Disciples At Work | Week Two

Most Christians think mission only happens somewhere else — on a stage, across the world, or on a church trip. But what if Jesus intended disciple-making to happen both as we go and when we’re sent? In Week 2 of Disciples at Work, we explore how the Great Commission reshapes ordinary life. Your workplace, neighborhood, classroom, gym, and routines may not be distractions from mission at all — they may be the very places where God has already sent you.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:34

Of the Father, of the Holy Spirit, of the Son. Of the Holy Spirit.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

I forgot to ask you all understand, but you may be seated. You can be seated. Kids, y'all can be dismissed. Thank you so much for being with us. That was amazing. Thank you so much, Miss Eleanor. That was awesome. So awesome, awesome, awesome. That was beautiful.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

All right. Kiddos, kiddos. Hey, well, happy Mother's Day. You're welcome. You're welcome. Can we give her a big round of applause for all the mothers in the room? It's always an awesome day. I call this like natural or national who's picking up lunch and dinner today, you know. Some of you as as as as maybe dads and parents, you're you've got this whole thing figured out and you're cooking. The rest of us, we're going to pick up four rivers on the way out. Yeah, there you go. Thank you. But no, seriously, the the fact that you're that you're here, one is just we're we're thankful for that. Um and beyond that, um, I mean there's there's so much that um every single mother in here uh I know there's there's all the things that we see and all the things that we celebrate, and there's a a gajillion things that no one ever sees, that no one ever realizes and recognizes the late nights, the projects, the all the things that happened. And so I just want to say thank you for the way that you guys all love and serve um our community, our church, our world, um, families, all those types of things. Um I just want to say uh we are thankful for you. And I want to pray just a special prayer over you as we start this sermon together. Jesus, I ask and I pray that you would specifically and especially be with every single mom in this room. I pray that you would be with every single person who perhaps this day is difficult because they're celebrating it for the first time without a mom, for the first time in a long time, or for the first time, you know, and they've been doing this for a long time without a mom. Um for some of us today is amazing and joyful. For some of us today is incredibly difficult and painful. And Jesus, we know that you are good and you are God regardless of where we fall in that. And so specifically, we thank you for the mothers that we've had, the mothers that we still have. We pray that you would be with them, that you would bless them, that you would give them energy, that you would give them the resiliency to continue to follow you, to love and to serve the people around them, to love and to serve and to make disciples, to love and to serve community, world, families, all in between. And it's in your name, Jesus, we pray and we ask this. Amen. Amen. So we started a new series last week called Disciples at Work. Disciples at Work. And the reason is because we spend uh, if you think about work kind of more broadly, not just work in the context of the Industrial Revolution, eight to five, you know, 40-hour work week. But if you think about work in the context of everything that is as kind of the meaningful productive part of life, um that that starts when you're in school, frankly. You wake up in the morning and you go when you show up, or you're homeschool, and you wake up and you show up in your living room, you know, whatever it is, and and you start to learn, and it's these taking these thoughts, these ideas, learning them, forming them, becoming all that God has called you to be. You can kind of continue on. You go to middle school, you go to high school, you go to college, maybe you do an internship, right? For some people, they kind of go on and there's a career that started, and maybe it's a for-profit, non-profit, um, climb the corporate ladder, kind of uh ascend in terms of responsibility, or or master the craft that you've been given. For some of us, the work is in the home. For some of us, it's not in the home, or it's in the home, and you're you're raising an entire family, which let me just tell you, if that's you, here's the crazy part work-life balance doesn't exist for you, right? It's all like work. And so when people get off work, you know, then all of a sudden you're at home and and more people are now home and and you're still at home the entire time. And if that's you, man, I pray for you. Because that I I tell my wife all the time, who also is in therapy and owns her own private practice, if I was a stay-at-home dad, I would be awful. Like it would be horrible. And the reason is because that junk would just be my I would, I would eventually my kids would just be like, I don't know what they'd be, but they'd be crazy. She wants you to know that. That's not an experiment we want to