 Jesus is going to where the need is. And this whole thing, building a radiant city, is about us mobilizing to go to where the need is. There's nothing more worthwhile that you can invest your life, your time, your prayers, and your money into than building things that are gonna reach people and expand his kingdom here and around the world. All right, I want you to turn with me to your Bibles today to Matthew chapter 28. Matthew chapter 28, this is part five. It's the final part of our Be Radiant series. What we've been doing over the last five weeks is looking at our core values, the pillars of what it means to be radiant. When we say be radiant, we're talking about a genetic code of what we believe Jesus intends for every believer, no matter what church they go to, no matter where they live, he has a certain profile that he wants his followers to live like. And so these aren't just unique to radiant church, although we hope that we exemplify those. And number one, it's being a word-centered person. It's living our life-centered anchor to the word of God. Number two, it's being spirit-empowered. The Holy Spirit continually filling us and empowering us so that we can fulfill the Jesus mission. Number three, it's being family-oriented. That we love and we relate to God as a father and we relate to one another as family. That's what the church is meant to be. Number four, we talked about this last weekend, which is kingdom of God focused. That we need to have our eyes set on Jesus so that everything else comes into perspective, so that the prescription that our heart, the lens that our heart is seeing through is not of this world, but it's of the kingdom of God. And number four, what we're gonna talk about this weekend is mission-motivated. We're called to be mission-motivated. And this is one that my heart beats 24 hours, seven days a week connected to this particular value because I believe all of the other ones lead to this one. Look with me here at verse number 18. We're gonna begin in verse number 18. And Jesus said to them, He came and He said to them, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, in the name of the Son, and in the name of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. This is Jesus' last conversation with His disciples. It's on the heels of His victorious resurrection from the dead. He's about to ascend to the throne and to reign and rule from heaven. He promises to return to establish His kingdom on the earth at the end of the age, but He commissions the church, His followers to go into all the world because He says all authority in heaven and earth has been given unto me. What authority is He talking about? He's talking about the authority that Adam lost in the garden that gave the enemy access to bring darkness into the world and to hold humans hostage bound by sin and to corrupt every aspect of God's good creation. Jesus won that back at the cross and He was vindicated by His resurrection and now He says all authority belongs to me. And because it belongs to me, He says to His disciples, I want you to go into all the world and I want you to make disciples of all nations. I want you to baptize them and I want you to teach them to observe all things that I've commanded. This is called the Great Commission. I say it's the only commission because Jesus didn't give us one really important commission and then give us a whole bunch of other things that we could do that were optional. No, the only reason Jesus sent the church, built the church, established the church, gave His Holy Spirit to the church was so that we would do this one thing that we would go. It's a simple two letter word, go. Do you know that two thirds of God's name is go? Do you know that if you look at it backwards, two thirds of God's name is do? That'll get ya. But it's important for us to know that this commission was not just given to His disciples 2,000 years ago. You and I are the extension of this nucleus, critical mass, small group of disciples and the last instructions from our Lord, King, and Master was to go make disciples, preach the gospel, baptize believers and to teach them everything that Jesus taught and to wait for His return. This is our job. This is our calling. This is our commission from heaven and it's not just a calling for a few people. It's a calling for every single disciple of Jesus. But unfortunately, in the church, over the course of time, there are moments when the church loses its focus. It's not just here, it's not just now, but it happens over the course of 2,000 years. You can see the cycle repeat itself over and over and over again where the church experiences renewal, revival, the Holy Spirit is poured out and there's passion for Jesus and because we love Jesus, we want Him to receive everything that He deserves. And then we have missions, movements that thrust out into the world but then eventually it begins to cool down, the embers begin to grow cold, we get focused on self, we get comfortable and we relegate the great commission to books that we read and really radical believers that we're just glad that they're willing to go on our behalf. And instead of it being the great commission, it becomes the