The Church - Why Bother? Extending

Why should we bother with church? What good is it? How could an institution that has been around for almost 2000 years have any possible relevance for us today? Those are valid questions as we look at the role of the church in the 21st century.

In North America, a lot of people who identify themselves as Christians are staying away from the church. They’re staying away because they don’t think that church has anything to offer them. As far as they’re concerned, the church is hopelessly out of touch with their lives, their needs, and their problems. It’s just not relevant.

I believe that many churches in North America have lost relevance because they have lost sight of their mission. They really don’t know what they are supposed to be doing. They’ve lost the blueprints; they’ve forgotten the plan; they’re fuzzy about their purpose. So they’re not making an impact on our people or on our culture

A few weeks ago, we went back to the book of Acts to check the blueprints of the church. We went back to the drawing board. What did God have in mind when he invented this institution we call the church? What is it for? And we discovered, as we looked at Acts 2, that there are some very important things that the church is for…

→ The mission of the church is to equip people with the Word of God so that they can exalt Jesus Christ, encourage each other to grow in their relationship with Christ, and extend the Good News about Christ to people who don’t yet know him.

Now if you look at that mission, you’ll see that there are four key words…

• **→**Equip

• **→**Exalt

• **→**Encourage

• **→**Extend

We have been unpacking what those words mean over recent weeks…

1. **→**Equipping - teaching people the Word of God, because the Bible is our truth textbook. It’s where we find out what life is all about and how to live it. The Bible is authoritative and it is practical. It equips us for living. The church has been entrusted by God with the task of teaching the Bible.

3. **→**Exalting - is about people getting in right relationship with God; worshiping God; lifting Him up and giving praise to Him for who He is and what He’s done. Exalting is everything we do “upward” in the vertical plane—worshiping, praying, praising, giving thanks.

5. **→**Encouraging - is about our relationship with one another as followers of Christ. If exalting is vertical, encouraging is horizontal. The church is a community, and as a community, we need to be encouraging one another in our faith. We need to be relating to one another in practical, loving, caring ways. This is the ministry of fellowship.

7. **→**Extending - if the ministry of encouraging is about our relationship with those inside the church, the ministry of extending is about our relationship with those outside of the church—those people who live all around us who are not yet believers, not yet followers of Jesus Christ, not yet part of our community of faith. God has given us a responsibility to them—a responsibility to reach out to them and share the Good News of Jesus with them.

When you think about this four-part mission of the church, it’s like the four wheels of a car. The other day, I was driving along Dundas and I noticed a minivan going very, very slowly. The van was loaded with people and it was just crawling along. Then I noticed that one of the rear tires was almost flat—the wheel was practically riding on the rim—that’s why the van was going so slow.

And I thought: That’s a lot like our church. If we aren’t carrying out all four areas of our mission—if we don’t have all four wheels rolling properly—then we’re not going to make much headway. Doesn’t matter if three out of four tires are well inflated—if that fourth tire is flat, then our church isn’t going to go anywhere.

And the part of our church’s mission that we’re going to talk about today seems to be the one tire on the car that constantly needs air. It’s outreach—the ministry of extending. Whenever the church has fallen into ineffectiveness; whenever the church has lost its momentum as an organization—this has been the first thing to go.

A church can do a powerful job of teaching

A church can have wonderful worship services

A church can have great programs of fellowship.

But if it loses its vision for outreach; if it loses its passion for reaching people with the Good News of Jesus Christ, if it loses its excitement for seeing people come to Jesus Christ—then that church is going to die. It’s only a matter of time.

On the other hand, when you look at a healthy church, you’ll see that a passion for outreach infuses everything they do. When they teach, they’re thinking about how to make that teaching practical and relevant to newcomers. When they worship, they’re thinking about how to make worship “user friendly” to someone who may never have done it before. When they fellowship, they’re thinking about how they can invite more “outsiders” in to enjoy this wonderful interaction.

A healthy church is always looking out for new people; trying to find new ways to build bridges to people who don’t yet know Jesus Christ.

The ministry of extending is so important to a church because it enables us to capture the heartbeat of Jesus.

Recently one of our church people had an echo-cardiogram—an EKG. That’s a test that gives you a picture of what’s going on in your heart. There’s a passage in the NT that gives us a spiritual EKG of Jesus—a picture of what’s going on in his heart. It’s Luke 15. Turn there now. In Luke 15, Jesus tells three stories:

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• **→**a lost sheep (v. 4ff)

• **→**a lost coin (v. 8ff)

• **→**a lost son (v. 11ff)

Have you ever lost something valuable? Think about how that feels…

When we were on vacation in Florida last January, my brand-new daughter in law lost her purse. We were having dinner in a restaurant and then we decided to go see a movie. The movie was due to start fairly soon, so we left the restaurant in a hurry. In the rush of leaving, Vicky left her purse there. When we got to the theater, Vicky discovered to her dismay that she couldn’t find her purse. It had all her money, all her travel documents, her credit cards, and so forth.

We all looked frantically through the car, under the seats, but it was definitely gone. And there was a horrible feeling about that. It was valuable and it was lost—it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

So we jumped back into the car and drove at high speed all the way back to the restaurant, praying all the way that the purse would be there. And when we got there, we found to our immense relief that someone had picked up the purse and given it to the manager. What an incredible relief!