go down. But the point is, is there's all kinds of versions and variations of work. And what's interesting is in a place like this, what we spend most of our time doing is talking about conceptually God, and then trying to say, okay, now this is how God integrates into these places and spaces, as opposed to talking about, let's just take that actual place and space, that context, because 80% approximately of our life is put there. In fact, even if you're retired, if you're retired like most people who are retired, um, you then go back and you look for productive work to do because now for the first time, you don't have to earn. You can work and do and be a part of whatever you want to do and work and be a part of. And what's fascinating about this, we talked about this last week, is we first need to see work as spiritual. Because for many of us, again, work kind of feels like a godless place. It's a place where I go to pay the bills, it's functional, it's responsible, it's it's kind of you know secular, it's not spiritual in nature. And so we just kind of go, we show up, we do our job, we roll out the other side at the end of the day. And what's interesting, what's interesting is if you actually study work as it relates to humanity, broadly speaking, there are these two kind of polarities, it's a duality that we experience in work. In other words, two opposites that war between us. On one side, every study that has been done shows that when we take away work from people, from work from humanity, productivity in any type of way, shape, or form from humanity, what we actually find is that when that happens, we deteriorate as people. Our mental health, our emotional health, our spiritual health, and in fact, even our physical health go downhill when we remove work. In a sense, we were made for it and we need it. And on the other side of it, anybody who's worked knows this. You can't wait for it to be done. I know very few people who are like, man, I wish Saturday and Sunday were shorter. You know? Can't wait to get back to that grind. Maybe that's you. But what's fascinating is right, we've all experienced this. You stand over a project one day with pride at what you've done, at what you've created, at what's been accomplished. And then the next day you are ready to pull your hair out because again, the copy machine doesn't work, the McFlurry machine is out in the fritz again, right? And Derek showed up, and nobody likes Derek. And why is that? Well, Genesis gives a beautiful explanation to all this. Genesis 1, God creates. God for six days goes to work, and on the sixth day, he creates man. And as he does, he has this incredible, and you can read this in Genesis 1, have this incredible job scripture. He basically says, he says, Come, let us make man in our image. In other words, the Trinity of God, let us make man in the image of God. What's the image of God? Well, well, Genesis chapter 1, all we see is God's six-day work week. And so he says, In my image I'm going to create you for this. And here's the work that I'm going to give humanity. Do you know humanity has a job description? It's to be fruitful and multiply. To multiply throughout the earth. And basically, it says to subdue the earth, which means to manage it or to cultivate it. And in that sense, again again, pre-fall, this wasn't like the animals were killing each other, and this was this massive threat. In other words, when you feel the dignity of work, that's Genesis 1. Genesis 2, God's created you for that. But then sin entered the picture. And he says, but here's the problem with work. It's going to be filled with thorns and thistles, Genesis 3. And so the purpose that we feel behind work comes from God's design. It's the thumbprint of God. And the frustration that we feel at work also comes from the curse of sin. Which is why we both can't live without it and can't wait for it to stop. And this is why I say the Bible actually explains some of the most helpful, some of the most incredible experiential things that we as humanity are still trying to figure out. Because in the garden before the fall, there was work. It just was always incredible and never painful. The reason I wanted to start there, and where we're going today, is to begin to see it as missional. And I'm just kind of gonna, these first couple of weeks are just integrating new categories. Because here's the thing when you go to work and it feels great, or it feels painful, you have to know that that is what God said way back in the book of Genesis. These were the dynamics that were going to be there. Before we can see it as missional, we need to see it as spiritual. And as we begin to see it as spiritual, it makes that transitional to missional a lot easier. Because here's what we're actually dealing with in this whole series. I don't think the majority of you in here are sitting here thinking, do I need to go be a missionary in Cambodia? Do I need to go be a missionary in East Angola, Africa? Do I need to go be a missionary in Guatemala? Maybe, maybe, maybe. But you know what I think most of us think about? Does my Tuesday matter? Does that Thursday, when I'm just clocking in and clocking out and I'm at the place and I'm at the you know, the