great omission where it's the one thing that we should be doing but it's the only thing that we're not talking about. We're supposed to be people that are motivated, I mean motivated for the mission, not tolerating the mission, not applauding the mission so somebody else goes to it but this is supposed to be our heartbeat. This is supposed to be what we're passionate about. Oswald J. Smith, who's a great pastor, a great leader, he said this, the mission of the church is missions. This is our mission, it is missions, this is it. And maybe something that you did not know about Jane and myself is that before we moved to Kalamazoo to plant, radiant, when we were first married in 1992 and Jane quickly thereafter became pregnant with our firstborn Ashley, we contemplated, in fact, we were fully funded or pretty close to fully funded to go on the mission field. Jane and I were gonna move to the Philippines and we were gonna work with a church planting organization in a Bible college in Manila that was planting churches across thousands plus islands in the Philippines. We had met with the missionary organization, we had met with the leader over there, our church that we were a part of had decided that they were going to send us, they were gonna give us finances, we had other people that were giving us finances, we had told both sets of our parents, made her parents cry, my parents were like, wow, where did that come from? And I'm just like, because Jesus called us to go. And so we were gonna go, we were all set. Jane's like, how am I gonna have, I said, you're gonna have the baby in the Philippines. And she's like, I don't wanna have a baby in the Philippines. I said, it's for the cause of Jesus. And we were starting to make plans to move on to the mission field. We were gonna make our life about the Great Commission. And on a summer day when we were sitting on her mom and dad's little lake house down by the beach, I was sitting in a lawn chair and I was reading out of a book by a man named Watchman Knee, a book called Concerning Our Missions. And I was reading, it was page 47, left side of the book on the bottom paragraph, page 47, third sentence in. I still remember it, it's blazed on my imagination. And he said these words that no amount of ambition, no affirmation from leaders or men's well intentions can substitute for the call of God. And when I read that, the Holy Spirit whispered to me and he said, I'm so glad you're willing to go, but I have something else for you. You will do more for global missions if you will plant a missions motivated church than if you will go yourself. And it was because of that moment I turned to Jane, literally I turned to Jane and I said, I don't think we're supposed to go. And she said, okay. And I know she was bummed. And that was the thing that set into motion, us deciding we're gonna plant a church. And I'm gonna tell you something. When we planted this church, some things that maybe if you have come along over the last 20 plus years, maybe you don't know, but number one, the first thing that we said to the Lord when we planted this church was God. Number one, if we can't be a blessing to the nations of the world, then we will go and do something else because there are enough great churches, but we wanna be a mission sending, mission motivated church. And so the very first check that Radiant Church ever wrote, check 1001 was to our missionary in Latin America. Before we rented a building, before we paid for anything, we did that intentionally. We wanted to make a statement that Radiant Church was going to be a missions motivated church. Another thing you may not know, but over the course of probably the first 10 years of our church, every Sunday when we would gather at the end of worship, one of the things that we did was we prayed over unreached people groups or we prayed over a nation in the 1040 window or over one of our missionaries. We would put up on the screen a picture of either the people group or the nation or one of our missionaries in the 1040 window. If you don't know what a 1040 window is, it's 10 degrees long, two 40 degrees latitude. It cuts across equatorial eastern hemisphere of North Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and it represents over 85% of the unreached people group in the world. And so we did that for years. In the old sanctuary, which is now our student ministry's center at the Richland campus, when you would come in, we had I think 65 flags around the room that represented nations that we supported missionaries in. And we did that because we wanted to make a statement. In fact, in preparation for this, I started thinking to myself, I think we're gonna start praying for nations again. I think I'm even considering putting flags back up. I just think we ought to be able to see that we're a church that is impacting the nations of the world. We're not just a little building in the middle of a cornfield or imported or even an online presence, but we are a missions motivated church. And I tell you that because listen, we're 25 years in this year and I am more motivated for the Great Commission to reach every person on the face of the earth than I ever have been before. My