"Needed: Field Hands"

31-Oct-2010

“Needed: Field Hands”

Robert M. Thompson, Pastor

Corinth Reformed Church
150 Sixteenth Avenue NW
Hickory, North Carolina 28601

828.328.6196 corinthtoday.org

Humility and openness create curiosity for our message.

Luke 10:1-12

October 31, 2010

Special Needs

Abigail Hardy is a member of our Board of Church Growth, soon to be renamed the Board of Evangelism. This past summer, several members of that board met weekly to pray and envision a deeper commitment to evangelism as a congregation.

Abigail and her husband, Greg, are certainly doing their part to help grow the church. They have one son, Lincoln, and twins on the way in December. I’m thinking whichever twin is born last is going to be our “Baby Jesus” at Christmas Eve.

Abigail, thanks for agreeing to share a little about how that discussion this summer touched your life.

What did you learn through that experience? (A: First, I feel that we all have hang-ups about evangelism, reasons why we don't do it. Maybe we think it is the pastor's job or we don't want to offend anyone or we think we don't know the answers. Someone might ask me why do good things happen to bad people and I won't know what to say! One of my hang-ups is that I cry really easily. But it is part of our calling as Christians to evangelize we have to be intentional about sharing our faith. It is not just going to happen on its own. It requires us to be active. In our meetings this summer we talked a lot about praying for God to open our eyes to the see the hurting and burdened people around us, just like Bill Parker sang this morning. They are all around us, in the pew next to us, our neighbors, co-workers. They need a touch from Jesus that we can give. Also, we learned that the more different people are from us, the harder it is to share our faith. With people of a different race or class or belief system it may be difficult to find ways to relate to them. That type of evangelism requires more work. But God will give you the ability and desire to evangelize if you pray for it.)

Is there anything in particular that you learned is particularly effective in sharing your faith? (A: I feel that the most effective thing for me to do, which I think would be true for a lot of us in here, is to share stories of how God has changed my heart at different times in the past. I am not talking about my "testimony" – how I accepted Christ in third grade and life was great, but more specific struggles that I have had. Maybe you have had an abortion or miscarriage or have had a deep hatred of someone in your life and God has healed and restored your heart through circumstances. Those are the types of stories that connect with people.)

So when you think about Corinth, what would be a great next step for us in spreading a heart for evangelism? (A: During our very first meeting this summer we had the opportunity to share some stories with each other about how God has worked in our lives and afterwards several people said that they had never shared those stories before and it was difficult. I feel that as a church, whether through existing Sunday Schools or study groups or through new small groups, we need to give people the opportunity to learn how to share their stories with others. Train them how to do it, give them opportunities to practice so that the nervousness and fear can go away. And it is not like everyone has just one story to tell. I can think of 5 or 6 different stories right now of how God has changed my heart that have to potential to connect with and touch another person.)

Today’s sermon is about Jesus’ ministry teams, especially his evangelism teams.

Principles for Teams

Everyone, at least once in life, needs to listen to a 15-point sermon. This is your lucky day. After today, you can check that off your “bucket list.”

It’s not my fault, really. Jesus is the one who gave all these instructions.

Before I review them, I want to test your listening and memory skills. In the Scripture passage that Pastor Bill read a few moments ago, Jesus divided 72 men into teams of two and sent them out with rather detailed instructions.

I found 15 principles for ministry teams in this text. How many of those can you name from memory?

Divide into groups of 2-4, and be sure to include at least one person who didn’t come to church with you. One of you get a pencil and piece of paper, and see how much you can recall of Jesus’ instructions without looking at the Bible.

1. Selectivity. “The Lord appointed seventy-two” (v. 1, NIV). Notice that Jesus didn’t ask for volunteers. He was at the height of his popularity, or maybe just past the peak. Everybody wasn’t invited for these particular teams. He chose people for this particular task.

