God’s Heart for the Nations

Live your life in such a way that when you die, people remember it, but then it points their eyes to the greater story that one day the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea.

Genesis 12:1-3 - 1 Now the Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. 2 And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. 3 I will bless those who bless you, and him who dishonors you I will curse, and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed.”

Good morning. It's good to be with FBC Metuchen.

My name is Bryan Padgett. Quincy Thompson is with me. Quincy is on the WorldVenture Church Relations team.  I'm the Director of Mobilization with WorldVenture.

First Baptist Metuchen currently has five missionary families that are partnered with WorldVenture that you've sent to us and you have a history of sending others through WorldVenture, one of which is our current president. We just saw photos of when they were sent out and this was a church that partnered with them financially and sent them to Venezuela— so just kind of cool that the history of this church and its involvement in sending missionaries through World Venture. I just want to thank you all for your faithfulness in sending and supporting workers that go around the world— not just through our organization but through others as well.

This morning, what we're going to do is walk through to the entire Bible. I know you're laughing but we

really are. What's great is that in your bulletin, they took my first slide and made it into note form. You’ve got Genesis 1-11, the introduction, then the body, Genesis 12 through Jude, and then Revelation.

Here's what I'm going to ask you to do: we're going to go through a lot of scriptures. What I would discourage you from doing is trying to open your Bible and flip to all of them. What I recommend is under each of those sections, just write down the reference and then you can go back and look at those later.

I've probably given this message close to 800-1,000 times since 2002 when I first started really understanding the biblical basis or foundation for global mission. One of the things that you'll find about me if you get to know me is that I try as very little as possible to put an “S” at the end of “mission.” A lot of people say “missions.” Now there are missions; I know sometimes you have to use the plural but when it comes to God, He has a mission in the world. It's one mission.

We pit things like local and global; we go, well, there's local missions and global missions and we're doing that because we try to wrap our heads around it. But there's one mission in the world— God's Global Mission and you're going to see that today but I just want to start off with that, just get our minds around the idea that God has a mission in the world and God has a people in the world to fulfill that mission in the world and what's not at odds with each other, what you're not going to hear me say this morning is I'm not going to create some competition between whether or not you should stay or go.

What I hope you hear this morning is that we dispel some myths about calling and some of these other things and then what you're focused on is what is God's mission for the world and then the follow-up question. So that's your center, that's your starting point and then the second question is, you get to ask God is, how does He want you to be a part of this.

For some of you, I would argue for most of us if not all of us, where it really needs to be is, Lord, I want to be

part of this and I'm going to start moving toward this and I want you to stop me if I'm going in the wrong direction and instead of waiting for some special call to go do something, that we understand from Genesis to

Revelation, we're called, every single one of us, that's a Christian breathing air, you're called to the mission of God.

So where do I get all this from the whole Bible? Read the Bible as one book, not 66 different books with 66 different messages. Somehow we ask what does all this have to do and why I say that is because if you're like me, I grew up in a Southern Baptist Church in Waco, TX and every Sunday in kids church, we would learn about David and Goliath one Sunday, the next Sunday we'd learn about Exodus, the next Sunday we learned about feeding 5,000, the next Sunday we'd learn about whatever and then it was Easter so we learned about Jesus dying, rising from the dead, and what has it to do with eggs, and then we go to something else. If you're tracking, all of a sudden, you're going these, you think the Bible is just a bunch of stories that are disconnected. They all have some moral to them like face the giants, don't try to feed a lot of people but trust Jesus to do it, don't be stupid like Egypt back then. I never saw how it was all connected so if we can see the Bible as one book. Every good book has an introduction, a body, and a conclusion: Introduction, Genesis 1-11; Body, Genesis 12 through Jude; and Conclusion, Revelation.

We're just going to pick up in Genesis 1 and we're going to start walking through until we get to Revelation.  I'm not covering every verse, I'm not going to be exhaustive, but I am going to cover a lot of ground. I'm going to give you the big picture of who God is and what He does in the world, what He's done for each of us, what He's

doing for others, and He's inviting us into this. This is the good news of Jesus Christ.

Introduction: Genesis 1-11

Where it all starts is in Genesis 1. We know that God is the Uncreated One, so He creates everything and we get to the day six, Genesis 1:26-27. It says that God says, come let us make man in our image, in the image of God He made them male and female. Why that's important is right in Latin, imago dei.

Why that's important is because when God created mankind, He created us distinctly different than all other creatures. There is not another creature on the planet that God identifies as one created in the image of God. That means if you're a human being, you are an image-bearer of the Living God. You were created In His image, after His image and His likeness because we're a people that God created to reflect His righteousness and His rule and reign in the world.

I know that because right after that, Genesis 1:28 says God blessed them. That's key— God blessed them, and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth. The rest of that verse goes on to say to subdue all creation and have dominion over everything: the living creatures, the plants, animals, everything. So, there is no sin at this time. No one has offended God. There's nothing broken in the world. Everything’s perfect and God, before He commands them to do anything, blesses them. Have you ever thought about that?

