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Printer Friendly VersionActs 1:8, “But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit
comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea
and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
According to the Book of Acts, these are the last words Jesus
ever spoke to His disciples while still on earth. Last words. People are often
fascinated with the last words of those who are dying. Sometimes—not
all the time—but sometimes you can tell quite a bit about the life and
the priorities and the interests of a person by their last words.
P.T. Barnum of Barnum and Bailey circus fame asked a question as he was dying
in 1891. He asked, “How were the receipts today at Madison Square Garden?”
Those were his last words.
Elizabeth I, Queen of England, in 1603 said, “All my possessions
for a moment of time.”
Napoleon simply cried out, “Josephine.”
Isn’t it amazing that in Jesus’ final words to His
disciples, His perspective, His vision, His outlook is devoted to others?
Jesus isn’t interested in telling them something new about himself.
He’s not even primarily concerned to comfort this core group of disciples.
Jesus has turned His vision and He wants them to turn their vision toward
the world. “You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea
and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” They didn’t realize
it at the time but Jesus was outlining His strategy for changing the world
with the gospel! Jesus was giving them the “vision” for what needed
to happen. Jesus was saying, “You’re going to be tools of God’s
Spirit if you’ll just turn your eyes away from yourself and look out
on the world.”
I’ve been preaching for the last month on some of the
fundamental characteristics of great, five-star, life-changing churches. They
are churches for everyone. They are churches where people are coming to Christ
and being converted and made new in Christ. Great churches emphasize learning
God’s Word and being molded by it. And they are filled with people who
are living for Him above all other concerns. Everyone. Coming to Christ. Learning
His Word. Living for Him.
The fifth characteristic that dominates the life of a five-star
church is this idea of going to others. Reaching out. Being mission-minded
at home and around the globe. Saying and planning and strategizing for impact
on others. Making the decision as a people to focus on those who must be reached
with the gospel. Saying, “We’re going to do it. We’re going
to move forward. We’re going to turn from looking inward to looking
outward and we’re going to pay the price to make that happen.”
Those are churches of impact and power and mission!
For the first seven years of my pastoral ministry, Dawn and
I lived in Virginia. What a beautiful place! Virginia prides itself on being
the “birthplace of presidents.” There is all kinds of history
there—from Monticello and Mount Vernon to Appomattox Courthouse and
historic battlefields. Fascinating places.
In 2007, Virginia will celebrate the 400th anniversary of the
founding of the first, permanent, English settlement in America, Jamestown.
Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts was 1620. Jamestown in Virginia was 1607.
It wasn’t easy to establish the first permanent settlement.
You have to build a town and elect a government and build homes and plant
fields and survive the winters. But within the first two years, they had done
all those things!
In the third year of Jamestown’s existence, 1609, the
town government proposed to build a road that went westward out of town and
into the wilderness. They wanted to build a road that was five miles long.
Do you know what happened?
In the fourth year, the people tried to impeach the town’s
government because they thought, “Who needs to go five miles into the
wilderness?” These same people who had the vision, the gumption, the
fortitude, and the faith to travel 3,000 miles across a dangerous and deep
ocean—within four years, they didn’t have a vision for five miles
outside of town!
Jesus said, “Impact Jerusalem. Impact right where you are, right where
you live. But don’t stop there! Reach out a little farther and impact
Judea. Touch the surrounding area. And then stretch and influence Samaria.”
That was a large area in the first century.
I saw an interview a few months ago with one of the evacuees
from Hurricane Katrina. Here was this grown woman living in the United States
in the 21st century, and she had never been outside the city limits of New
Orleans. That’s almost incomprehensible for us today. But in the first
century, that would have been the norm. You couldn’t jump on a bus or
hop on a train or fly across the world. Living in a very limited geographical
area would have been commonplace.
Some of Jesus’ own disciples probably had never set foot
outside of that little sliver of land on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean
that we call Palestine. And Jesus is saying, “Don’t just stop
there. Not just Jerusalem. Not even just Judea. Not just Samaria. You’ll
witness, you’ll tell my story, you’ll proclaim who I am and what
I’ve come to do, to the ends of the earth.” Wow!