office and I'm at the event or I'm studying for this test? Does that actually matter to God? And beyond just like, does it matter to God? Like, is it actually missional and purpose? And frustratingly, one of the things that can make us feel that way is a verse that we just read through. And I want to show you some of the nuance behind this verse that actually I think makes it come alive and shows us so much more about how God thinks about the normal things of life. Because here's what we have a tendency to think is that there is ministry world. That's where the paid people, that's where the church staff goes, that's where, oh my gosh, how many coffees did Grace Markwell have with people? How many people got baptized? Are you kidding me? Nate, and he was with people and he spent some time and you're right. And then, oh my gosh, and here's all the friends that we have, the struplers from Cambodia, like those are the people doing mission work. But when I'm working at the Department of Revenue at, you know, downtown, like, bro, we're just counting numbers. And there's nothing spiritual to that. To which Jesus, I think, would say something very different. And in Matthew chapter 28, we have this command that I think when we read it on the surface, it has an implication to it that's very unintended. And I'll tell you what I mean by that in a second. So, Matthew, we're gonna start chapter 28, we're gonna start at verse, let's call it verse, I don't know, 18. So, context. Jesus has just, well, just done everything basically. He has gone through the period where he taught, he spoke, he's gone through times where he performed miracles, did all kinds of stuff, claimed that he was the son of God. Then he did what no one thought he was gonna do, which was to die, which meant that nobody thought that he was the son of God, because no one thought that God would die. That theologically, they didn't have the category. There wasn't a box for people to say, like, oh yeah, God's gonna die. That makes sense. And so he dies, he resurrects from the dead, flips the whole world, starts showing up over a period of 40 days. And this is his last time, kind of his last words that he's saying to his disciples. And so Jesus came and he said to them, He said, All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. In other words, I have all power, I have all authority, I have all capacity. It's all been given to me. And so here's what I want you to know. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. And what's interesting about that phrase is if I were to say, what is the command in this sentence? For most of us, it would kind of be like a dual command. But the primary thing that we see, the very first word that we see is what? What's the very first word in this sentence? Okay, that was wildly. I'm gonna take that as my fault, timing-wise, that I didn't point at a good cadence where you naturally wanted to fill in that blank. Okay, let's do that one more time. All right. So the first word in this sentence is so we oftentimes think that the biggest thing in this command is to, but did you know that's not even a command in this verse? That's a participle. And I know everybody in the room is like, oh, I'm clearly tracking with participles. Know what that is and what that means. So let me, we're gonna pause for a second. We're gonna do a quick grammar lesson. The main idea of what you are to do, right? The main command in this verse is called the indicative. This is the thing that the verse is saying, here's what you do, okay? A participle is kind of like a verb, but it kind of just informs. It doesn't command, it almost assumes in some ways. Honestly, I've looked through about 17 definitions of what participle means, and what I found out was it would be pointless to try to explain it because I don't even really fully grasp it, because it can be like different things at different times. It's like, eh, we'll figure it out. But here's the point: the command in this is not go. In fact, go is the assumption in this verse. The command is to make disciples. And this is why when you've heard people talk about these verses, they've talked about it in two different ways. Some position it as go, go therefore, which makes us feel like this. In order to do real ministry, real ministry is done somewhere else where I'm not currently. I have to go somewhere to do ministry. I have to go to Cambodia, I have to go on a mission trip, I have to go to church, I have to go to an event, I have to go to an outreach, I have to go do something to make disciples. And some people will say, it's not that. It's as you go. As you naturally go, what do you do? You make disciples. You see, what's interesting is if you I kind of take the Greek in this verse. And I kept trying to figure out which is the authorial intent, which which does the author mean to do? To make it just a little bit more complex, participles in the Greek don't point to either, they're inclusive of both. Which is why when you've heard people talk about that, it's both. The best way I can explain this is to give you an example of what this means. