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Readings: Matthew 9:35-38 & John 20: 19-23
35 Jesus went through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and healing every disease and illness. 36 When he saw the crowds, he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd. 37 Then he said to his disciples, ‘The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. 38 Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.’
19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said, ‘Peace be with you!’ 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord. 21 Again Jesus said, ‘Peace be with you! As the Father has sent me, I am sending you.’ 22 And with that he breathed on them and said, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive anyone’s sins, their sins are forgiven; if you do not forgive them, they are not forgiven.
Teaching:
Well folks, last Sunday was an incredible celebration for the lives of 6 people who were baptised. And this was a statement of what happens to people who come to know the Lord – they realise like the story of Philip meeting the Ethiopian Eunuch on the road to Gaza that I preached about, they know that that encounter with the Lord Jesus changes everything. There’s no going back once you realise what the Lord Jesus has done for you.
And so last weekend was an important moment also to communicate to our Church family my vision for 2025 – a year of evangelism, in which with the love the Lord Jesus in our hearts we go out beyond our walls into our families, into our community and share with them the Gospel, the Good News that we ourselves have discovered.
And so as we begin to think and prepare for 2025, I want to spend some weeks thinking more about why it’s important for us that know the Lord Jesus as our saviour to want to share it. There is something at the core of Jesus’ life and mission and something that he specifically mentions in the book of John – one of the readings we had today. After he had been raised from the dead and appeared to his disciples for the first time, he says these words in John 20:21 “As the Father has sent me, I am sending you”. So Jesus has just experienced the cruelty of the cross to pay for our sins, and he now is raised from death to show there is freedom from those sins, and even though it would seem as though his mission is done, all that he wanted to do, his ultimate passion is not finished. Jesus wants that all people to experience life in his name, to experience the joy and freedom of his love and forgiveness. Jesus wants everyone to know him. That’s his heart for our world. But the incredible thing about this folks, is that he is not interested in doing this mission on his own. So we see in this passage that he is enlisting his followers to partner with him in this mission. He is enlisting us to be carriers of his hope to a broken and hurting world. “As the Father has sent me”, Jesus says, “I am sending you”. You are sent. Everyone who is a follower of Jesus is sent by him to carry on his mission and to bring his life to a world that desperately needs it.
Before I go any further, I want to do a little exercise. You have a pen and a piece of paper given to you. In the space of literally 1 minute, I want you to write down as many names of people that you know, either in your family, your friendship group, your neighbours, work colleagues, anyone. And I don’t just mean the people that you like in those groups, it’s everyone you know in some capacity. Ok, you have 1 minute, and you won’t have to share this with anyone.
Now I’m sure for those of you who were here last week, or for you today who are hearing about this 2025 Year of Evangelism for the first time you are beginning to twitch a little and think to yourself, well I’m not a missionary – that’s for others – that’s for people who are more extroverted than me, that’s Jonny’s job, I’m not skilled enough in the bible to go and tell others about Jesus, I’m happy to work behind the scenes thank you very much. But Jesus isn’t saying that. He is saying “as the Father has sent me, I am sending you”. That word you includes all of you. That Greek word for You Hymas, is plural, it’s everyone. So none of you who claim to follow Christ can hide away from Jesus’ command in being sent.
And in this verse, it’s not just that Jesus is saying that we are sent – he’s actually telling us more about HOW we are being sent. You see we are being sent in the same way as Jesus was sent. As the Father has sent me, so I’m sending you. So, what that means is that if we look at how Jesus was sent into different situations, we can see how we also are meant to go. It’s how each of us can do life in such a way that we are partnering with him to bring his life to others around us.