2. Partnership. “He sent them ahead in pairs” (v. 1, NLT). We are a self-sufficient culture. “I can do it myself.” Jesus sent them in twos because when one fails or is down, the other can carry the load. Two also bring different skill sets.

3. Opportunity. “What a huge harvest! And how few the harvest hands” (v. 2, Message). This is our first indication that Jesus is expanding his ministry beyond Jewish territory. He wants his disciples to begin thinking globally. Here at Corinth, we will focus on cross-cultural missions in two weeks. Even in Hickory, though, the harvest is plentiful. There is much to be done.

4. Prayer. “Ask the Lord of the harvest to sent out workers” (v. 2, NIV). Prayer is all about dependence, but the specific prayer here is for more field hands. It’s not a prideful prayer of self-pity: “I can’t believe there are so few of us committed to Jesus.” It’s rather an awareness that only God can call more field hands to work.

5. Movement. “Go” (v. 3, NIV). As Abigail said, “It’s not going to happen without active work on our part.” We have to be intentional. To whom are you going?

6. Realism. “You’re like lambs in a wolf pack” (v. 3, Message). There are two problems with being lambs in a wolf pack. The first is danger. The second is being defenseless. What Jesus is saying is that you need to step into ministry with your eyes open. Nobody is promising an easy road and quick results. And it’s not up to you to defend yourselves.

7. Dependence. “Travel light. Comb and toothbrush and no extra luggage” (v. 4, Message). This translator takes some liberty here, but I like his freshness. Literally Jesus says not to take a money bag, a travel bag, or an extra pair of shoes. I think the point is to be totally dependent on God to meet your needs. You don’t have to figure everything out in advance.

8. Focus. “Do not greet anyone on the road” (v. 4, NIV). Here Jesus is not saying to be rude. I’m sure the southern, “Hey, how are y’all?” would be fine. But like most southerners, don’t wait for an answer. Typical mid-eastern greetings would be long exchanges of small talk. There is an urgency to completing Jesus’ mission.

9. Openness. “First say, ‘Peace to this house’” (v. 5, NIV). St. Augustine said, “Since we do not know who is a son of peace, it is our part to leave no one out, to set no one aside, but to desire that all to whom we preach this peace be saved.”

10. Value. “The worker deserves his wages” (v. 7, NIV). Sometimes we don’t give others an opportunity to partner with us or serve us. It’s a false humility. We may say, “No, you’ve already got enough on your plate.” We have to be willing to receive as well as give.

11. Relationship. “Don’t move from house to house, looking for the best cook in town” (v. 7, Message). Again, I like how Eugene Peterson paraphrases this in The Message. But don’t get distracted by it. The point really is about staying in one place long enough to go deep with relationships.

12. Contentment. “Eat what is set before you” (v. 8, NIV). When I went to Bible Camp forty years ago, we learned the “seven Bible manners.” I don’t remember the other six, but this was one of them. Probably it had something to do with teaching children to be content with institutional cooking. In Jesus’ case, these disciples were going into Gentile areas, and they weren’t supposed to let their scruples about food – even biblical scruples – get in the way of their primary mission. You can’t let secondary issues distract you.

13. Compassion. “Heal the sick” (v. 9, NIV). The ministry of the Gospel is always two-pronged, though not necessarily always distinct. We meet the needs of the body as well as the soul. Social concern as well as evangelism. Compassion, not just preaching. Deeds and words. You don’t start preaching when the listener is starving or sick. The message won’t get through anyway, and besides, you show you don’t really care about the person. Just love them.

14. Message. “The kingdom of God is near you now” (v. 9, NLT). But you do “preach.” You do use words. For years I’ve heard a quote ascribed to St. Francis of Assissi: “Preach the gospel; if necessary, use words.” I read recently that not only is that quote falsely ascribed to St. Francis; it’s probably not something he would have said. His whole ministry was evangelism. Point them to Jesus. More on that in a moment.

