Missions: Our Story

Psalm 67

Turn in your Bibles there to Psalm 67. There are no blue sheets, so don’t freak out on me. There is a reason there are no blue sheets. It is this…I really want you to interact with this Psalm. I’m going to tell you a couple of stories that I really want you to sink your mind and thoughts into. That’s where I’m going. So if you’re wondering, What am I supposed to do in the next 30 minutes or so? I want you to really marinate in this passage, and I want you to listen to… I’m just going to tell you a really simple story. It’s this church’s story.

We could open our Bibles to numbers of passages that have this message. It is the message about missions. We could have opened our Bibles to Acts 1. We could have opened our Bibles to any place out in the closing chapters of the gospels. We could have opened our Bibles to Genesis, chapter 12. There are just hundreds of passages we could look at, but let’s look at this one for a few minutes.

Verse 1, “May God be gracious to us and bless us, and make His face shine upon us.” Does anybody think that would be their own prayer this morning? God, bless us. God, bless us. I did a concordance study. This is the only place I’ve seen in the Bible where it actually says, “Bless us.” Now you find that word blessing and God has promised blessing all over the pages of Scripture. God is in the blessing business. God loves to bless His people. You find it in the Sermon on the Mount. In Genesis, you find it all over the place. One of the first things that God does to Adam and Eve is He blesses them. He blesses Abraham, and there are all kinds of blessings through the Scriptures. Psalm 1 talks about how to be blessed. God desires to bless us even more than we want to be blessed.

Bless us. Be gracious to us. That word gracious is literally have mercy. Have mercy…show Your mercy on us. Anybody here not need mercy? No, we all need mercy deeply. Make Your face to shine upon us. It’s a metaphor, and if you grew up with a father, you know the two differences. My dad could give you a look that wasn’t nice. He could just cut his eyes at you and it would like freeze water. Any of you have dads like that? I mean it’s like they taught them this at the hospital when you’re taking them home. Here, here is the look. There is the other look that says, “I’m proud of you.” It’s a joyous look. It’s just…man. What you won’t do for that smile, that pleasure. Lord, may You find pleasure in us and look upon us with pleasure.

Now look at verse 2. He says, “That Your way may be known on all the earth.” There is a reason they call out for blessing. This is the psalm that was sung at Pentecost. If you take notes and it’s your Bible and not ours, write it the margin over there, “Leviticus, chapter 23.” Or, if it’s ours and it’s not in there, you ought to just go ahead and put it in there anyway. It’s a good cross reference. It’s the feast that is synonymous with Pentecost in Acts, chapter 2, when the church was birthed and people from all nations first started hearing the gospel. Your way, God’s heart has always been for the world. “That Your way may be known on all the earth.” Not Jerusalem, not Judea, not just right around here geographically, but unto the uttermost parts of the earth.

Sometimes people say to me, “Why in the world should we be involved overseas when there are so many needs right across the street?” You know what? I have to agree. There are more needs right in our community than we could possibly meet. Amen? What you find in the Scriptures, He says, “It is not one or the other. It’s not one compartment, but you shall be witnesses unto Me both (that’s an important word) in Jerusalem, Judea, and the uttermost parts of the earth.”

I hear people say sometimes, “Well, my thing is overseas, and I’m not really into the local stuff.” Then you’re disobedient. You’re disobedient. Or somebody says, “Well, I’m just concerned with what is happening in my own community. I’m not concerned with overseas stuff, or all those things that I don’t understand.” Well, you’re disobedient. We are to be engaged in both of those things because this is what we’re commanded that God’s heart has always been for the world…Your saving power to the nations.

There are three different words for peoples and nations here. Just so you get the whole list of it the word that is used there for peoples means literally everything that is not Israel…everything that is not Israel. He says, “Not just for those who are of the children of Abraham, but for everybody else.” There is the word here used for governments, and there is the word here used for clans and races. He says, “Your saving power…” That word saving…this is worth your time right here also. The word is Yahshua; it is Joshua. If it were translated exactly into the English, it’s Jesus’ power.