If you look at the first five days of creation, God literally created everything they would ever need. When He makes mankind, there is nothing they have to do to feed themselves. God has literally provided everything for them and then their first full day after they're created, God says, I'm going to rest, so they begin from rest.

Why does He bless them? Why didn't He just say, be fruitful, multiply, fill the Earth? God blessed them because you'll see throughout scripture that any time, and even Jesus said this before He starts giving commands. Think about The Sermon on the Mount— all those commands He goes through and you've heard before. How does he start the Beatitudes? He blesses them. Before we get the commands, you're blessed. That’s assurance.

Now I want you to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth with image-bearers. Fill the Earth My glory. Fill the Earth with worshippers of the one true God. Fill the Earth with people who rightly reflect My righteousness and My rule and My reign, My holiness, My goodness on the earth.

This is Genesis 1 and if you've been reading your Bibles, Genesis 1 is easy. Everything's perfect and that's God's mission when everything's great but then we have a little problem. We get to Genesis 3 and mankind sins and this is where most, not all, but most of Western Christianity centers everything in the Bible right here with Genesis 3. We shouldn't start with Genesis 3; we should start in Genesis 1 always because it helps you understand the redemptive nature of God, what He's doing in the world.

Genesis 3 helps us know how we broke it but that's man-centered. Genesis 1 is God-centered. Genesis 3 starts with how we broke it; it didn't even take long; we haven't gotten past two people. He said, be fruitful and multiply, but before we're fruitful and multiply, let's break this thing. It's just Adam and Eve. They eat of the tree in the middle of the garden that God says not to eat from and God comes down and He pronounces curses on them, but God begins with the serpent, then He goes to the woman and the man.

We're just going to look at the serpent because in Genesis 3:15, this is known as the Proto-Evangelium, it's good news. Proto is the word for first so this is the first gospel. What this is saying is that this is the first announcement of the good news of Jesus, the gospel.

I'm going to go out on limb here and assume that you didn't learn this verse as part of sharing the gospel. Just imagine going to your next-door neighbor. You feel real empowered and inspired by today's message so you’re going to your neighbor and you knock on the door and they answer the door and you said, “Listen up, I'm going to put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers, He will crush your head and you will strike his heel. You want to accept Jesus today?” You're going to get the cops called on you.

This is the first gospel. You see why the whole Bible is important. If you just read this and put it away, it doesn't make any sense to you but notice what's happening here. The first gospel announcement in the Bible according to theologians and scholars. The first announcement of the gospel is to the serpent, Satan. Does that baffle you at all? I've had kids ask me if we can just tell Satan the gospel and if he believes, things will change. This is how it goes— he's heard it, he knows how the story ends, God lays out everything— His

whole redemptive plan is laid out right here.

Do you notice who's missing? Man. We got the woman, we got the serpent, we got some seed that's coming, we know it's a he, but where's Adam in this? Through Adam, we are all sinners. What this is announcing and foreshadowing is a virgin birth. No male involvement. God is going to put enmity between you and the woman, between her offspring and yours, He's going to crush your head but you will strike his heel.

Satan's not omniscient. He doesn't know everything. I have this theory— when you study the history of the world, the most suppressed and oppressed people on the planet in every culture and in most cases, is women. Is it possible that it ties to this: Satan doesn't know which woman is going to have which seed that's going to destroy him but he's doing everything he can to destroy them before they can destroy him? Maybe.

What we do know is that Satan does strike his heel— the cross, suffering. By the way, the Achilles heel is the most painful strike you could ever have happened. So, it's suffering, it's pain, it's all this but he will crush your head. Do we not have that in the resurrection? We all know that if Jesus died and stayed dead, there is no crushing of heads; he's just a dead man. But if he rises, then what we just sang was true— all powers, all authority, all dominions, Jesus is stands above them all. Otherwise, we just lied— if he's still dead, he's dead.

So, Jesus is the fulfillment of this announcement of the gospel and from this, God now clothes the man and the woman, sends them out of the garden so they don't eat from the Tree of Life and live forever in this situation. They begin to be fruitful, they begin to multiply, and they become corrupt, awful, terrible people, so much so that Genesis 65 says that God regrets making mankind.

God says Noah is a righteous man who should build an ark. Noah is in the middle of nowhere, not anywhere near water, and he starts building this massive boat. Of course, people are mocking and ridiculing him and he's calling them to repentance. Nobody's listening to him. Noah and his family and a bunch of animals get on this boat because it starts to rain, and it rains 40 days and 40 nights and God wipes out all creation but this family

and a bunch of animals and then they get off the ark and in Genesis 9:1, God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. Does that sound familiar? Now the difference here is that

mankind has sinned and God basically wipes out all creation and starts all over.

