard sugary coating to prevent them from melting.”
Inspired by the idea, Mars returned to his kitchen and invented his version of we now call M & M’s. They went public in 1941 and quickly became a part of the American GI’s rations and were packaged in cardboard tubes for them.
As time went on, more colors became available and the product line began to include my favorite – Peanut M & M’s, Crunchy M & M’s, peanut butter M & M’s, Almond M & M’s, and a whole host of other products.
One of the things about M & M’s over the years that generated a lot of interest has to do with the colors they come in. Just how many different colors do M & M’s come in? Well, from the website you can order 21 different colors of M & M’s on-line! Here are the colors
Black Dark Green
Purple Green
Pink Silver
Dark Pink Yellow
Blue Dark Blue
Red Light Purple
White Cream
Orange Aqua Green
Gold Maroon
Teal Green Brown
Light Blue
This means you can by your M & M’s in your favorite sports team colors, your company colors, your favorite racing team colors, or your favorite holiday colors! Or you can mix and match your colors! Among my favorite mixes would be Western Michigan Bronco Brown and Gold or Cincinnati Bengal orange and black!
And of course, now that the NASCAR season has begun, they also sponsor the #38 Ford Taurus driven by Eliot Sadler! And you can also order NASCAR #38 M and M’s on-line as well!
But, there is another kind of M & M that we must acknowledge this day. It is an M & M of a more important and eternal kind. Each of us who claim a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through the confession of our sins has this M & M.
· Our ministry to one another
· Our mission to the world
We will soon address the ministry to one another. This morning however we are addressing the second point – our mission to the world. What is our mission as Christians to the world? Our two texts that have already been read this morning give us a hint- it is an extension of Christ’s mission. It is the Great Commission – God’s call to us to “go and make” disciples who are mature and responsible believers.
But it starts with outreach. It starts with our intentional commitment to build a relationship with people who need God in their life and need someone to help them come to God. Let me use a familiar image to give us a starting point – home plate.
In baseball home plate is two things – the starting point of the game and the measure of progress. It has a dual purpose. Let me suggest that outreach also has a dual purpose – the starting point of faith and the measure of our progress in furthering the Great Commission. In other words the purpose of outreach is to help people come home to God! Why? Because until they do, they are lost! And speaking of lost, Jesus told three stories that comprise the entire 15th chapter of Luke’s gospel. These three stories say something about outreach.
The first story that Jesus told was the story or parable of the lost sheep. A few weeks ago I watched a cable TV news channel feature story in the Middle East, I can’t remember where, about residents of this one country who were looking for a sheep to sacrifice as part of an upcoming religious celebration.
The TV crew filmed the segment alongside a busy highway where people would stop and get out of their expensive cars like a Mercedes and deal with the herders. Price and quality were a big deal for them and then when the transaction was complete, they would drive off with the sheep in their trunk.
One of the things that stuck me was that here were people who were wealthy enough to drive a Mercedes buying sheep from someone who perhaps drove an old truck or did not drive an automobile at all. But, who were the sheep more valuable to? Those who owned the sheep! Those who were looking could buy anything they want and if they lost their sheep they would be out what they had paid. But, for the shepherd to have lost a sheep, it was a tremendous loss because it was a source of tremendous revenue!
The featured help me better understand the joy of verse 6 at the recovery of the lost sheep? Now some people might frankly say, “Hey! The shepherd still had 99 sheep left. Maybe he’s better off one less sheep. Maybe that sheep was nothing but trouble!” But, we miss the point of the story, especially from God’s perspective.
As Jesus says in verse 7, “Heaven [rejoices] over one lost sinner who returns to God than over ninety-nine others who are righteous and haven’t strayed away!” The one matters to God! God is interested in finding the lost sheep! And He needs our help in doing so because a key function of a fully functioning church is outreach. But, Jesus does not stop with the sheep, he moves to the story of the lost coin. He is trying to prove a point.
How many of us get so frustrated when you lose something and you spend a great deal of effort trying to find it? And sometimes we do some crazy things to find things. For example, a few weeks ago I lost the cordless phone in our house. It was somewhere where we could not see it.
Know how I found it? I used the cell phone to call the house phone and listened for the cordless phone’s rings! It took me two rounds of calling to find it! The home phone’s voice mail kicked on before I could find it!
As we read the story of the lost coin in verses 8 through 10, we understand the desperate search for something of value don’t we? The search for the car keys, or the diamond ring, or the childhood keepsake, or the TV remote gets us possessed. We are no longer are in the hunt mode, we are in the search and rescue mode!
This woman that we read of in Luke 15 probably did not have a great deal of money. Things were probably tight for her. That coin was going to buy food or pay the rent or a bill that she owed on. Where was it? How am I going to survive!
But, she finds it! And she celebrates the finding! And Jesus says in verse 10, “In the same way, there is joy in the presence of God’s angels when even one sinner repents.” Lost people are of great value to God. Lost people matter to God.
Then there is the greatest story of the three – the story of the lost son. This time Jesus does not speak about a lost animal or lost coin but a lost person.
Very briefly it is the story of a father and two sons. The youngest decides he wants to live life his way and asks for his share of the inheritance.