He says, “This is what we’re praying for is that this saving, deliverance power would be among the nations.” Three times, notice in verse 3, 4, and 5 the same prayer is uttered, “Let the peoples praise You.” Then again, in verse 3, “Let all the peoples praise You. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy.” That word that is used, by the way, up in verse 3, the word praise literally means to shoot the hand out. It’s the whole idea of raising your hand in exuberant, jubilant praise for God. That’s the way we should praise Him, and that’s the way we should hunger for others to have that experience.

“Let the people praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You. Let the nations be glad and sing for joy for you judge the people with equity. You guide the nations upon the earth. Let the peoples praise You, O God; let all the peoples praise You. The earth has yielded its increase, and God, our God, shall bless us. God shall bless. Let all the ends of the earth fear Him.”

If you’ve been around Grace for the last 10 years or so, you know that we believe in missions. Amen? It’s our heart. We talk about nations, neighborhoods and the next generation. Those aren’t slogans for us. This is what we think about. We have several hundred kids in the high school department on retreat this weekend at 30 below, and we pour into this and strategically think through and exercise our resources. On a Sunday morning here, half of the people who attend here are high school and under. I love that. That’s a demographic we just seek out and seriously engage.

We try to equip you to reach and be engaged in your neighborhoods because this is what God has called us to do. But Grace hasn’t really always been a missions church. If you were here 15 years ago, or so, in 1983 when we started the church, if you had said, “Do you guys believe in missions?” We would have said, “Yes.” Do you know what our attitude was about it? It was kind of like paying the bills, you know.

Have you ever given money and you didn’t really want to give it, but you knew you had to because you didn’t want to be in trouble? Maybe some of you did that this morning. We take the offering afterward, but you might have written a check this morning and didn’t really care, but you thought, Well, God I need Your blessings. I want the windows of heaven to be open. I don’t want to be cursed. Here you go, God. Hope that makes You happy.

You know, I hate to admit it, but that’s pretty much how we were about missions. It’s like you know if you don’t want them to cut the water off, you pay the water bill. If you don’t want them to cut the power off, you pay the power bill. You want them to pick up your trash, you pay the trash bill. You don’t want to get in trouble with God, you pay the missionaries. I grew up believing that, and when we started the church we put ten percent, and now we do fifteen percent and actually much more than that into missions, but you know what? It really wasn’t something that clicked as part of our passion.

Some people, actually some missionaries, came to Grace. Their names were the Andersons and the Carnills. They didn’t come in and say, “Oh, you guys are such a wicked bunch of people.” They looked at us and they said, “These are good people, but they don’t get missions.” So they kind of did a reverse missionary thing on us. They kind of treated us as a mission field. They knew that my heart didn’t break for that.

So we had a missions committee that kept trying to get us to go to strange places. I would say, “No, I don’t want to do that. I have work to do.” Missionaries would call and say, “How about coming to visit on the field?” I’d say, “Listen, I don’t ask you to do my work. I don’t ask you to come up here and clean the building. I don’t ask you to come up here. I don’t even want you to preach because you’re boring.” They would get up and do the same old slide…here are the wheat fields and the sun is setting into the harvest fields…are white in the harvest. Okay, got that. Show you the snakeskin, you know. Do you think I want to go see snakes? No, we have snakes ourselves.

The Carnills kind of…they would try and say, “How about going to this?” I would say, “No.” So they schemed, actually. They connived, and they said, “How about going on a mission trip to Jamaica in the winter?” “Yeah, I could do that. Now you’re talking my language. I can do this…Montego Bay. Yeah, I know that song.” Now what they didn’t tell us…and apologies to anybody from Jamaica. I think it’s a paradise, but it’s also incredibly impoverished, and has suffered a lot under some bad government.

Dawn’s dad, Dave Anderson and Mary were just… Jody and I would say to each other, “Man, when we get David and Mary’s age, those are the kinds of people we want to be.” I just had so much respect for David and Mary. And David said, “How about going with me to El Salvador?” I didn’t really want to go. I just did it because Dave told me to because I loved David so much and respected him so much.