fire for mission has not grown cold. And the motivation of our church, the fuel of our church is going to continue to be this because this is Jesus's last words to us. And here's what I know. The last thing you say to somebody before you leave is the first thing you talk about when you come back. How many parents know what I'm talking about? Do not stay up past 10 p.m. And don't eat my cookies. And then when you come home, first thing you wanna know is did you go to bed? What time did you go to bed? Did you eat my cookies? When Jesus returns, he's going to pick up right where he left off. He's going to look at us individually and he's going to look at the church of Jesus Christ and he's gonna say, what did you do with my commission? What did you do to preach the gospel? What did you do to make disciples? What did you do to bring the gospel to those who've never heard it? What did you personally do? What did you do with the resources that I put into your life? What did you use with the giftings that I put into you? Did you have a heart for the lost here and around the world or were you focused just on yourself? This is where Jesus is gonna pick up. And God has called us to be missions motivated. Today, what I wanna do is I wanna describe to you what being mission motivated looks like. Mission motivated people believe some things. So here's five things that mission motivated people believe. And here's my heart. Not that we would say check, check, check, check, but we would actually recognize that in all of our lives, if you're truly a follower of Jesus, here's what I know is on each one of these five things I'm gonna tell you, there's a slide scale of intensity. There's some of these that you're gonna be like, yes, 100% and some it's like, well, I'm more of a two out of 10. This isn't to judge or to condemn. This is for us to have a dashboard to then ask the Holy Spirit, Holy Spirit. I wanna be a 10 on all of these. I wanna burn with passion for the things that you burn with passion for. So here we go. Mission motivated people believe that number one, everyone is a missionary. Mission motivated people believe that every single believer is a missionary. Do you know who the first missionary was? It was Jesus. Jesus is the first missionary. What does John 3.16 say? For God so loved the, that's us, by the way, we're the world that he gave his only begotten son. So Jesus came in the flesh. Listen to what Jesus said about himself in John 5.30. He said, I can do nothing on my own. As I hear, I judge and my judgment is just because I seek not my own will, but the will of him who sent me. Jesus was the first missionary because he came from heaven to our world, our culture, our existence in order to save us. He set the example. And then he sent the disciples and he has sent us every single one of us. And this is an attitude. This is a posture that every single one of us need to get a grip on, that we are all missionaries. It's not just a couple of people. I grew up in missionaries would come to my grandparents' small church and they would have like a slide projector, set it up and they'd show you pictures and here's a straw hut and here's a lion and here's our well and here's our little chapel or I remember as a kid thinking, I don't wanna get saved because if I get saved, I know Jesus is going to call me to be a missionary. I was scared that I was gonna have to wear a loincloth, learn how to throw a spear and I was gonna live in a jungle somewhere. I was just freaked out. I saw the elephants, I'm like, I'm out. And there are a lot of people who are like, well, missions is what takes place on the other side of the world and missionaries are the people who come back, once twice a year and they're the brave, they're the kind of the extreme Navy SEAL Christians who sacrifice everything here to go there to the mission field. But I want you to understand a missionary is someone who is sent by Jesus to proclaim good news and because of that, every single believer is a missionary. You're a missionary with your time, you're a missionary with your words, you're a missionary with your money, you're a missionary on the other side of the world and you're a missionary right here. Every single believer is a missionary. Charles Spurgeon, the Prince of Preachers once said this, every Christian is either a missionary or an imposter because it's in the very nature of what it means to be a Christian is to care, it's to love and it's to say freely I've received therefore I freely give. Every believer is a missionary. You might think well, I live in America, this isn't a mission field, I'll wait for a couple points down the list and you're gonna realize very quickly that you are called to be a missionary. Number two, mission motivated people believe that everywhere is a mission field. Everywhere is a mission field. Mark 16, verse 15, it's a different version, this is Mark's version of the Great Commission and Jesus or he said to them, go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Let me give you some statistics here, around the world right now in the Middle East, Asia, North Africa and India, that represent the largest area of unreached people who've never heard