Vision Series - Courageous in Outreach

January 25, 2004

Rev. Ronald Burcham

Typed from audio transcript

Grace, mercy, and peace to you from God our Father and our Lord and Savior, Jesus. Amen.

I walked into the room and started talking to him. We didn't really talk about much of anything at first. Then I guessed what was on his agenda, what he really wanted to talk about probably since the moment he entered that room. Yes, I had stumbled upon him. Maybe the only one in the room, I don't know. I had stumbled upon a new grandpa. Yes, I should have suspected when he reached for his wallet, but he was so fluid in the motion, before I knew it, he had it there in front of me, all the portraits of his new grandchild. And he wanted to show each and every one of them to me. “This is her at the hospital. Isn't she adorable? Just look at her. This is her at her mom's house. And this is at our house. And, of course, here's my favorite. Here she is wearing the outfit that I bought her.” How he got the 8 x 10 in his wallet, I don't know, but there it was in living color. He just couldn't help himself. He had to talk about his grandchild.

I didn't mind. In fact, I wanted to listen to him. I wanted him to tell me everything about her because, as I listened to him, I could see a sparkle in his eye and just a love that he had in his voice. After the conversation, I wondered. I wondered, “Is he usually an outgoing kind of person like that?” Judging from the outside, whatever that's worth, I'd say no. I'd say probably he was more of a quiet kind of guy, a little bit shy, maybe a little introverted. So I asked myself, “What could make the difference? What could turn this shy introvert, all of a sudden, into this bubbly extrovert that could just go on, for hours even, talking about his new grandchild?” Just one thing. He was passionate about that grandchild. He was just passionate about this gift that God had given to his family, and you could see in his eyes and hear in his voice the love and this special connection that he had with his granddaughter and, frankly, no one could stop him, not even himself could stop him from talking about her.

It is the vision of Gloria Dei that we would be so passionate, that we would be so excited, that we would have such joy in our heart about what Jesus has done for us, that there would be no stopping us, that no one, not even ourselves, could prevent us from talking about Him. Our vision says that we will be courageous in reaching out with the gospel message, that we'll have a passion as believers in sharing our faith with other people, that we'll be courageous in spreading that gospel both far and near. I think it's the boldest statement of our entire vision. I know it is the most difficult one of our entire vision for us to accomplish and see. Maybe it shouldn't be. It is the commission that God gave to His church, but I am convinced it is the most difficult one for us to see into a reality because, frankly, we don't talk about our faith. We don't talk about anything spiritual. We don't talk about Jesus. We don't talk about a relationship with Him. We don't talk about the integral thing that happens to us when we come to faith in Him, but we'll talk about our grandkids constantly. We will talk about the new car we bought and even give you a test ride in it. We'll talk about the latest vacation we took and share slides with you. But we won't talk about our faith. For some reason, we just don't feel comfortable.

I can see in your eyes already, some of you are saying, “Oh, no, it's going to be one of those sermons, isn't it? Oh, boy. Yeah, pretty soon, he's going to have me out on the street corner flopping a bible at people as they drive by. He's going to put me in a little sandwich outfit that says John 3:16 and I'm going to have to walk up and down downtown.” All the objections are coming up in your mind. All of your defenses, you're getting them ready for me, right? Yeah, you're saying to yourself, “Well, now, I thought that was your job, Pastor. Trying to get out of a little work, are we?” Yeah, that's lazy me, trying to pass things off. Or you're saying to yourself, “I just don't know what to say. I feel uncomfortable. I don't want to offend anyone.” All of those objections come from one place. They come from the fact it is a misbelief that somehow God is commanding, God is forcing, or I'm trying to coerce you into giving witness to the faith that God has put into your heart. Well, I have to tell you there is not a good witness that is forced into doing it. If giving witness and testimony to what you believe is something you are forced into doing, you are not being a witness at all and you certainly will not be effective. There is not a grandparent alive that talks about their grandkids because they have to. There is no rule book that says, “Oh, I became a grandparent. Dog gone it, I have to talk about the grandkids now.” It doesn't happen. There are no classes for them to take. There is no book to read about how to talk about their grandkids. No, it comes naturally, there is such a passion, there's such a love, there's such a connection that you just can't help talking about them. When Jesus gave us the Great Commission, when He said, “Go and make disciples of all nations.” When He said to His apostles just before He went up into heaven, “Now you're going to be my witnesses, witnesses here in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, throughout the world,” when He says to us that we are to be His witnesses here in our local community and throughout the world, Jesus was not laying down another law, another rule, another stipulation that you have to abide by. Instead, Jesus was giving you an invitation. He was bestowing upon us an honor, an honor to be able to share what he has done with us.