He took me to San Salvador, and they had come out of a 10-year Civil War. Just outside of San Salvador there were about 10,000 people living in a dump…off of the dump, in the dump, eating garbage out of the dump. I remember walking into that place and the smell of it and the feel of it. It was like God reached in and grabbed my heart and just crushed it. I never got over it.

We have done a lot of mission stuff over the years. What I want to talk to you about this morning, and some of you have been on this journey with us for a while is this journey involving Islamic ministry and Muslim missions. It started where a lot of us started…9/11. It was an absolutely spectacular Tuesday morning. We were in a staff meeting, and you might notice we have no rooms for offices here. The only time we all get together as a staff is Tuesday. We just shut everybody out. We shut our phones off. I don’t answer my phone unless it’s an emergency that I’ve seen or one of my family members. They know how we treat Tuesdays, so it’s like calling me on a Sunday. We just focus in. We try to get our work done.

I got a phone call from my son, Gabe. Gabe said, “Dad, I think you want to go turn on the TV.” I said, “I don’t think so. I’m in staff meeting, son.” He said, “A plane just hit the World Trade Tower.” Now you know my memory of a tour I was on in New York kicked in, and I said, “Hey, you know there was a plane that hit the Empire State Building one time. They’ll be fine. They’ll figure it out.” I hate that I felt that calloused, but that was pretty much my reaction. I can’t do anything about it.

He said, “Dad, I don’t think this is like that at all. I think this is something really, really bad.” So I said, “Hey, let’s go get a TV.” We turned it on, and that was when the planes had just hit the towers. They hadn’t collapsed yet. I remember just seeing these images that just shook us to the core, and then they started showing the images of the Pentagon and showing the trajectory of the Pentagon. Then the Towers collapsed. Everything was just swirling around for us.

We have some good friends who are in the Pentagon. Jody and Mike and Pam and I had been up there really just weeks before that. We had visited them. I remember standing there with Mike looking out over the landscape from that side of the building. It was just over the helipad. As a matter of fact, when we were in there, I don’t think our friend still knows this, but we sat in his chair and played general.

As I was looking at that, I was realizing that this hit his side of the building and even went into that suite where he was. So I picked up my phone and tried to call him and could not get him. Then I called his wife, and she answered. I didn’t really know what to say because I didn’t really know how much she knew. I said, “Hey, you guys good?” Her voice was kind of thin, but she said, “Yeah, we’re fine, and he’s okay. Most of his staff is not.” These are the words that stuck in my brain. She said, “Have you noticed the video coming out of there? They’ve all changed clothes. They have on their battle fatigues.” She said, “We’re at war.” Those words just kept ringing…we’re at war.

It wasn’t the voice of panic or anger or revenge. It was the voice of somebody who had lived decades in the military world and knew what war looked like and how much it cost. Later on, I talked to our friend, and I said, “What I was hearing over the television, ‘Oh these cowardly deeds…these cowardly people.’” He said, “Buddy, they’re not cowards. They’re brave. They’re willing to die for what they believe. If we don’t understand this, we’ll never deal with it. It’s possible they even believe what they believe more than we believe what we believe.”

Now you know, we just didn’t know what to do, but our DNA missionally is if you don’t know what do to, doing something is better than doing nothing. You know, we prayed together as an elder board. We prayed together as the church. Hundreds, thousands of people came in here. Some of you sitting right here…your first doorway to faith was one of those prayer meetings. We decided we needed to go to New York, and we decided we needed to do something about Muslims, and we didn’t know what.

We called some people in New York and some churches in New York, and we decided just to take team up and pray. Didn’t know what…we’ll just go up and pray with the relatives and we’ll pray with the policemen. We’ll walk around the town and pray with New Yorkers. So that Sunday after I got through preaching I was standing out there and I was about to leave, and Denise Cox came over and she handed me this envelop full of little cards. I started flipping through them and she said, “I had the kids this morning write cards to the firefighters.”