the gospel or have not had a clear proclamation of the gospel, there are 7,422 unique people groups who are right now alive on the planet who have not heard the gospel, right at this moment. I'm not talking about nations where it's been preached over and over and over again. I'm talking about unique people groups that have never heard the gospel. So the largest mission field by culture is the Middle East. Second largest culture that is per capita would be Asia. Third largest mission field in the world globally is India, which is a subcontinent. The fourth largest mission field by culture, per capita is North America. Because if we define mission field by the population of people who do not identify as Christ followers or have not yet necessarily heard a clear understandable presentation of the gospel of Jesus Christ, then North America, the United States, Canada, represent the fourth largest mission field in the world. If you see yourself as living in a Christian nation and sending people to the heathen, then you have a broken mindset and you don't have a mission motivation because you see this as home base. But if you recognize God when he created me, put me in North America as a Christ follower, all of a sudden you begin to recognize that America is not so Christian after all. Come on, somebody. Well, why doesn't God send some missionaries there? He has. And we're all in this room and we're all joining in right now. We're missionaries. Well, I don't want you. Jesus sent somebody. He's like, I did, I sent you. Well, I don't know how to be a missionary. It's time to learn. You can YouTube everything else. We can DIY everything else. We can memorize everything else. Well, I don't know how to really share the gospel. Maybe it's time we figure it out. But if I don't see myself as a missionary, then I don't have any responsibility. But if I recognize Jesus put me here on purpose, it's not like God's up in heaven going, wow, I really didn't know America was gonna go like this. It's kind of crazy and all these poor Christians living, let's get them all out of there and put them in a little Christian commune out in Montana so that they don't get rattled too much and then we'll send some real missionaries into America. I appreciate the gospel. That ain't happening. If you're looking at the world right now and saying the world's going crazy, America's losing its mind. It's always had its mind lost. It's always been in sin. It's always been depraved. Pressure's just making it rise to the surface. But wherever sin abounds, grace does much more abound. God has not given up on America. He's actually set up America and he sent you to win it. He sent church like a radiant church and other great churches all over America to win this generation. And he's not gonna send in five missionaries into America. He's already got hundreds of thousands of them. He's just gotta get the church to have a change in their identity of recognizing I am a missionary. Do you know that in the last 10 years, America has experienced a shift for the first time from its founding and here's what it is. We actually now receive more missionaries into our country than we send out. Asia is sending, Korea is sending, China is sending missionaries to America. Latin America is sending missionaries to America. Do you know that Brazil is 25% born-again spirit filled? Guatemala is almost 40% born-again spirit filled. So we've got some Latino fire that is coming into America and bringing the fuego and we need it. We need it. Praise the Lord. Mas fuego, mi padre. More fire, my father, bring it. All right. You know that God's not at all threatened by atheism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, secularism, Marxism. He's not at all intimidated by those. None of those intimidate the spirit of the living God. He's called you and I to see ourselves as missionaries and everywhere as the mission field. Number three, mission motivated believe that every church is a mission base. Ah, we gotta stop thinking of church as a cruise ship and start thinking of it as a battleship because a cruise ship, if you got onto a Navy battleship and you expected that to be a cruise ship, you'd get on there and be like, hey, where's the buffet line? They'd be like, snap to attention and drop down and get me 50. It's like, what kind of cruise is this? And they throw you a uniform. It's like, I'd rather wear my Tommy Bahama little, you know, loosey-goosey. I'm just gonna be sitting in the lawn chair. No, this ain't time to be sitting in the lawn chair. We're not playing shuffleboard. And you know, you're not gonna be dancing up on the stage. It's like, get an alignment, get dropped down and get me 50, eat your oatmeal. This is your bunk, this is your uniform. Why? Because we're going to war. And if we come into church, then come, well, you know, I don't, I don't really like the worship. The worship's not my preference. Can I just tell you, the worship's not for you. We're not here to worship you. We're here to worship him. Well, the message, you know, I just have my preferences. Look, on a battleship, we come into alignment not because it's easy, but because the cause is just. And that's what we gotta get to