So, this morning, can you put aside all the defenses, all of the answers you have ready of why you don't and why you can't give witness to your faith? Can you set those aside for just a few minutes? Because that's really not the question this morning. The big question we are posed with this morning is, “How do we make the leap?” How do we make the leap from where we try to avoid talking about our faith to where we can't help but talk about our faith? How can we make the leap when we are just frightened at the fact of trying to say anything about our relationship to God to the fact that our relationship with God is so much a part of our lives, every word we speak and every action we take speaks of the faith that's in our heart.

How do we make that leap? We make it personal. We make our relationship with God personal. It's not Jesus, the Savior of the world, it's Jesus, my Savior, my Lord. When we make it personal, then it becomes a passion for us. Let's use, as an example, the apostle, Peter. For Peter, it became personal. Look at the transformation that happens with Peter. Peter goes from hiding out in a room behind locked doors for fear of what people might think of Him. Peter goes from denying that he ever even knew Jesus to the point of cursing and swearing to standing up in front of a crowd that we know had at least 3,000 people there boldly proclaiming Jesus as the Messiah, Jesus as their Lord and Savior, repent and be baptized. How do you make that leap from where Peter was to Peter standing in front of that crowd giving witness to his faith? It became personal for Peter. Peter went beyond just head knowledge of Jesus, and it made it down to the heart. He went beyond an intellectual knowledge of Jesus to a relationship with Jesus as his Savior. Peter knew all the right answers. He did from the beginning. Peter was always the one popping up with the right answers. It was Peter who was up on the Mount of Transfiguration and who saw Jesus in all of His glory. He knew Him to be the Son of God. It was Peter that, as they came down from that mount and Jesus said, “So who do you say I am?” Peter's the one who stood up and said, “You are the Christ, the Son of the Living God.” It is Peter who knew all of the answers, knew that Jesus was the fulfillment of prophesy. It was Peter who was so confident that he said to Jesus, “I will never, ever deny you. They can throw me in prison. They can put me to death,” he said to Jesus, “but I'll never deny you.” But it was Peter who had all this head knowledge but just a few short hours later would be standing in a courtyard, Jesus a few feet away, swearing that he never knew the man, had no idea what they were talking about, to the point of cursing and swearing and getting angry at people even suggesting he was remotely associated with Him. Then it was Peter whom, as he ended his last rant and the rooster crowed, Jesus looked at. It's the most haunting passage of scripture to me. The rooster crows and scripture says, “And Jesus turned and looked straight at Peter.” And in an instant, Peter was convicted. In an instant, he was cut to the heart. He knew what he had done. He had denied his Lord, turned his back on his Lord, Peter who was so confident. Scripture tells us that it was such a heavy burden, such a big blow to him, that he ran out of the courtyard and he wept bitterly. It was Peter who felt the brunt of his sin, the burden of his sin, the guilt, the shame that went along with that. But it was Peter, after Jesus rose from the dead as he was on the seashore, He came up to Peter and said, “Peter, do you love me?” And Peter had to have echoes back to that night, and he says, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” And then Jesus reinstates him as an apostle. He says, “Feed my sheep.” Again, in an instant, Peter knew God's love and His forgiveness and the compassion that Jesus had for him. It was Peter who knew the burden of his sin and then knew the burden of that sin being removed. He knew guilt, and he knew the guilt being removed. He knew shame and how the shame had been removed. He experienced it himself. It was now personal for Peter. He had experienced the sin and the guilt. He had experienced the forgiveness and the love of God. So when Pentecost came, nothing could stop him. Nothing could stop him from standing up and talking about Jesus and all that he had done for him and all that he wanted to do for each one of those people in the crowd. It wasn't something Peter was forced to do. Peter couldn't help himself. It became personal for him. And then it became a passion for him to share his faith.

It needs to be personal for you. It has to be personal in your lives. We need to make the leap from Jesus, the Savior of the world, to Jesus is my Savior. We can have all the intellectual knowledge we want. We can have the catechism memorized from cover to cover. We can have books of the bible stored away in our brain. We can be doctrinally correct down to the last period and comma and still not be connected and still not have that personal relationship with God. It needs to be personal for us.

There's a new movie coming out that's going to premiere on Ash Wednesday. It's called The Passion of the Christ . Maybe you've heard about it or read about it. Mel Gibson is doing this. Mel Gibson is making it personal. He dumped in $25 million of his own money in the making of this film, because no one else wanted to make out. He finally searched out and found somebody that would actually distribute the film, because everybody's afraid to. Because he wanted an accurate depiction of the last week of Jesus' life, but Mel Gibson really made it personal. Really made it personal when they filmed the crucifixion of Jesus, because, as they do the close-up of the hand holding the nail that's going to pierce into Jesus' hand, Mel Gibson said, “That has to be my hand.” So when that film airs, it will be Mel Gibson's hand holding that nail. He said, “I have to hold the nail because it's for my sins that He died.”