I got on the plane that afternoon and was sitting there on the plane. I was looking through these cards. Actually, when I was preparing this message I prayed. I said, “Lord, I’d love to have my hands on some of those cards because the scrawls of those children…” Have you ever noticed the crayons? It’s like the medium is the message. Brian Krawczyk called me, and he said…because he inherited my old, little sort of desk…and he said, “I found some magazines in your desk, and I was flipping through them.” This is a magazine. It just says, “A Day That Changed the World,” in Time Magazine. He said, “Stuck in there were some of these cards.” So some of these, somehow, did not get delivered properly, but I do want you to see them.

Here is what happened. I was sitting there and this lady was looking over my shoulder, and she was looking at the cards. She started crying. She said, “Can I see that?” I handed her a couple of them, and her boyfriend was behind her. He leaned over and started reading them. He said, “Can I see this?” Pretty soon, they’re passed all over the plane, and people are crying. The attendant came back and said, “What’s going on here?” Then she started crying and she took them up to the captain. He came back and said, “I think we all need prayer.” I just lead prayer in this plane.

It was a weird time in New York. You could just show up and put up a little card table with a sign on it that said, “Prayer Station.” People would line up 50 deep. Can you see that? This is just one of the little cards. It has the Trade Towers and a flag. See that? On the inside it just says, “The red white and blue…the stars and stripes will stand forever. God bless America.”

“Dear worker, thank you for all the work.”

“America thanks you.” I’m not sure what that is. I’m not showing it in the next service.

This is, “Hello workers…we appreciate your work. My mom’s cousin is still in there. We think he’s dead by now, but keep looking. We’re praying for you.”

This is one that shows…I think this is a super hero New York City. “You’re my hero. Thanks for being so courageous and being brave. I would be sort of scared, but you stuck to it. You’re our heroes.”

“Dear Firefighters, Polices, Workers and Others, thank you so much. You risk your life to save other lives. I know I could have never done that.”

Anyway, I took these cards and I went down to Houston Street, Port Authority…didn’t really know what to do with them. I put them down there and I walked in an office and I said, “You know, I don’t know what to do with these, but there are some Sunday school kids in Snellville who are praying for you.” I walked out, and as I was walking out this police officer said, “Wait a minute.” He said, “Our guys need this right now.” He looked at this guy and he said, “Take him down to the morgue.”

He put me in the back of this police car and we rode down through the hazmat lines and the security lines and the police and everybody else. The firefighters were still in charge of the scene at that time, and they had rebuilt a little fire station out of plywood that was there…not a big one. He just pulled right up and he said, “Call me. Call me when you get done. I’ll take you to a hotel.”

I really didn’t know what to do. I took those cards. I walked into this little shack and there was a desk there that was built out of plywood too, and this chief of the fire department was sitting there looking through the schematics…completely absorbed. Over on this side over here was another table built out of plywood. There was a whole stack of American flags over there that they were using to wrap bodies in…dead body parts. When they would find one, everything would come to a standstill. Everything would stop and they would salute and play the national anthem.

I walked in and I said, “Sergeant So-and-So told me to come over here, and I have these cards.” He said, “Sure.” Never looked up. Didn’t know what to do. There was some duct tape over there, and I walked over and I took that duct tape and I started taping those cards all over this room like Christmas cards. This fire chief said, “What are you doing?” Those weren’t his exact words, but it was like that. I said, “I’m a pastor and there are some Sunday school kids this morning who wrote these out, and I just thought they would encourage you.”

He walked over and he looked at one on the wall there, and he started crying. He put hand against the wall like this and he said, “This is what this is about, isn’t it?” I said, “I think so.” He said, “It’s about what kind of world we’re going to give our children.” What kind of world are we going to give our children? He said, “There is a guy out there you ought to pray for.”

There was a guy out there and they told me that he hadn’t left the scene because he was the only one left out of his ladder crew alive. The reason he was alive is because a jumper had fallen on his partner, and he went to carry his partner off, and the buildings collapsed. He couldn’t stand the thought of looking those partners’ wives in the face and their children until he was sure nobody was left.

I went out there and sat…it was really weird…in a lawn chair. There were like five of them out there…just those regular, old lawn chairs. We sat in these lawn chairs, and I said, “Man, what can I pray with you about?” We talked for a long time.