There are arguments from science people who say that there's no way that there's been a massive world flood and that there's no evidence of it. Science is great. I believe in science, but science doesn't explain everything. Almost every culture on the planet has a massive flood story in their lineage; they don't all sound the same

but everybody has some sort of massive flood story. That's not by accident; something happened and just because science can't explain it, it doesn't matter. History tells us some stories and we have to wrestle with the fact that these cultures around the world all have these massive flood stories. This is the Judeo-Christian flood story; I think there’s an Islamic flood story.

Noah and his sons get off the ark and going down to verse 7, it says the exact same thing: be fruitful, multiply, and fill the Earth. What hasn't changed: mankind sins, but God's mission didn't change though.

He's still after filling the Earth with image-bearers. The only difference in this one and Genesis 1 is that right in between Genesis 9:1 and 9:6, God starts to reference the killing of man and He rebukes it because He says those are image-bearers of God. He identifies and pronounces this image of God as first importance. This is something that we're to protect. The image of God isn't completely destroyed by sin. While corrupt, it remains and this is what God is after in redeeming.

Jesus, then, who is the image of God according to Colossians 1:15 and according to Romans 8:28-29, that we're being conformed by the spirit to the image of Christ who is the image of the invisible God. This is why you see Jesus is a kind of the connector here, but let's keep going.

So, mankind starts to grow, they start to be fruitful and multiply. Again, it is irony upon irony that as sinful and wretched as we are, there is one command that we've always kept: be fruitful and multiply. Here, they're fruitful and multiply and they decide, in Genesis 11, they have a great thing going here. They settle on a plain in the East called Shinar and they build for themselves a city with a tower that reaches to the heavens and to make a name for themselves and not be scattered over the face of the whole earth.

That's Genesis 11:1-4. You’ve got a good thing, one language. They have a common speech, and they find this nice plot of land and they say, “Let's just stay here, we'll build a tower that reaches to the heavens.” They don't need God's help to get there: it's making name for ourselves and let's not go anywhere.

Well, God sees this, and the rest of Genesis 11 says, “Come let Us go down and confuse their language so they'll not understand each other” and He scatters them from there over all the Earth and they stopped building the city. Now at this point, we're getting the languages of the world. Genesis 10 speaks of those languages. For the longest time I thought Genesis 10 was telling us about the languages and Genesis 11 was telling us how we got those and then someone drew my attention to the fact that there's this guy named Nimrod in Genesis 10 and it says in the time of Nimrod, they settled in this place in Shinar and they all start speaking one language and the idea is that they were speaking different languages before Shinar happened, the point being Nimrod was kind of a ruler and there's this empire that was being developed.

When you hear the term Babel, that's where we get Babylon from in the scriptures. Babylon is, you'll see it in Revelation, and you think that Babylon didn't even exist when John's writing Revelation, why is Babylon in there? Babylon is a representative the counter Kingdom to God's Kingdom so every kingdom or empire on the earth that has ever existed is a form of Babylon: the Roman Empire would be Babylon, the American Empire, Babylon, the European Empire, England, Babylon, Genghis Khan, the Mongol Empire, Babylon.

Why am I calling those Babylon? Well, sometimes Babylon can do good things; sometimes Babylon is just horrific. You get a mixed bag of these things so when you hear that don't say, America's Babylon? I said it because they're all counterfeit kingdoms and what are they all trying to do is they're all trying to create one nation, one name, one language, one way of doing things, one politic, one, one, one and God's not a one, one, one. God is a multi; He's diverse so this isn't a curse; this is a blessing. This is what God's design was; it's that the Earth in her diversity would have unity in that diversity to reflect the multicolored nature of God.

Go read Ephesians 3:10. That's what it literally talks about: multifaced means multicolored. This multi, this diverse kingdom of God. So, now we've scattered all these people over the world. None of them know how to

communicate with one another.

Body: Genesis 12-Jude

And enter our boy, Abram. Nobody knows if he's monotheistic. He could be polytheistic; there's really no indication of where he's at. We just know that God comes to him in Genesis 12. Now we're getting into the body of the scripture. We're through with the introduction but we needed to lay a solid foundation for the introduction.

In the body of the Bible, we get to Genesis 12 and the Lord said to Abram leave his country, his people, his father's household and go to the land He will show Abram. Based on this, does Abram know where he's going? No. What I want to say here is that mission is not a location issue. It is always, and always has been, a lordship issue. It's not about God hasn't called me to go overseas. You don't know if He's called you to go overseas or not if you're not walking with him, if you're not obeying him. What He tells Abram is, leave, go.

Verse 4 says that Abram leaves as the Lord told him to. It's about our relationship to God. The only way Abram's going to know where he's going is if he's walking with God and what he's going to have to do to walk with God here is he's going to have to leave and he's going to have to go. But look at what he's leaving. He's leaving his country, he's leaving his people, which represent his culture, his language, the stuff he understands, and then he has to leave his family, the people that he has security with and comfort with, and all these other things.