You and I have to hold the nail. We need to know that it was for your sins. It was for my sins that He died. It was the lie we told last week that drove the spike in. It's the shady deal we signed off on. It's the joke we laughed at in the locker room. It's the test we cheated on. It's the anger that burned in our heart and all the other countless things we do every week of every year. We need to hold the nail. We need to drive the hammer. We need to know that Jesus died for me, that Jesus died for you. It has to be that personal because then you can know that the nail and the spikes and the cross, that's how Jesus took your sin away. That's how we removed the guilt and the burden and the shame. To know the same Jesus that hung upon the cross is the Jesus who said, “I have not come to condemn the world but to save the world.” That same Jesus who said, “I've come to lay down my life as a ransom for many.” You need to know the burden of sin as it weighs upon your heart, the guilt and the shame that goes along with that, so then you can feel that being lifted off of you. When you know Jesus is your Savior, that He died for you, when that sin is gone and no longer do you feel the guilt and your conscience is clear, when you experience God's love in that way, in a personal way, not that God died for the world but that Jesus died for me, that's when it becomes personal. That's when it becomes a passion, and there's no stopping you. You can't even stop yourself from giving witness to Christ in your life. It makes such a dramatic difference. It changes you in such a way that every word you speak, every action you do, it bespeaks of the faith that lives in your heart, the hope you have, and the love that God has showered upon you. When you make it personal, it becomes a passion. It isn't something you think about. It isn't something you have to do. It's something that happens. It's that natural. When you make it personal, all of a sudden you become courageous. You do things you never thought you could do. Peter, I'm sure, never thought he would stand up in front of a crowd of his fellow Jews and proclaim to them about Jesus. You want to know how courageous that is. Maybe we don't think about this. Now this is a group of people that has been waiting 700+ years since the prophet Isaiah said that a Messiah was coming, waiting 700+ years for this Messiah, this deliverer. Parents have told their children, generation after generation, to look for the coming Messiah and what happens? Peter gets up and says, “You know the Messiah you've been waiting for generations?” You can almost see them nodding their heads, “Sure, we know all about that.” “Well, guess what? God sent Him. His name was Jesus, and you folks nailed Him to a cross and watched Him die.” That's gutsy. That's courageous. To speak that kind of a message, to say that they had killed the Messiah they had been waiting for. But Peter cared so deeply for those people, he wanted them to know what he knew. He wanted them to have the relationship that he had. Scripture says he pleaded with them that they might accept Jesus as their Savior, and it says that 3,000 of them did.

When it becomes personal for us, we become courageous. When it becomes personal for us as a congregation, we become courageous as a congregation, courageous in reaching out with the gospel message. It means that we care. We care about the fact that 50% of Polk County does not have a church home. That means half of your neighbors and coworkers have no relationship with a church whatsoever, no place to go and have their spiritual life fed. It means that we care. We care that we, as a nation, quickly, more than we want to admit, are becoming a non-Christian nation and we care about that and we want to turn that around. It means that we care, that throughout the world, there are groups of people who have never heard the name Jesus much less know Him as their Savior and we want to do something about that, so we will be courageous as a congregation. We will do whatever it takes to send that message out so they also can share in the joy we have. We'll be courageous and creative. Maybe that means we deliver the message in a new and different way, not that the message has changed but maybe how we get that message across so we can at least have a chance to share the message with people. It means we'll be courageous and we will not fear failure. In fact, we will expect failure because we will try so many different things and so many different ways to share that message. We'll expect that some of them won't work, but we won't look at that as failure. No, that will only spur us on to try something else so we can reach the thousands, the millions of people who don't have what we have.

When it becomes personal, we become courageous. When it's personal for you, you will be courageous. In fact, I'm going to give you an opportunity to be courageous. Two Sundays from now you can be courageous. On February 8, we're going to have Friendship Sunday. It's time for you to step out of your comfort zone maybe. It's time for you to know that personal relationship you have and want to share that joy with someone else. So on that Sunday, I'm asking you to invite a friend with you to worship that day so they can hear the love God has for them. Now when I say invite a friend to come that Sunday, you're not going to invite your friends over at St. Stephen's. No. Over at Pius? No. What I want you to do is find those friends who don't have a church home. Find those folks who have no base from which their spirit can be fed, and it may be uncomfortable but if that passion is there, it won't. And they're going to listen just as much as I wanted to listen to that grandpa talk about his grandchild. I couldn't help but share in his excitement because of the genuineness with which he was talking.

When people see the genuineness and the passion and the joy in your life, they will listen and they will come. Jesus gave us the great invitation, the great commission to make disciples of all people. God has given us the vision to be courageous in our outreach. Both will be accomplished when it's personal. When we personally know the love and forgiveness that Jesus has in our own lives, we will become compassionate and courageous in reaching out to others. Amen.

Copyright 2004 Gloria Dei Lutheran Church