He leaves and goes to another country and lives, no pun intended, high on the hog until there is nothing left of his inheritance. He ends up feeding the pigs to survive.
Then one day, “When he finally came to his senses,” as stated in verse 17 he makes the decision to return home and become a servant at his father’s house. He has screwed up and he longer feels worthy to be a son to his father. He even rehearses his speech.
He goes home and there is dad who spots him from a distance and runs to him and welcomes him home. A party follows and the older son finds out about his younger brother’s return.
He confronts his father about why this party has been done for this irresponsible brother when he has been so faithful to him. And what does his father say? Verse 32, “We had to celebrate this happy day. For your brother was dead and has come back to life! He was lost, but now he is found!”
Every one of us here this morning can name a person they wish would come home to God. They are a brother, a sister, a parent, a grandparent, a wife, a husband, a friend, or a neighbor.
We desperately want to see them turn their life over to the Lord. And if we are so desirous of this, think about how God must feel! He wants them worse than we do!
I think that Jesus was intentional in how he organized his story. He was setting up his primary audience whom is identified in verse 2 – the Pharisees and the teachers of religious law who complained about the kind of people that Jesus was associating with.
He starts out with a story designed to evoke sympathy. His target audience knew the value of those sheep for the faith they proclaimed required the use of them.
Then he moves to a story that they understood even more clearly because it dealt with money. And they liked money.
Then he nails them. He humanizes the story. He deals with what is closest to the heart of God – lost people -those very prodigals that kept gathering around Jesus that were despised by the “religious” people.
I wonder from time to time about the facial expressions on those who heard this story. The religious people did. The disciples did. The prodigals always around Jesus did.
Lost and seeking people matter to God. That’s who Jesus was after. He did not sit in some synagogue somewhere and hope that people would show up for the service. He did not have a home church. He went where the people were.
Think about the term outreach. It is composed of two words – out and reach. That’s what Jesus’ mission was – reaching out through His ministry and His death and resurrection to bring people home to His father.
That’s the mission he prayed for in John 17:18, “As you sent me into the world, I am sending them into the world.” That’s what he told them to do in John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” That’s part of being a fully functioning church.
Outreach is a part of our church. The purpose our outreach ministry team is to help people come to God! We cannot make the decision for them. We cannot force them to come to God.
In fact one great and grave challenge for us today is to proclaim the gospel in such a way as to attract people not repel them. In a recent article, “Evangelism As Companionship,” Katie Hayes made this very pointed observation. “We must address the new and growing reality that people are wary of the religious equivalent of telemarketing. They have a sensitive detection system that alerts them when they are just another target for the evangelistic sales pitch. To be perfectly crass about it, evangelism the old way allowed us to check people off our list when they were “finished.” Once we got them in the water, we could move on to the next one.”
Outreach involves relationships. And if there is one thing that I have truly learned over the years it is this: relationships require time, lots of time, to grow and mature in order to be honest and real and authentic.
Here are some important questions that we need to ask ourselves regarding outreach:
· Am I consciously developing relationships with unchurched persons and asking God to help me with opportunities to share His love and forgiveness with them?
· Am I investing in a person or group of people who need God in their lives?
· Am I regularly inviting unchurched or unconnected friends to church?
We have an outreach ministry team that is currently combined with our fellowship ministry team. I hope to see that changed with the election of new leaders this fall. Right now there are two main outreach ministries that we have – FW Friends and VBS. In the works are two goals:
3 year – Develop a future facility plan based on the work of the Facility Study Group.
5 year – Develop a small group ministry for various needs and life stages.
Both of these goals are important. A good facility can enhance our ability to reach new people. And small groups have been proven effective in bringing people to faith.
But, more than facilities and more than another program a faithfully functioning church that wants to partner with God in helping people come home to Christ is one who makes a choice, a very strategic choice. Namely, they make the choice to develop honest and caring relationships with unchurched people and love them into the Kingdom of God. This choice is not an easily made choice. It is a choice that is made again and again and again when it is easy and when it is hard.
Finally why are we reaching out to people? Why do we say, “come to church with me?” Why should we reach out to those who have no faith or little faith?
People need hope and love and security in their lives. Things are out of control in many person’s lives. Jobs, war, money issues, all of these things are uncertain. We need to be grounded in something much more permanent – we need to be grounded in God. God wants to find us and save us, He wants us to come home.
I like what you said about being saved, which was the second question that I asked.
· Eternal life with Christ
· Changing your lifestyle to reflect Christ
· I am going to a better place when I die
· To be free from the power of sin
· I have accepted Jesus as my Savior
· Knowing that I lack the power to turn myself from destruction
· My sins are forgiven
· Forever in the light of Christ
· Receiving Christ into my heart
· I have been place in God’s hands and one day will be forever with Him
· Jesus died for our sins
· Forgiven of your sins and going to heaven
· You have lived your life without God but you found Him later in life and you follow Him for the rest of your life
I conclude with this thought: Think about the people in our lives who made the choice to help us make our commitment to Christ. What if they hadn’t? Amen.
Questions are from Saddleback’s 40 Day Purpose-Driven Life small group guide.