I wonder do any of you remember our core values as a church? One of those core values is this – to ‘Reach out in love and welcome in’. Now immediately I suspect for many of you listening to that aspect of reaching out, you might think, oh yeah, we do that through our Compassion ministries – we reach out through Baby Basics, Munch on Mondays, School uniforms, and all other things. But let me read to you what I wrote for this core value some 6 years ago now – “We seek to offer hospitality to both those in the church and those outside, reaching out into the community to help those in need (so there you go, that’s Compassion and we do that well. However, here’s the next bit that I wrote), sharing the Gospel message through different forms of evangelism. This will not be constrained to the location of the church buildings but should extend into our ‘frontlines’ – the places where we live and work daily, bridging the gap between Church and Society.
That’s what being sent is all about. It’s going out into the places that only you will go. None of us are the same, and so where you go and where I go will look different. And so from Jesus’ command we know the what – we know we are being sent and where we are being sent. But the biggest issue where I think we might fall down is actually the why? Why are we sent?
You see if all I did in this preparation for a Year of Evangelism was to give you some ‘how to’s’, or some practical ways in which to do this, then we would all know what to do and how we should do it, but if we ‘re honest we probably wouldn’t do it. Most of the reasons for people not engaging in programmes within the church is NOT about what the thing is, or how to do it, but actually it’s around the reason why. Why should I join a house group – why is it important? Why should I give my time to serve God in a particular area – why is that important? You see alot of the time we are missing the why.
The reality is that Jesus not only knew the what and the how of his Mission, but he also knew the why. So what was his why? Well can I invite you to complete this sentence John 3:16 ‘For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life’. That famous verse of the Bible gives us the why of Jesus’ mission. ‘God so LOVED THE WORLD, that’. It was love. Jesus was willing to be sent because of love. It was love that compelled him to be with us. It was a way to demonstrate and express the love that was in his heart for us. So back to John 20:21 Just as the Father sent me, so I am sending you. That was Jesus’ why, and so it’s our why also. Love is our why. It’s not about growing a bigger church. It’s not about all the programmes. It’s about love. We have experienced the love of God in Christ Jesus, and we live in a world, in a community, that actually wants to experience genuine love, they want to know that they are valued, that they have a purpose. And all of those things can only be found in Jesus. We know his love, we have experienced his love, our lives have been transformed by his love, and yet we live in a world where most people around us have not experienced his love. You live in a neighbourhood, you live in a family network, you live in a community, where most people around you have not experienced the love of Jesus. There probably are names on your list right now. But the question is this – what does that do to your heart? Does it do anything? Do you even care? Does it matter to you that people whom you love in this world, but who have not entered into a true relationship with Jesus will perish. Does it grip your heart?
You know whenever I do that exercise to quickly write down the amount of people I know and realise that many of the names on there don’t know the love of Jesus – they haven’t experienced that relationship – it really does something to me. If it didn’t then I am truly heartless and have no conscience. It stirs me to want to do something. And as we begin these preparations for this Year of Evangelism, I want you to keep at the centre of your mind the names of the people on your list.
Folks this isn’t about ticking a box and hoping that many more people that we know go to heaven, no, this is about people experiencing love, it’s about people experiencing life in the way that Jesus has given us that know him. Yes, ultimately we receive the gift of eternal life, but life in Jesus begins NOW. This is about people’s hearts being healed and impacted by the acceptance and the love and the truth that Jesus alone offers them. Folks, right now our world is so full of brokenness – it’s on the brink of a huge global war, it’s full of confusion and anxiety and emptiness and anger. People around us are hurting. Even those who seem to be doing really well, they too are longing for love, purpose and joy, and Jesus offers that. But do they know that? Probably not, but that’s why we need to learn to live in an intentional way that opens up genuine opportunities for us to help people experience Jesus.
And so where we start is that we need to start seeing people the way that Jesus sees them. This is where Jesus’ mission began. Do we see people through the lens of love? Or do we see them in a different way? Do we see them with eyes that are based on their politics, or their morality, or the colour of their skin, or how they look?