15. Confidence. “The only thing we got from you is the dirt on our feet, and we’re giving it back” (v. 11, Message). The concluding paragraph of the text we read is really not about fulfilling our inner need to tell somebody off if they reject us. It is about our own assurance that human rejection does not mean the message is faulty. We crave response to validate our sense of importance, or to assure us that the sacrifice is worth it. Jesus says our confidence has to come in the truth of his message. Their response is not our responsibility.

Made for God

Sharing your faith is not the job of preachers. Well, it’s not just the job of preachers.

I have been asking the Lord to open up new opportunities for me to connect with people who don’t believe or don’t have a church family or both. You see in your bulletin where I am participating a community conversation on homosexuality Thursday night at Lenoir Rhyne University. I suspect that at least some of the audience will be people who have been turned off by the church, and rightfully so.

Most of you know that I take a conservative position on sexual ethics. But this event is not going to be a debate. That’s exactly what the world does NOT need from the church – harsh, judgmental, finger-pointing from a preacher.

The world basically sees the church as a group of people who fight with each other and condemn everyone else. By contrast, humility and openness create curiosity about our message. I am praying for a conversation Thursday night that counters the assumption of some outside the church that we only want people who think like we do and act like we do to sit in our pews or chairs and worship together.

I ask you to pray for me.

I also ask you to pray, as Jesus said, for more field hands in God’s harvest. Evangelism is the task of every Christian. We too often hide behind our fear of being misunderstood or of saying the wrong thing or of being perceived as intolerant. Or we hide behind a misapplication of the concept of “spiritual gifts” and excuse ourselves because we don’t have the “gift of evangelism.”

There’s a broken and hurting world out there. It’s full of people who are looking for meaning in life in all the wrong places. Their search for meaning is reinforced by a culture that believes meaning is found in looking within to what your desires are, and then fulfilling those desires for sex or material things or pleasure. We are, collectively, on a road marked “The Pursuit of Happiness” that leads over a blind precipice.

As Dick Meyer points out in his book, Why We Hate Us, we Americans have more of what we think produces happiness than ever before, but we are less happy than we’ve ever been. That’s because we worked so hard and waited so long for what we thought we wanted, and there’s no disappointment greater than climbing to the top of a ladder that was leaning against the wrong wall.

We were made for God, pure and simple. The Bible is the record of God finding ways to tell us what he wants and of our collective turning away from him. Finally, God entered our world in the person of Jesus in order that the barrier between us and God and between us and one another might be reduced to rubble and we might find what we were truly made for – to love and be loved by God and to love and be loved by one another.

Here’s the response to today’s sermon. God is calling out new ministry teams at Corinth. During the month of November, we are asking every member and attender to find at least one way to partner with others in ministry – within the church and beyond. What will be your ministry?

It seems to me that we should have people clamoring to be part of the E-team, the Evangelism team. We need those who simply want to create a welcoming atmosphere on Sunday mornings. We need a prayer team for those who are hurting and aimless in our community. We have special events that we want to focus on evangelism and welcome. We need people with a heart to model and train others in sharing our stories of transformation by grace through faith.

We especially need, however, those who are called by God to “go.” I’m not talking about going to Guatemala or Moldova – we’ll be talking about those mission opportunities and partnerships in a couple of weeks.

We need to identify and partner with those whose hearts are deeply burdened for the brokenness in our community – so deeply burdened that their number one ministry priority is to seek and save those who are lost. Families that are falling apart. Children and spouses who are being abused. People suffering economically and blaming God. Those who are still climbing the wrong ladder, content with their pursuit of false gods. Those hell-bent on self-destruction who don’t even know it.

I’m praying the Lord of the harvest to call more field hands into a ripe harvest. I’m not asking if you’ve figured out “how.” Just if you feel his nudge to say, “Here am I. Send me.”

This will be one of many opportunities we will expose you to in the month of November. The “Evangelism Team.” We shouldn’t even have to ask. It’s the reason we exist. Amen.