And then he's invited into the dark with God to a place he doesn't even know but God doesn't leave him there, Verse 4 says he leaves but there's two verses in between that we haven't even looked at. What does God say in between? Well, check it out verses 2-3 where God says He will make Abram into a great nation and God will bless him, make his name great, and he will be a blessing. God will bless those who bless Abram and whoever curses him, God will curse and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through Abram.

Just one chapter ago in Genesis 11, wasn't mankind trying to do that for themselves? Make a name for themselves? Make themselves into a great nation? And God says, “Hey Abram, how about I make you

into a great nation, give you a great name, I'm going to give you my name, Abram. There's no greater name that you can be identified by. You're going to be my people. There cannot be a greater nation on the planet than a people identified by Me and I'm going to bless you and you're going to be a blessing and the whole world, all the peoples that I've created, will be blessed through you.”

“Through you” is important because it shows that God's work in us isn't meant to terminate in us but flow through us to others. We are blessed on our way to blessing others. It's the idea of breathing— you breathe in, and you better breathe out. Because if you breathe in the rest of the day, you're going to die. It's not going to work for you, and you can't just breathe out the whole time. We need to breathe in the gospel, and we need to breathe out. We’re blessed to be a blessing. Now this also is the gospel again.

In your evangelism training, you probably didn't hear this one. At least it’s a little nicer. Let's knock on our neighbor’s door again. Hey, that first one didn't go very well. You're ready to kill me and call the police. I think we've worked that out, my apologies. I got something else for you though. How about I make you into a great

nation and I bless you? How about I give you a great name? You'll be a blessing. How about I bless those who bless you and curse those who curse you and all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you? Do you want to accept Jesus today?

Alright, they're probably not calling the cops now because this sounds kind of a little more pleasant.  I don't know how you're going to give me a great nation and make me all these things, but this doesn't talk about sin.

It doesn't talk about believing in Jesus. I mean, if you talk about the gospel and say, “Bryan, I think you mean well but hold on.” Let me take you to Paul's letter of Galatians 3:8 and the scripture talks about foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham saying, “in you shall all nations be blessed.” Paul says that God preached the gospel to Abraham and then references Genesis 12:2-3 when he said, “all peoples on Earth will be blessed through you.” Paul says this is the gospel; this is the good news.

Now you say, but how? Verses 13-14 tell us. Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us. For it is written, cursed is everyone who's hanged on a tree. Jewish folks in first century would have understood that Jesus dying on the cross means he's a cursed man. You hang on a tree, you're cursed. You can see where there might be a struggle with understanding how this is the Righteous One of God when He's cursed.

Why didn't the Jewish people know? For the same reason that you don't know certain things. Sometimes, it's our perspective. But he's cursed; He's hanging on a tree. But it tells us why he's cursed— so that in Christ Jesus,  the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, meaning when Paul says he preached the gospel in Genesis 12:2-3, the way through Abraham, we were going to all be blessed was ultimately about Jesus because Jesus would do for us what no other man could do. The God-man comes and He becomes the

curse for us so that the promised blessing of Abraham that all nations would be blessed comes to us, the

Gentiles.

If you're a Gentile, that's how it gets to us, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith. So, what Paul's whole argument is that we're all of the faith of Abraham. Nothing's changed; they’re the same for Jews, same for Gentiles. It's faith in Christ who's that seed of the woman who's the Seed of Abraham, the seed of Isaac, the seed of Jacob and on down, Judah, down, down, down, down, down till we get to Jesus who then

becomes the curse so that we can receive the promised blessings of God.

If you don't understand, let me go back to these two verses. You're going to struggle to understand the rest of the Bible. When Hebrew writers wrote something more than twice, it was kind of their way of emphasizing, putting all caps on, and saying, hey, pay attention to this one. It's important.

Over 50 times in scripture, you're going to see this promise. It keeps coming up. In fact, He's going to tell Abraham one more time. He's going to have Isaac record it. It's recorded about Isaac and Jacob and then you're going to see it all throughout the rest of Scripture. It's an extremely important text. I want you to see you how this plays out in some of Israel's history.

In Exodus, we all know the story about Israel in captivity, being set free, you've seen The Ten Commandments at Easter or Prince of Egypt. Everybody knows somewhat of what happened— they go into Egypt as 70 people, Joseph is second-in-command, Israel comes in, they're protected, and Israel and Egypt have a pretty good relationship at this point. Somewhere along the way, Egypt gets insecure, decides to enslave the Hebrews for hundreds of years.

Israel is kind of giving up on God. Moses gets into second-in-command; he's Hebrew, but he's raised by the Egyptians. He's getting close to his roots and sees that an Egyptian's mistreating one of the Hebrews and confronts the Egyptian and ends up killing him. Moses flees for his life into the wilderness and ends up in the

Mountains. He's a shepherd and 40 years later, God comes to him in a burning bush and tells Moses to go back to Egypt and Moses starts in with all the excuses of not going back and not speaking well. God answers all his objections.