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations. Going is the assumption, make disciples is the command. It's getting hot outside right now. And my kids are terrible at staying hydrated. I don't know if you guys had that, but sometimes they get so dehydrated at night, they kind of like wake up, and sometimes there's almost some like night terrors things that happen, they feel sick at night, and they're just they're just dehydrated just because they're going, they're going, they're going, they're playing all day. So if I was gonna take this sentence, here's how this would actually work and look. It would be something to the effect of playing outside. That's the assumption. You guys are gonna go play outside. They're my kids, they just run, they go play, they all that playing outside, don't forget to stay hydrated. Playing outside, don't in fact, the actual phrasing of this verse, let me just read the way that the Greek lays out for this. Having gone therefore, having gone therefore, disciple all nations. Now, why is this important? Because the call of God is both to go. Some people are going intentionally, right? And while some people are going intentionally, others are going as you go. Right? So you've got one person who's saying, okay, there's not people, there's not believers in that spot, in that place. I'm going to go therefore. And what happens? They get to a place, they they preach the gospel. And if you ever go on a missionship, here's what you know. The goal, especially if you've done it from people who are from this, or with people who are from the states going to somewhere else, the goal is not to have a bunch of people from the United States be the only missionaries in the world. It's that we would go, we would preach the gospel, and we would create disciples of the people groups that are in the places and in the space. In other words, our goal is to help them see the gospel in a way where they spread it where they are. That's biblical mysiology. So what's the point? Well, the point that he's saying is this not go. The point is, wherever you're going, are you making disciples? This is not an additional thing to do. He's saying, this is a thing that I want you to do as you do what you do. And for some of you, as you do what you do, well, you're gonna feel called to go. But can I tell you this? If we're not already doing that here, just being honest, we're gonna be a liability out there. Like if God called us to go, and I'm not currently going here, I'm gonna have to learn for the very first time in a new place, in a new space, in a new culture. One of the things that's really interesting, so Rhodes and I, um, we were watching uh, so one of the things we do at bedtime, we watch YouTube Shorts. You could judge me if you want to. Um but the truth is, is I feel like I'm a better parent than you. Um because what I do is I use it as my time, like keep this a secret, okay? Um, it's just us in the room. Um I use it as my time to kind of to what are the things that I want Rhodes? So he loves sports. So what we do is I use it as my time to watch film on the greats. So we'll watch Tiger Woods, just his slow motion, putting motion, you know, just how what's it, what's that grip like, right? We'll watch Paul Skeens throwing his fastball. We're looking at the mechanics, that like leg drive of hip, you know, rotation, internal X. Like it's just that's what we do, right? So, anyways, but then you also get a bunch of junk because it's YouTube. So the other night we were watching, and uh, and it was this guy who was he had decided that he was gonna um dye his pond. It's just kind of pond dye, it's all eco-friendly, all this kind of stuff. He had that he had all this property, he had done it the year before, and so he kind of gets in this canoe and he starts going back and forth, and he's dropping like little things of dye all throughout this pond, right? Well, so then he decided he knows that he needs to kind of get it in some different places, and so he kind of goes back and forth and spreads it, and he kind of moves his oar and all and stuff. But to be honest, when he leaves, it's this whole pond that is still brown with this little streaks of blue that happened in between it. He went and he tried to spread it, he did that. But what he knew was this. He just needed to walk away from it. So he goes away and he comes back an hour later. And the coolest thing happened. The natural flow of the water, as the wind naturally carried the water back and forth, left and right, and all across by they came back an hour later, and it was shocking because the entire, entire pond was blue. You see, there was times when he said, I need to drop this in intentionally because I need to make sure it has access to be spread equitably. But I also know there is a natural movement that happens in this. And as the wind naturally blows, as this water naturally spreads, there's going to be a natural sense in which this thing goes everywhere. So, what does that mean? The gospel, in the same way, there's some of us that go intentionally, but do you see this? The natural spread of humanity, if we are making disciples as we go, it naturally spreads. The problem is, is not that the gospel wouldn't spread, it's that we don't see where we are as a place of mission field. Because we always think we have to