that we see as the church, we're a missions base to our culture, to our city, to our context. This is what we're called to. John Piper, who is a great pastor at Minneapolis. He's written a lot of different books. Here's what he says. He says, missions is not the ultimate goal of the church. Worship is. Missions exist because worship doesn't. Worship, missions exists because worship does not. What do I mean by that? This means Jesus, the Lamb of God, who was slain upon the cross, deserves worship from every corner of creation. And the only reason he's not being worshiped is because the gospel hasn't penetrated that. And so we, as people who love the Lamb of God, we say, I'm going to the four corners of the world so that those people can worship Jesus worthy is the Lamb to receive glory and honor and power and glory and dominion forever and ever and ever. This is what we're in this for. It's not for our own glory. It's for his glory. Number four, we believe that everything must be fueled in prayer. Missions motivated people understand the connection between prayer and mission. Acts 4.29, the church is gathered. They're being persecuted. They don't know what to do. They're preaching the gospel. The local authorities have come to them and say they've thrown them in jail and then they've told them, if you keep preaching in that name, we're gonna throw you into jail. We're gonna throw away the key. And they said, well, is it right for us to obey God or obey man? We're gonna keep preaching the name of Jesus. And so they went and they started praying and here was part of their prayer. They said, and now Lord, look upon their threats and grant to your servant to continue to speak your word with all boldness. While you stretch out your hand to heal and signs and wonders are performed in the name of your holy servant, Jesus. And when they had prayed, the place where they were all gathered together was shaken and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and continue to speak the word of God with boldness. You wanna know where boldness to preach and to be mission motivated comes from? It comes from the presence of God in prayer. In the early 1700s in Europe, there was a very wealthy aristocrat. His name was Count Nicholas von Zinsendorf. It's a great name. His father was very wealthy, was in politics. As he was coming up, stirring in his heart to study the Bible to know God was stirred and they had massive land holdings. He didn't wanna go into politics. He wanted to study theology. There was a group of believers, the Christians that were being persecuted in other parts of Europe named the Moravians. And he invited the Moravians to escape their persecution and to come and live on his property. And what is kind of the modern day area of Czechoslovakia, Germany, kind of in that area there. And he had a large estate and he invited them to come. So over the course of time, four to 600 Moravians moved there and they created a community called Hernhut. And in this community, they began to study the Bible. They began to pray, but they also experienced some differences, conflict. And Count Nicholas von Zinsendorf was used by God to kind of be a leader of this group. He pulled them all together one day in the mid-1720s and he said, we're gonna come together and we're gonna pray. And when they prayed, it was called the Moravian Pentecost. God moved in a powerful way in that prayer meeting. That prayer meeting ended up lasting 100 years, 24 hours, seven days a week for 100 years. God poured out his Holy Spirit where there was disunity, there became unity. And what was the overflow of that prayer meeting? Something powerful happened among that group of Moravians. They began to recognize in the place of prayer that Jesus, who is the Lamb of God, deserved the rewards, the full rewards of everything that he suffered on the cross. And what that meant was somebody had to go and to preach the gospel. So many of them became missionaries to different parts of the world. Some of them wanting to bring the gospel to the West Indies actually sold themselves into slavery so that they could preach the gospel to people groups on the West Indies islands that nobody had ever penetrated with. And so while they're on their ships, having sold themselves into indentured servanthood and they're waving goodbye to their friends knowing they're never gonna come back again, they shouted from the side of the ship, worthy is the Lamb to receive the rewards of his suffering. And it sparked a massive missions movement. You see missions motivated people understand that in the place of prayer, when we encounter the presence of the Lord, our heart is softened, not only to the reality of how beautiful, how glorious Jesus is, how worthy he is, but also of how much his heart is focused on the nations of the world. See, right now our heart's not necessarily broken for the nations of the world or even our own city or our own community, the way that God's heart is broken. When God looks at Southwest Michigan and he looks at even North America right now, his heart is broken for a generation that is having their faith deconstructed by TikTok theologians. When Jesus looks at America, his heart is