Moses is just like us— I'm not I'm not going overseas, I'm not doing this, I can't do that, I’m too old… Moses is 80 years old. God has Aaron go also and speak. Everything's been knocked down. God tells Moses to go to Pharaoh and tell him to let Israel go.

Do you remember the plagues that God sends on the Egyptians? What's the last one?  The killing of the firstborn son. What does Pharaoh do after that? He lets Israel go. Imagine that you're an Israelite at this time and you've watched the other nine plagues happen and then we get to the tenth one and that moves Pharaoh to let Israel go. You’re probably going, “Hey, God, why didn't you start with that one? We've been here for a long time, and You had that trick up your sleeve this entire time. Why didn't you just kill the firstborn and let us go if that was always the plan?”

Here's why that's important. If we read the story and think that the Exodus is only about Israel, we miss the bigger picture. We miss how Genesis 12:2-3 is playing out here, “I'll curse those who curse you.” Egypt's getting cursed. God tells Pharaoh, “I've raised you up for this very purpose that I might show you My power.” We know the end right for Pharoah. God hardens his heart.

Pharaoh comes after Moses, God wipes them all out, but before He does that, He has a season of mercy and grace for Egyptians and others. Here's what I mean. God says that My name might be proclaimed on all the Earth, so He says Pharaoh, “This is why I've raised you up.” The Egyptians worship different kind of gods and goddesses. Their religious system was set around these things so when God sends the ten plagues, He is

systematically destroying the gods and goddesses that Egypt worshipped. He is destroying the foundations of their faith, of their religion. The greatest, most powerful, most revered god in the land was Pharaoh so when God kills Pharaoh's son, who is pharaoh-to-be, everybody in the land would have known that on that day, their God just killed our god. No one even lifted a weapon, and fear strikes them because they've just been emptied spiritually, they are bankrupt, they got nothing to hang their hats on. And what does God do in the midst of that? Yes, He rescues Israel and that's a blessing.

He's absolutely rescuing them but notice what Exodus 12 says. It says a mixed multitude also went up with them. Moses starts giving directions about the Passover and he immediately starts talking about the foreign resident that's among the Hebrews because they were already with him. What this means is the word, mixed. If it was just Egyptians, he would have said a multitude of Egyptians came out of the land with them. What we know is that it was a bunch of the people groups that lived around them. It was a mixed multitude, not a few tokens along the way just to show that we're diverse. Multitudes, thousands of non-Israelites, said “We're going broke with their god, we rallied around Egypt because they were the big superpower.” Israel’s God, without lifting a finger, just crushed all of Egypt’s gods so that Abraham will be a blessing to all peoples.

Forty years later in Jericho, what God did in Egypt was still front page news. When they go to cross into the Promised Land, Rahab meets them, and she says that they heard about what your God did. That was 40 years

Later, they're trembling. He said, “My name will be proclaimed in all the Earth.”

Let's look at another story David and Goliath. Goliath and the Philistines, in 1 Samuel 17, it says that the Philistines destroyed the people and their gods; they would crush them to the ground, and they were in control of everything. This was a massive empire, a global empire, that was growing and now it's Israel versus the Philistines. Every nation that the Philistines destroyed, the world's paying attention now and there's this giant. He's a 9-foot giant, Goliath, and he's out there talking all kinds of trash to Israel.

David comes into the camp. David is the youngest son of Jesse. He doesn’t get to go to war. He gets to bring sack lunches to the brothers. He hears this and he asks why nobody is dealing with this guy. We always kind of have this view that David's like Tiny Tim. No, he's killed a lion and a bear with his own hands. He's young, so of course, he goes to try Saul's armor on, and it doesn't fit and we think he’s like this little squirt. He's just younger, he's not as large in stature as Saul.

He gets five smooth stones and a slingshot, and they let him go out on the battlefield. David is probably between 16-17 years old roughly. David just rolls up, they just let him do it. David goes out there and he has full confidence in God who's faithful to His promises who says, “I'll bless those who bless you, whoever curses you, I will curse. All peoples will be blessed through you.”

David gets on the battlefield and says to Goliath, “I'm going to strike you down, cut off your head, and give the

bodies of the Philistines to the birds of the air and the beasts of the earth.” That's some serious trash talk. He ends it with, “that all the Earth may know there's a God in Israel.” What kind of a “I Got Confidence” man. God is handing you over to us today. You bring your curses on us and this story is going to go out around the world that the God of Israel took out the Philistines who had taken out and bankrupted spiritually every nation they had gone to.