Losing something isn’t fun. But finding it again is wonderful. Jesus captures all those feelings in these three stories that he tells…

A shepherd has 100 sheep but he loses one of them. What does he do? Does he say “Well, I’ve still got 99 sheep. I’ll just forget about that one that’s lost.” No, he leaves the 99 sheep and he goes out looking for the lost sheep until he finds it. And when he finds it, he’s overjoyed. He gets all his friends and neighbors together and throws a party. He says “Rejoice with me, because I’ve found my lost sheep.”

Then there’s a woman who has ten silver coins and loses one of them. Now in a typical Palestinian house with a dirt floor and no windows, finding a lost coin could be a real problem! But the woman lights a little oil lamp, gets down on her knees with a whisk-broom and sweeps the floor carefully until she finds it. And when she finds it, she is so happy that she gets all her friends and neighbors together and they have a party.

Then there’s the father whose son runs away from home. The boy demands his inheritance—and in doing so, says “Dad, I wish you were dead.” and not only leaves town; he leaves the country with no forwarding address. The father doesn’t know where he is or how he’s doing.

The son burns through that money in no time, and finds himself starving, friendless, and destitute. He’d like to be eating what the pigs are eating.

So he decides to return to his father’s house. And in verse 20 it says:

So he got up and went to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.

The son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and against you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son.’

But the father said to his servants, ‘Quick! Bring the best robe and put it on him. Put a ring on his finger and sandals on his feet. Bring the fattened calf and kill it. Let’s have a feast and celebrate. For this son of mine was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’

Three stories about the heartache of losing something and the joy of finding it. You know why Jesus told those stories? Look back at verse 1. There were two groups of people listening to him: the tax collectors and “sinners”, and the Pharisees and teachers of the law. If you want to put it in modern terms: the unchurched people and the church folks.

The church folks didn’t have much use for the unchurched people. They didn’t think they should be there; they didn’t want them around. And they didn’t think that Jesus should be hanging out with them. They said “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.”

So Jesus told these stories to make the point that people—ALL people, even unchurched people, ESPECIALLY unchurched people—matter to God. They are valuable—so valuable that they are worth going out and searching for.

Because people without God are LOST. And that’s not a good place to be. The religious people were angry that Jesus was hanging out with sinners; they were angry that these sinners were hanging around them and tainting them with their uncleanness.

But what they should have been upset about was that these poor people were spiritually LOST.

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The first message of Luke 15 is that the condition of the world is: **→**LOST.

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And the second message is that the mission of the Saviour is to **→**FIND them.

In these parables, Jesus is the shepherd who goes out looking for the lost sheep. Jesus is the woman who gets down on her knees and sifts through the dirt for the lost coin. Jesus is the father who gets up every day and looks longingly down the road to the horizon, waiting and praying for his lost son to show up.

Did you notice that there’s a party in each of these stories? When the lost sheep gets found, the shepherd throws a party. When the woman finds her lost coin, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says “Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.” When the lost son comes home, the father throws a big party.

And Jesus says: “You know, there’s a party in heaven every time a lost sinner gets found. God throws a party.” That’s how much we matter to God.

In Luke 19, Jesus goes to dinner at the house of a tax collector named Zacchaeus. Now tax collectors were utterly despised in those days. They had sold their souls to the Roman government. They were regarded as traitors, and corrupt swindlers. As usual the religious people were griping and grumbling about how Jesus kept hanging around with sinners. They were absolutely scandalized that he would even enter this tax collector’s house.

But Jesus says in verse 10 “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.”

The world’s condition is LOST. The Savior’s mission is to seek and to save—in other words, to FIND them. Because lost people are worth finding; they are infinitely precious. Lost people matter to God.

John 3:16 For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…

And because God loves lost people, he wants us to love them too. Jesus said in John 20:21… “Just as the Father has sent me into the world, I am sending you.”

Caring about lost people is what we’re supposed to be doing. It’s the very heartbeat of Jesus.

At the end of his ministry, Jesus gave his disciples this final command: He said “Go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” This is what we call the **→**Great Commission of the church—it is the command to **→**MAKE DISCIPLES.

And we do this as we go into the world. (The Go part isn’t a command; it’s a participle—it means “as you go” or “in going”. It’s simply understood that we are going to go into this lost world; we are going to build relationships with lost people.)

But you would be surprised at how many of us never do! We never get around to actually going into this lost world. We never take the time to actually get to know and become friends with lost people.

When Jesus was here on earth, they hung a label on him. They called him the “Friend of Sinners”. I wonder, as I look into the mirror, if anyone could call me that? I wonder if there are any lost people out there who could say “Yeah, I know Peter McKnight. He’s a friend of mine. He’s a good guy; he cares about me.”

How about you?

I fear that I have devoted more of my life to being a “Friend of Christians”, than to being a “Friend of Sinners”. If lost people matter to God, does it matter that I have few or no truly significant friendships with lost people? If lost people matter to God, does it matter to Him that I spend almost all of my time with “found” people?

What am I doing with my life?

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Someone has said that life is a terminal disease that we catch at conception. And every day we live brings us one step closer to our final destination. And what we are doing right now—what we are giving ourselves to; what we are spending our time on—is literally what we are dying for.

When I look at my Savior, I see that he was willing to die for lost people. That’s how he got to be my Savior; that’s how he got to be my Friend. Because I was lost. But he cared enough about me—I mattered enough to him—that he came looking for me. And he found me.

That’s the ministry of extending: it’s caring about lost people. And if our church doesn’t do that—if that isn’t our core value; if that isn’t written into our genetic code as a community of faith—then it doesn’t much matter what else we do.