Great, life-impacting, community-transforming, world-reaching churches are
compelled by the mission. They can’t stay where they are. They can’t
rest in the past. They can’t do things just because that’s the
way they’ve always been done. Five-star churches must engage and reach
the world. They can’t remain independent and isolated and do their own
thing. They are driven to partner together with other believers, other churches,
other agencies, and evangelize the world!
The Church of the Nazarene is evangelizing in more than 150 countries, the
most recent being Iraq, and you and I are a part of that! Great churches are
concerned about the ends of the earth, and the ends of the earth can be on
another continent in a completely different time zone or the end of the earth
can be around the corner in our hometown.
It reminds of the story an old preacher tells about his first
church. The first church he ever served was in the hills of Eastern Tennessee
near Oak Ridge. Almost overnight that little sleepy town began to boom because
in the early 1940s the government decided to establish a nuclear power plant
there. As a result, thousands of people began to flood into the area. Every
hill and valley and every shady area had a recreational vehicle on it. People
were living in them as they began to find work and make Oak Ridge their home.
Pastor Fred had a beautiful little church nearby. It was a white frame building,
112 years old. There was an organ over in the corner that Ms. Lois played.
There was a chimney and kerosene lamps were around the walls and every pew
was handmade from a giant poplar tree.
One Sunday morning, Pastor Fred asked the leaders of the church
to stay after the service for a brief meeting and he said, “Men, we
need to launch a calling campaign and an invitational campaign in all these
trailer parks to invite those people to church.
“I’m not so sure,” someone responded.
Another added, “I don’t think they’d fit in
here. After all, they’re just here temporarily to build the plant and
then they’ll be moving away.”
They argued about it for a while and then it started pushing
into lunchtime and so they decided to vote on Pastor Fred’s idea next
Sunday. After the service the following week, there was another meeting. Someone
said, “I move that in order to be a member of this church, you must
own property in the county.”
“I second that,” somebody else said.
Pastor Fred and a few others voted against it. But the motion
carried. Many years later, after serving other churches and teaching in seminaries
and a university along the way, Pastor Fred moved pack to that part of the
country. He had told his wife that story about when he was a young “kid
preacher” and she said she’d like to go back and visit. An interstate
had been built in the meantime but they finally found the state road and then
the county road and finally the little gravel road that led to the church.
Back among those Tennessee pines was that beautiful, little, white, clapboard
building but it wasn’t the same as all those years ago.
Now, there were motorcycles and trucks and cars packed in that
little parking lot and out in front there was a great, big sign that said,
“Barbeque—all you can eat!”
They went in. Of course the kerosene lamps were long gone, but
over in the corner was the old organ. And all over the place, there were folding
tables and aluminum chairs and people up to their elbows in sliced pork and
barbequed chicken. Pastor Fred says he turned to his wife Nettie and said,
“It’s a good thing this is not still a church, otherwise these
people couldn’t be here.”1
Five-star churches don’t lose their impact because they’ve
lost sight of the vision to go to others, whether the others are next door
or at the ends of the earth. We used to think the mission field was “out
there,” across the ocean, over the desert, into the jungle. Now we know
the mission field is there, but it’s also here. I don’t know Pastor
Fred personally, but I think if he was in Winter Haven he might say something
like this to his wife, “Nettie, they knocked down another orange grove
this week. Looks like another subdivision. How is our church going to reach
them?”
Jesus knew His disciples weren’t up to the task on their
own. They just couldn’t do it! And so He promised to them a Helper,
an Empowerer who would enable them to do the impossible. He promised them
God’s Holy Spirit.
We are in the same place with the same need. We face incredible
opportunities and challenges and Jesus says to us today, “You will receive
power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem,
and in all Judea, and in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”
Lord Jesus, let it be so!
1 Fred B. Craddock, Craddock Stories (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2001), 28-9.