go, therefore. But the point is make disciples wherever you go. He continues. He said, All authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore, make disciples of all nations. What does that mean? That doesn't mean just taking people who already have. Faith and helping them to mature. To make a disciple was to make a learner of Jesus. And most people hadn't heard of Jesus at that point in time. What is what's this point? Help people who don't have faith to come to faith. And once they come to this faith, this belief, help them to walk to maturity. Teaching them. I want you to baptize them. I want you to come to faith. I want you to make him baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And I want you to what? Teaching them to observe all that I commanded you. He said, so here's kind of the concept. Here's the idea. I want you to go there for it. I want you to make disciples. I want you to do all of this stuff. And as you go, as you do this, here's the reality. I want you to go from non-belief to belief and belief to maturity. And what I know is that virtually everybody in this room hears that. And you've heard a sermon probably about you know going and making disciples and all this kind of stuff. And the natural intuitive kind of response is well, that sounds incredibly difficult, incredibly terrifying, and perhaps I don't feel like I'm prepared for it. Next week, we're actually going to go through some very specific on what I think it looks like. What we see biblically and how people actually live in this thing again. You think about a God who actually says that if that's true, and he says, Okay, so I have everything, and I am going to be with you. One of the things that I love about the Bible is the interconnectedness of this whole thing. Because this is this beautiful thing. What he's talking about is I'm going to send the Spirit. The Holy Spirit's going to be with you, going to empower you, going to be my witnesses, he says in the book of Acts, to Judea, you know, Samaria, like to the ends of the earth, you are going to be my witnesses here, around, further out, like you're going to do this. But what's going to happen? It's going to happen as the Holy Spirit comes upon you. Look, get this. In Genesis chapter 2, we read last week what happens as God has created man for vocation, for meaning, for purpose to cultivate. What does he do? He breathes on man in Genesis chapter 2, verse 7. It says, He breathes life into him. Why? Life that is going to create the man in such a way that he has vocational capacity. Okay? But it's the same Spirit of God that breathes life into vocation that he does into mission. If you've never read this, John chapter 20, verse 22, it's the coolest thing. Jesus has risen from the dead. He showed up to his disciples. He's on the beach with them one morning. And you know what he does? He breathes on them. He breathes on them. And he says, receive the spirit. In the same way that God breathed life into man to utilize humanity for their vocational productivity and multiplication. He then in John says, I'm breathing my spirit on you permission. And what happens? Acts chapter 2, all of a sudden all the believers are gathered together. It's Pentecost and the believers aren't even there yet. It's all the folks over there for a Jewish festival. All of a sudden the Holy Spirit comes down. Acts chapter 2 and they start talking gibberish and all kinds of crazy different languages, all different stuff. It didn't seem like gibberish, but but somebody looks it up and they say, it's one of my favorite things in the Bible. And this is one of those things where it's like, you wouldn't write this unless you were just recording it because it actually happened. That when the Holy Spirit comes down, people start preaching the gospel. It's so crazy that every somebody looks up and says, they're drunk. That's a wild detail from a religious text. But Peter stands up, gives a sermon. So the Holy Spirit is received to empower the mission. Here's what I want you to know about that. If the Spirit breathed life into vocation, and the Spirit breathes life into mission, what that actually means is God is using our vocation as part of the mission. Not separate from it. Think about this. The values there look nothing like God. You might say, in fact, if anything, there's need all around. And it just feels like everybody's just can never get enough of whatever themselves, the success, the late nights or the work, or the who's gonna get in the right program in the right place. And you look around and you just think, man, God's absent at this place. There's no believers here. You know what the Christian tendency to do is find a place that has all believers. Did you know that if we saw a country that had a percentage of the population as unreached as many of your workplaces, we would send missionaries to those countries? Think about that. That's like it's not a godless place because you're there. And I mean that like in an encouraging way. Like that is part of why God has you at that place. In fact, you know what? I'm convinced that 2,000 years later, the reason, the reason that that we are still sending go there for missionaries is not because we haven't sent enough go