When God begins a mighty move amongst people, study history. There is always a bankrupting of their spiritual faith. It's what happened to you. You came to a moment where all that you held was and you're going, “What do I do now?” and your eyes shift to the One True Go. And they go after the Philistines, they do exactly that, and the word begins to spread— don't mess with the God of Israel. He's the One True God.

Time and time again, you see this in Daniel and Lion's Den, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego all these stories. They all have this global element to it. It's not just God rescuing Israel for Israel's sake. He's blessing Israel to bless the nations. He'll curse those who curse them but it's always so that the nations will be blessed.

When we get to the Psalms, it's kind of the soundtrack of the story of God. It is full of God's glory among the

Nations— him calling the Earth to clap and celebrate and praise Him. If you take a highlighter and just start highlighting all the passages about mission and the nations, by the time you get to Psalm 25, your

highlighter is out and you got to get another one. I'm not kidding; it's everywhere.

Psalm 67 is a great one. I love this one because this is the great breathing in, breathing out that I was talking about. “May God be gracious to us and bless us and make his face to shine upon us.” Where is David getting this from? This is the benediction of Aaron; this is the one that says God bless you and keep you and make his face shine upon you.

He's quoting that but he's putting it in its proper global context. It was never just, “Hey, receive this good luck. Have a nice day. Receive this because you need it for yourself but this is also so that the world would know my saving power, my salvation among the nations.” This first part is the good news. It's the gospel. God be gracious to me, God bless me, would You make your face shine on me? That's Him pleased with you.

When Jesus comes up out of the baptismal waters and the Father speaks and says, “This is my son with whom I'm well pleased.” For all who are in Christ Jesus today, that is true of you. His face does shine on you and for some of you, that's the best news you could hear this morning because when you looked in the

mirror, you looked at shame and guilt and sadness and going, “I don't know if God loves me” and God's going, “I'm pleased with you because you are in Christ and I'm pleased with Christ.” He's gracious to you and He

blesses you and there is a purpose— that His ways would be known on the earth, His salvation among the nations. God be gracious to me, bless me, make your face shine on me that your ways would be known on the earth.

You want to reach the people around you. Feast on the gospel every single day. Look, it isn’t just good news to get you to heaven. It's good news for every single day. We talked about the 72-ounce steak in Amarillo yesterday morning at Men's Breakfast. I always tell people that the gospel is that 72-ounce steak at that steakhouse in Amarillo, TX. By the way, it's Texas. You're never going to finish it. When people say they need the meat and not the milk, they think the gospel is the milk. No, it's the 72-ounce steak in Amarillo. You're never going to finish; you just keep feasting on that. It's good news.

Habakkuk.  I love Habakkuk 2:14. God says that Babylon has built her empires on the backs of slaves and God says that the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea. That will be filled is a promise. It's essentially God saying to the Babylons of the world, “I'm going to drown you, I'm going to drown your empires, and the waters of my glory that are going to fill the earth” and when this is all said and done, the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea. It's going to happen.

We get to Jesus now. I want to take you to this guy named Simeon. He’s been fasting up, sunup to sundown, praying, waiting for God's Chosen One, the Savior of the World. In fact, he's been told by the Holy Spirit that he will not taste death until he’s held God’s salvation in his arms. Israel has been waiting for this for a long time. Here's what we don't talk about at Christmas for some reason. Eight days after Jesus is born in keeping with the custom, He's in the temple in Jerusalem and no one has a clue, but Simeon does as does the prophetess, Anna. Simeon takes Jesus into his arms and he says, “Sovereign Lord as You've promised, You now dismiss Your servant in peace for my eyes have seen Your salvation which You've prepared in the sight of all people a light of Revelation to the Gentiles and for Glory to your People Israel.”

Now, why did I highlight the light of Revelation to the Gentiles? He's quoting Isaiah 49:6. I emphasize that because it would be really easy at this moment for Simeon to just see Jesus as a tribal deity or a nationalistic savior. Hs is centering Jesus exactly where He belongs— the Savior of the World both to Gentile and to Jew.

Years later, Jesus begins His ministry. Two-thirds of Jesus's Ministry, and this may shock you, is cross-cultural ministry. It's not to his own people. His disciples are all Jewish. They're following along seeing this, so they're not confused when Jesus says to make disciples of all nations. He's been doing it— the Roman Centurion’s servant healed in Matthew 8, the healing of the Canaanites daughter in Matthew 15, the Samaritan woman at the well in John 4.

Jesus's own ministry reflects His heart to see both Jew and Gentile brought together worshiping the One True God, reflecting His glory in the earth. These are the Great Commission verses. Hopefully, we all know Matthew 28:18-20. It says, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” Mark 16:15 says, “Go into all the world, preach good news to all creation.” Luke 24:46-47 says, “Repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in His name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” In John 20:21, “As the Father has sent me, I'm sending you” and in Acts 1:8, He says, “You'll be witnesses of mine in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the Earth.”

