Sunday, March 06, 2005

Matthew 10: Joining Jesus in His Mission

My message this morning was out of Matthew 10, entitled Joining Jesus in His Misson. I focussed on three themes that emerge from this big passage. Joining Jesus in His mission involves. . .

RELIANCE: God will Provide
REJECTION: God will be Present
REWARD: God has promised

I had some tension about covering such a long text this morning, but there is a method to my madness. I would like to get through chapter 11 by Easter Sunday, when we cut away from Matthew for a 4 part Heaven Series in partnership with the Central Coast Evangelical Pastors Network. I have to tell myself that, God willing, we'll have other opportunities to pick up some of the material we missed.

Growth Groups will be discussing some of these issues this week, but I wanted to throw out a couple of questions here. . .

• Reliance: How are you relying on God as you serve Him? How has he led you into deep water, beyond your comfort zone and beyond yourself?

• Rejection: How have you experienced rejection as a result of your identification with Jesus Christ?

• Reward: What kind of rewards have you experienced in serving Jesus?

I would love to see a few responses posted. Sermon audio should be posted online in MP3 format by Monday or Tuesday morning. Complete outline is there now.

I love Matthew 10:16, “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves. Wise and winsome. Strategic and submissive. Bold and humble. Lord help us to be so as we join you in your work! Help us bear the cross, so we might wear the crown!

The College Worship Team did a great job today. Thank you for serving us and leading us! Full house today. Lots of visitors. When are we going to three services? Beautiful day here on the Central Coast. I'm going surfing!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

As a college student, it was awesome to see them up there! Thanks for letting us be a part today!

Unknown said...

Great sermon, today, Pastor Tim. We had a great time discussing it tonight in our Growth Group. A couple questions came up:

Who are the "worthy" in verse 11?

What does it mean to "shake off the dust from your feet" in verse 14?

As for the college worship team, we are blessed to have them every week. Austin and Pat are two remarkable young men, and it is exciting to see what God is doing in their lives.

Anonymous said...

Interesting post. I enjoy hearing what others are doing across the country. Surfing?!! We are getting rid of snow from the weekend!

I'm sure your congregation is enjoying hearing your personal thoughts on your blog! Keep it up!

Anonymous said...

Cool, this is getting reading from people beyond Grace. Snow?? What's that? (Guess I've forgotten my Minnesota roots.)

Tim, this week so folds in with the book, 'In His Steps', that I am reading to Karen. (Or maybe the book is coloring everything that I hear or read). We are all called to Christian discipleship which is that of service and suffering, but at the same time, finding God's reward of his presence in our hearts and in deeper fellowship with one another. This is the natural result of trusting God and finding Him faithful. I need this kind of thing to really sink beyond my brain and effect more of the core of who I am, how I serve, and how I lead my family in service.

Nice job separating the commands for the specific mission from the general principles that we need to understand for our commission. It made it easy to set parts of the passage as 'irrelevant to the current discussion' and focus on the rest.

I heard Tom make mention of the service thing, too. Or do make changes to expand capacity? (or both?) We need more servants to make that happen.

Keep getting that core Gospel stuff in there with the challenge to go deeper. There was at least one man that I've talked to at the jail in the second service. I know that he still needs to hear core stuff.