there for missionaries. It's because the as-you go disciples have not made disciples as the go-therefore missionaries have gone there for. Because you think about this. If a go-therefore missionary goes and they reach somebody, people come to know Jesus. If all of those disciples then go to completely different places and plead different places, we're still sending missionaries to that place. It only actually works as it goes therefore with the people who are there. Not the professional folks. The everyday folks. In fact, can I tell you? That's kind of the part of the problem with working at a church. You kind of have to be saved just to be on payroll. Which means your entire circle in front of you. We talked about this at staff. Or every every Thursday we have an entire sermon run through. We talked about it afterwards, and our staff basically all said, I mean, this is really difficult. Because all the things and the friends and the people that I'm around every single day is just surrounded by Christians. I have to go out of my way and find intentional places where I can meet and spend time with people who don't know Jesus. Now at this point, is at a part where it's starting to get a little bit more persecution field, just to say. But at this point, he ain't at that point. In fact, at this point, he hates the church. He kills the church. It says that when Stephen died, that he was there giving approval. And this is what happens as the last as the first person who has died, the first martyr, Stephen dies, Acts chapter 8, and Saul approved of his execution. And there arose on that day a great persecution against the church in Jerusalem, and they were all scattered throughout the regions of Judea, Samaria, and except the apostles. Why? Because they had come for Pentecost, they had come for this Jewish celebration, this Jewish festival, and all of a sudden the Holy Spirit comes down, this new thing starts, the church is born, all of a sudden they're going, they're preaching, they're teaching, they're doing all this stuff. But remember, God said that y'all do need to scatter to some degree. You do need to go, therefore, and as you go, but part of the natural movement of humanity is for it to spread across the globe. And so it says, so here's what happened is they scattered. Except the apostles. They stayed central. Devout men buried Stephen. It made great lamentation over him. The church, sorry, great man lamentation over him. But Saul was ravaging the church. And entering house after house, he dragged off men and women and committed them to prison. It's a pretty difficult context to live out your faith. And it says, now those who were scattered went about preaching the word. See, this was it. Like it was just normal people. Persecution hit and they scattered. Normal people, persecution hit, and they scattered. Here's what I want you to know with all this. It's the lie to me of modern Christianity. That any type of spiritual responsibility is on thee. The onus of that responsibility of taking the gospel, of the mission to reach the nations, is on professional Christians. That couldn't be farther from the truth. That there were people in the book of Acts who would go and they would plan, they would go and they would plant, but they would start a church and they would raise up believers. It should be our goal that we say, no one ever needs to send another missionary to Tallahassee. Because we are all as you going. And the place where God has you, that place where you work, right? You're the only Jesus follower there. That gym that you go to, and you're the only gym that Jesus follower there. That that team that your kids are on use sports with, and you're the only Jesus follower there. You're the one of a couple. That that place where you play golf or tennis or uh mahjong or whatever you do, right? Like, and you're the only Jesus follower there. Like God has put you in that place for a purpose and for a reason instead in the ordinary believers, man, the gospel spread. And you might still be thinking, man, well, I don't think we exactly know what to do with that. Well, the first thing again, we gotta see our work as spiritual. But for too long, we have created this sacred secular divide where real ministry happens in these places and on stages, and it's separate from real life. And Jesus said, Man, I want some of you to go. I want you to pray about going. And some of that's gonna be to a different place, but for most of you, it's gonna be to all the places and spaces where you are. Can you guys just say this clearly? Mission and evangelism should not add anything to your plate. It should be the reason why your plate exists. It's not that we're adding more to it. What's already in your hands? Where does God already have you? What's the place? What's the space? And here's what I want you to do. Because anytime that we would go on a mission trip, it's it's it's just good, clear, clean biblical mysiology. We would study, we would be aware, and we would pray first. We never say, okay, let's go on a mission trip. Y'all want to go tomorrow? Let's roll. Like maybe. But if we're doing our due diligence, we take a little bit more time than that. So here's three things that I want you to