What I hope you see in this: we're called to make disciples, we're called to go, that's where we spend most of our time, but the context of all that is, of all nations. What this tells me is that there's not a place on God’s green earth that is off limits to anybody in this room. So why are four billion people today still without access to this gospel that you're hearing every Sunday?

Some statistics:

• out of the 8 billion people on the planet, close to four billion of them cannot drive within a day's time and hear the gospel in their own language

• 0.00002% of the global Christian population is currently working among what they call unreached people groups - it's roughly 30,000 missionaries out of the close to two billion Christians on the planet

• In total, the number of missionaries working cross culturally today is 0.0002% - we're not even sending 1% of the global Christian Force cross-culturally

Why do I share all that? One of the arguments we always hear is that there's plenty to do right here. Amen, but there's four billion people, and it's from everywhere to everywhere. If what you hear me saying is we need more Western missionaries, we do, that never stops for us, but we need people from the global church. I'm talking about global Christianity not just American Christianity.

So, who will go and who's stopping themselves saying, “Well, God hasn't called me.” What if you just started moving in that direction and then let God say, “Don’t go.” Paul tries twice to get to Asia, and you know who stops him? The Holy Spirit. And then God gives Paul a vision of a man in Macedonia and Paul realized that he is to go to Macedonia.

I bring that up not to have you feel this guilt, “Oh, I'm terrible Christian. What's wrong with me?” I bring it up to say, what if the perspective here was no longer, “Well, God hasn't called me but, oh, God's commanded me so I'm going to start moving that way.” But here's the good news for First Baptist Metuchen. You know right now that you can walk outside in any direction and you're going to be talking to people from all over the world. You literally are without excuse. When you stand before Jesus and He says, “Hey, did you make disciples of the nations?” and you say, “I didn't know the nations at all.” And Jesus says, “Oh, really? You didn't catch that the whole world, God has put them all around you like that?” Look down the pew— you don’t see the same-colored people sitting next two each other except family members.

You guys are sitting in a very unique place and time right now. You are blessed a 100,000%, you are blessed where you're at. And here comes the tricky part: it's really easy for you to lock in and say that the nations are here so we don't have to go and for most of you that is 1,000% true but I'm asking, “Lord, would you give some that step forward?” Maybe we change that 0.0002%. What would it look like for FBC Metuchen to send 1% of our people. Two people— that's 1%. That's not asking too much.

The Lord knows my heart and He knows your heart, too.

Let's wrap this up. Paul says this, “It has always been my ambition to preach Christ where He's not been named so I'm not building on another man's foundation.”

I'm going to ask a crazy question here I didn't ask in the first session I'm going ask it. If you are someone in this room that kind of relates on some level, would you just raise your hand?

Okay, there's the 1% right there. We got it but here's the thing. Notice how the rest of you didn't and now you feel a little bit guilty. Don't feel guilty. Can I tell you why you shouldn't feel guilty?  

In Ephesians, it says that Paul will go to the Gentiles and Peter will go to the Jews. And you study Peter's

Ministry and it was also global. He went to Rome, he went to these other places, he was he was traveling to, but he was reaching more people that were like him, the Jewish people. The Jewish diaspora wasn’t a monolith. If you went to the Jews in Rome, they weren't going to be like the Jews in Asia or whatever. There were some differences there, but they had some commonality.

Paul’s ambition was to preach Christ where He's not been named so I don't think it's wrong that some people want to preach Christ to those that are like themselves. Peter and John are going to the Jews and Paul is going to those where Christ has not been named. Paul's foundation is this, “As it is written, those who are not told about him will see and those who have not heard will understand.” Paul's foundation for going to the places where Christ has never been named name comes from Old Testament scripture, a promise from God in Isaiah 52:15.  Paul doesn't quote statistics or some emotional video he saw about poor kids that don't know

Jesus. Paul doesn't quote any of that stuff. He says God said that those who haven't seen will see and those who haven't heard will hear and that's enough for him. He wants to go to the places that haven't seen and haven't heard because they're going to. That's what drives that ambition.

Why I bring this up is because what we're walking through today is God's promise. This is what He's going to do. He said, “I'm going to bless all the peoples on the face of the earth, the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea.” He's going to fill the Earth; He's going to reach and bless all nations.

The question is, who's going to be the Pauls that have the ambition to go preach Christ where he's never been named before and then who are going to be our Peters and Johns that are going. Peter led the way in breaking barriers with Gentiles. Who's breaking barriers in Metuchen? Don't just reach the people that look like you, eat like you, dress like you, walk like you, talk like you, vote like you, break the barriers like Peter. That's what he did. That's what John did. And in that, you're going to find more Pauls popping up out of that because you're going to get people who say, “Hey, this is awesome. I want to go where Christ hasn't been named.”