broken because there's far too many churches where there is comfort and cotton candy preached and not the power of God that leads to salvation that's called the gospel. When Jesus looks at America, he doesn't see systems of education as high academic mausoleums, he sees them as concentration camps with barbed wire being wrapped around the minds of a generation, keeping them from the living God, the one who died for them, the one who loves them, the one who knows their name, the one who has their names carved in the palms of his hands. When Jesus looks at North America, when he looks at Kalamazoo, when he looks at the poor, when he looks at the broken, he hears the cry of the single mom who doesn't know how she's gonna take care of her kids. She hears the cry of the little child that's been neglected and left behind and is insecure and this last year has wreaked havoc on their soul. He hears the cry of those who have no hope, those that have no faith, that have nobody to tell them that you're significant and you're important and the Father in heaven hears that cry and he turns to the church and he says, well, you go. Listen, we're not planting campuses so we can build an organization. We're not building prayer rooms so that we've got really cool buildings downtown. I could care if Jesus would let me, I'd drop the keys on the desk and I would go to the mission field tomorrow. I'm not doing this for my name. I'm doing this because Jesus has called us to care about the things he calls. He cares about. He's called us to build the kingdom of God one person at a time by picking them up off the ground, by filling them with hope, by making disciples of them, by baptizing them and washing off the filth of this age and seeing them come to life in the Holy Spirit of the age to come. He's called us all to be missionaries. Every single one of us. Every day I wake up and one of the things I do in my devotions is I remind myself, Lee, I am a missionary. I get the privilege of being a missionary to Kalamazoo, Michigan. I'm not a clergy member. I'm not a right reverend. I am a missionary. And you know what? There's nothing I'm prouder of than to be a missionary with all of you, to the city that he has called us to, to the generation that he has called us to because number five to be mission motivated means that we use every available means to preach the gospel. Spurgeon once said, if there is any one point in which the Christian church ought to keep its fervor at white hot, it is concerning missions. If there's anything about which we cannot tolerate lukewarmness, it is the matter of sending the gospel to a lost and dying world. A man named C.T. Stud once said this, if Jesus Christ be God and died for me, then no sacrifice can be too great for me to make for him. Church, we are called to be found at work in the harvest fields when Jesus comes. And I want you to think about not just mission fields as an ethereal kind of picture of continents and maps. I want everybody to close your eyes with me wherever you're at. And what I want you to see right now in your mind's eyes is I want you to see the faces of people that you know that do not know Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. I want you to think about those faces. I want you to think about the faces of people that you passed today on your way to church. I want you to think about the faces of people that you work with, that you go to school with, that you follow on social media. I want you to see those faces and let the Holy Spirit pop them up because this is not about maps. This isn't about inanimate objects. This is about people. Lord Jesus, would you move our hearts today with what moves yours? Lord, this whole thing that we're embarking on called bidding a radiant city. It's not about a brand, somebody's logo, somebody's name on it. Lord, we want you to receive the rewards of your suffering. Lord, we want to reach the lost in every community. We want to reach the next generation and make disciples of them and teach them everything that you have commanded. Lord, we want to help marriages be restored. We want to reach foreign exchange students that are on Western Michigan University. We want to raise up missionaries from this house to get on airplanes and go to other parts of the world and preach the gospel. And they also go to the other side of town and they serve their neighbors. And they witness in coffee shops and they live bright radiant lives because your Holy Spirit is in us and is overflowing us and motivating us to be people that go. Lord, it's for you. This is what we're called to. Forgive us for the times, Lord, where we've preferred comfort over commission. Lord, forgive me for the times when I've made it about me. Forgive us, Lord, for not being moved by the things that move your heart. We're so grateful that when you saw us in our sins, you didn't leave us the way that you found us. We're so grateful for the cross. We don't want one person to slip into eternity that hasn't had an opportunity to hear the good news of the gospel. Lord, we, your church, have been called to evacuate hell and to occupy heaven. And by God's grace and in unity together, that's what we are going to do.