be thinking about this week. Here's three things as you're thinking about my work as my mission place. I want you to see, because we need to start seeing. These are the things that if you're a missionary, these aren't all of the questions, but this is the basis of the questions that you ask. Number one. Number one. What are the idols? What are the idols at my work? What are the values? What are the things? Is it productivity? Is it is it this sense of accomplishment? Is this sense of fair? Is it this sense of entire grinding? Whoever works the hardest and whoever wears the what are the idols? Is it beauty? Is it the aesthetic? Is it winning at all costs? What's the idol or the thing that can seem more important than God at your workplace? Number two is what are the needs? You gotta identify the idols of a culture that you're gonna minister to. Because you can't call out idols that you don't see and recognize. And number two is you can't meet needs that you don't see and recognize. The primary way you see Jesus in the gospel is that people come to him. A few come and say, Jesus, how do I inherit eternal life? They usually had some false motives, to be honest. Most people came to Jesus, they were hungry, they were blind, they couldn't walk, somebody was sick. He embraced what were the biggest needs in their life to get to the actual greatest need of salvation? What are the idols where you work? What are the idols where you go to school? Where are the idols where you volunteer? What are the idols in your home as you're raising your family? What are the needs? And number three, where has God given you favor? This is a really cool thing that happens continually, and it's not always. Sometimes God calls us to go to incredibly difficult places to do incredibly difficult things. But oftentimes Jesus sent his disciples out, and we just sent them out. He'd say, you know what? If they receive you at that place, also stay with them. If they don't, man to shake the boots, the dust off your you know, your Jesus sandals and keep walking. Go to the next place, go to the next space. So here's the question: What are the idols? What are the needs? And where has God already given you favor? With whom has God already given you favor? That you already have warm water there, conversations are easier. Oftentimes God just guiding through that. But here's what I want you to know with all of this the call of God on the church is that we would go therefore and as we go, that as those two things happened, no matter where it is, no matter where we are, we would make disciples. My dream for our church is that someday as we go on more mission trips together, what happens when we go on those is it feels like the exact same thing as normal life in a different place. We wake up the same way, thinking the same things, feeling the same things, because this is the responsibility of every single person who's a Jesus Father. The command is make disciples. And in case we weren't clear, in about an hour after the service ends, I don't know, approximately, we're gonna close the doors and we're gonna lock up. And you all are going to have gone. You aren't gonna be here, you're gonna be going. The obligation is to continue to make disciples wherever we go. Next week I want to tell you a little bit more about the specifics of what that looks like. But for right now, what are the idols? What are the needs? Where do you have faith? Let's pray. Jesus, thank you for the fact that you naturally send, that you naturally spread, that you naturally create. God, I pray for each and every one of us gathered. You would help us to see. That in a significant way, the reason that we still have to pay and to send missionaries to go places is because the make disciples has not been fully received by us as just the ordinary as-you-go believers. God help us. Your power, your wisdom that breathe life into creation, that breathed life into vocation, that then in John breathed life into mission. And we saw it happen at Pentecost. We saw the mission begin as the Holy Spirit, and immediately thousands are brought close to you. The mission, the church was born, and you have called our place, our Cambodia, our East End Gold Africa to be our home. Some of them are neighborhoods, some of them are sports teams. You've called for some of those places to be the Department of Revenue. You've called for some of those places to be at McDonald's when the McFlurry machine, Genesis 3 acts up again. We're the people of joy, of hope, and of peace, God. And you have called us to make disciples, helping people who don't have belief to come to belief, and those who do believe to walk closer in maturity to yours. So Jesus, I ask and I pray that you would help each and every one of us to do that. Would you help us to begin, not by deciding something that we're gonna go do, but by being students and by praying, by praying every single day, saying, God, would you show me the items? God, would you show me the needs? And God, would you help me to see where I have faith? God, I praise, having God, therefore, we would disciple all these nations, and as the same as that task is, you'll be with us. Your spirits that free flight, also free flesh, your name we freeze.