Conclusion: Revelation

Let's get you out there and let's send you further because here's how it's all going to end. You are worthy to take the scroll, Jesus, and open the seal because You were slain. Just like You said in Genesis 3:15, You're going to have Your heel struck, You were slain but then You crushed him and by your blood, You crushed Satan and redeemed people, purchased people from every tribe and language and people and nation. Promise kept.

Then John gets this beautiful picture of Heaven in Revelation 7 and he says, “After this, I looked and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count from every nation, tribe, people, and language” and they're standing there before the Throne in front of the Lamb with palm branches in their hands shouting, “Salvation belongs to our God and to the Lamb who sits on the throne.” Promise kept.

Genesis 1:28 fulfilled. The promise of God, the mission of God, is fully realized now. This is what it looks like when the whole Earth is filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea. Remember what He told Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “Your descendants will be as numerous as the stars in the

in the sky, the dust of the earth, and the sand of the seashore.” I don't know if you ever gone out at night; you can't see because of light pollution. Maybe you've gone to Jersey Shore and tried to count the sand on the beach. It's a great multitude that no one can count. Promise kept. Promise kept.

Next Steps

So, what can you do about it?

Pray

Pray. Get the Joshua Project app, Unreached People Groups app.  The app has a people group of the day that you can pray for, learn about, read about. What if you just made that a part of your daily life? They say the average Christian in America prays five minutes a day. What if you made it six and included this prayer for a

people group, pray for the country, and countries that your people are reaching, that you support.

Pray for your missionaries, pray for laborers. That's one of the few things Jesus actually said to pray for. If you've not seen God answer prayer in a long time, start praying the things that Jesus specifically said pray for and see what happens. Pray for laborers. Let's do it and then don't be shocked when people come forward. And don't be shocked if it's you. I'm not saying it's going to be but don't be shocked. Pray for people groups, pray for countries, current workers, pray for more workers.

Build

Build relationships with international students, immigrants, and refugees. If you're here and you're think you’re off the hook because you are an international refugee or an immigrant, you get to build relationship in the other direction.

This is the beauty of it. No one has an excuse. You're going to stand before God and live in Metuchen, NJ, God's going to be, “You know all the people I brought there and the people that I brought you to.”

This is a chance to break barriers cross-cultures, cross-ethnicities, reach other religious blocks around you whether you're native to this land or you're not, it doesn't really matter. Build relationships with those that aren't like you.

Support

Support a missionary and be more than a functional ATM machine. You're not just dollars and if missionaries are just viewing you as dollars, shame on the missionary. They shouldn't do that. You're a supporter, you're a sender. According to 3 John 1:5-8, you are a fellow worker for the truth, co-laborers with them.

Some of you have co-workers that you work with. Do you just give them money and let them do all the work?

They're not going to feel very much “co”-worker with you. They're going to feel like the worker and you're just there as the benefactor. You're not a benefactor, you're a supporter, you're a sender, you're a co-laborer. Find out ways to be creative and how you support them.

Go

Go overseas. Go on a care trip and visit one of your missionaries on the field and make them your mission— not coming back and talking about how many people you got to share the gospel with or do something with. Just come back and say, “I got to go meet our missionaries on the field, take care of them, babysit their kids while they got a date night, brought them supplies, did whatever, just loved on them, heard their stories, and I want to tell you what's going on with them.”

Go on a vision trip. Those of you that raised your hand, let's start taking steps forward. I don't know where it's going to take you or how long it's going to take but start moving in that direction. Come talk to one of the pastors. Let them know, “Hey, I don't know what's next for me, that kind of shocked me.” Maybe eventually, go on a vision trip and see where the Lord might have you go and serve and then maybe consider long term missions.

Learn

Learn more. There's a great course called Perspectives on the World Christian Movement. If there's not one around here, you can take it online. There're other mission classes, books, Bible studies. Ask your pastors, ask the Missions Team.  

Invite

Invite others to join you. How hard is that? You decide, “Hey, I just downloaded the Unreached People Groups app.” Let's do that. Let's invite others in. Most people don't know much about mission or how to be a part of it. This is a way that you're doing just as much for global mission here as you geographically could in Morocco. It's just a perspective switch. Most of the stuff, you're already doing. You're just going to add this new element to it .

I want to end with and I'm going to pray. I don't know how your story is going to end. I don't. All of our stories are going to end in a variety of ways. Some of you are going to make it to the very end: old, kids gathered around your bed, you just pass away peacefully in hospice. I pray that's true for you. That would be amazing.

Some of you are going to die in tragic ways. Some of you are going to die young. Some of you are going to die old. I don't know how your story's going to end but here's my plea to you: to live your life in such a way that when it does end, it doesn't end with a period. What does a period do? It ends the sentence. It's over.

End your life with a comma because what do we do when we come to a comma? We pause, we remember this, we keep the thought, and we move on— that your story would end with a comma because it was always pointing to the greater story.

Live your life in such a way that when you die, people remember it, but then it points their eyes to the greater story that one day the whole earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord like waters cover the sea.