I’ve told this story before about a guy who was the local drunk around Coleraine when we were living there. His name was Mickey. Now Mickey was a big lad, he previously had been in the SAS, and you certainly wouldn’t have messed with him. I heard a few stories of bouncers trying to get Mickey out of the pub, and it wasn’t an easy task. But one Sunday evening, in St Patrick’s Coleraine when we were preparing for our evening service, the next thing we saw was Mickey walking in through the back door. No one got in his way. And so Mickey, calm as a cucumber walked up to the top of the church and sat down. No one knew what to do. Should we ask him to leave. What if he caused a scene? Because of his typical behaviour around the town, we knew that we probably wouldn’t get through the service without something kicking off. So, a plan was afoot to ask him kindly to leave. Anyway, just before the service started, Mickey got up and went up onto the chancel steps. Every one of us took a large intake of breath. He extended his index finger out pointing to us all, and then spoke. He said this, “You know what your problem is? Your problem is that you don’t know what to do with me”. And then Mickey as calm as anything, stepped down from the chancel steps and left the way he came in. It truly was a turning point for us as a church. Because we recognised that in all of us, we so easily give labels. And those labels affect how we see people and how we approach them.
You see if we see people in the way that Jesus sees them, through the lens of love, then it dramatically changes our why. It makes those words of 1 John 4 become so relevant ‘We love because he first loved us’.
And so briefly for the remainder of the time I have, I want to look at our other reading from Matthew 9:35-38
Here we see Jesus moving around from town to village, telling people about the good news of the Kingdom, bringing healing wherever he went. The crowds would have been large, wanting to get to see this man that everyone was talking about. And then Matthew says that as Jesus looked on the crowds “he had compassion on them, because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a shepherd”. His heart was moved. He saw them through the lens of love. He saw them dealing with the weight of life’s circumstances. He saw the heaviness on some of them to care for another family member. Or to deal with stuff in life. He saw people whose hearts needed love. Jesus saw people below the veneer or the exterior that they were putting on. And when he did that, he saw their struggles, their burdens and their fears. And that seeing moved his heart to feel compassion.
Folks, what if we began to see people through the eyes of Jesus? In a society where everyone is labelling everyone else, can you think of anything more radical than a group of people called the Church choosing to live in a way where we see them the way Jesus does? You see if we continue to see those around us with labels, a bit like what I did with big Mickey in Coleraine, then we automatically distance ourselves that keep us from moving relationally towards them. I wonder are we willing to be so radical that we start understanding what people are truly going through, their struggles, walking with them and understanding their issues, having compassion for them the way that Jesus has, before we come up with conclusions. What if we asked Jesus to help us change how we see people? Folks that truly would be a game changer in our town.
In this conversation about being sent, we have got to begin with a significant change in our hearts, and intentionally see people through a lens of love and compassion. So as we embark on the preparation for a Year of Evangelism in 2025, I’m going to give you all homework this week. Firstly, take home your bit of paper. Don’t lose it – it will be important for the future. If you haven’t filled out any names on the sheet, then you mustn’t have any friends. Take your page home. Secondly, consider how you see people in this week ahead, whether in work or school or your neighbourhood, what is going through your mind when you see that person? Are you seeing them with a label that you have put on them, or are you seeing them with love? And when you start seeing them in the way that Jesus sees them, then think about what your heart is telling you to do? This is where being sent comes in. It’s no longer concentrating on how or what you do next, because it starts with the Why – why it is so important to share the good news of the Gospel with others.
Can you imagine what the impact would be, that through our unique connections, of which everyone of us has different connections, can you imagine what the impact would be if we all intentionally saw all the people around us through the lens of how Jesus sees them – that being love? Can you imagine like the crowd he mingled with, that we would be filled with such compassion for those in our connections? It would be truly amazing and kingdom transforming.
[PRAYER – Open our eyes Lord, to see people the way you see them. Forgive us if we see people with labels. We are asking for labourers and we want to be your ambassadors, would you help us as we prepare for this year of 2025, as we are sent out, and the impact this will make into our neighbourhoods and community, in our schools, in our families. We want to partner with you in your mission Lord. Give us your eyes to see. We feel so privileged to be sent Lord, and have our hearts moved out of love and compassion. ]