Do you ever have those moments of just absolute clarity, like everything just comes incredibly into sharp focus? About 3:30 that morning, I’m looking into this molten mess and these words are ringing in my ears, “We’re at war and these are brave people. If we don’t realize what motivates them this will never be solved.” It came so clearly to me. Listen to what I’m about to say. Bullets, bombs and blood will never solve this. It won’t. This is not a critique on the military. It’s not to say that military doesn’t have a role, but ultimately people who are not afraid of bullets, bombs, and blood…those things are not going to deter them.

Do you know how else I know that? Have I told you I’m a southerner? What do you think would happen tomorrow if we woke up, and there was a superior military power to the United States and they had blown up Washington and burned down every church in the United States? Do you think it would be over? Heck no. It would just be starting. Do you know why? Because I have a truck. I have a Harley, and I have guns. Did you notice that’s plural? Have you ever heard that song…Country Boys Can Survive? We can. It wouldn’t be over.

I have a son who studied chemo-something, I never did figure out, at Tech. I know he can build bombs. I know some of you people, and we’d be down at the Waffle House figuring out who to kill next. Some of you women are just every bit as bad. Do you understand my point? If this is going to be solved, it’s going to have to change people’s hearts.

Do you know my granddaddy’s granddaddy fought in the Civil War on the side of the South? Now you know what? I’m a proud Southerner, but I am not proud of slavery. I am not. It embarrasses me. I have been watching this inauguration coming up and regardless of your political viewpoint; this is a good day for America. I don’t even care if you like it, so don’t even tell me if you don’t. It’s a good day for America.

I was with Don Balfour in Washington a while back and he was giving me this little tour. He’s our senator. We were over at the Lincoln Memorial, and he had the opportunity of taking Mrs. King to Washington for a speech. They were driving by, and he said to her, “What do you think when you see that? Do you remember that day he made that speech?” She said, “Of course I remember, but do you know what? At the time, it was just another day. I’d heard him make that speech over and over again…had no idea how it was going to resonate around the world.”

Now here is what I want you to understand. It wasn’t guns, ultimately, that changed the southern heart. We might have lost, but if our hearts are changed, it’s because we know God. We know God. We know God differently than our parents did.

Do you know what I did? I went back to the back of that little shack, and I got down on my knees, and I said this prayer, “Lord, I don’t know if You could use a local church as part of the solution in Snellville, Georgia, but if You can, we’re in. I don’t know what that looks like, but we’re in.” Now do you know what I actually thought? I thought God would pat me on the head and say, “Buddy, this is way over your pay grade. You’re not even good at English. You can’t solve this. This is billions and millions of people. It is cross-cultural. It is complicated beyond imagination.”

Do you know what? We started off on this journey, and we said, “Do you know what? Let’s learn what we can.” At the time, I did not realize there were 28 mosques in Atlanta. Did you know that? The largest mosque in the southeast is right downtown. That’s why we went down there to start that church. That’s why we’re downtown. I don’t know if you realize this, but just a few miles from where we sit right now, two of those suicide hijackers, those suicide murderers, took flight practice at Briscoe Field…lived in our neighborhoods.

That journey took us a lot of places. We went through what I call sort of… We went to London and studied apologetics, and polemics and figured out how to tell them they were wrong. When they wouldn’t listen, we just said it louder. I kind of call it our Jerry Springer stage, you know. Just scream louder. Maybe that will work, you know. We took that show on the road to Lebanon and Jordan and Iraq. Mike and I were arrested in Iraq. That’s a whole other story. Put on trial, and that’s a whole other story, and if you listen to Mike’s version it sounds different than mine. In my version, it was Mike’s fault. In his version, it’s my fault.

Do you know what? God led us to a strategy that wasn’t an attack-and-extract mode. It was…let’s just talk about Jesus because you know, let me ask you something. How many of you grew up Baptist? A bunch of you. How many of you believe Baptists need to be evangelized. Yes! Absolutely! Now how many grew up Methodist? Do you know what Methodists need? They need Jesus, just like the Baptists. Amen? Now, how many grew up Catholic? Now, do Catholics need Jesus? Yes, they need Jesus!

Now, if you’re Catholic, please just kind of stick your fingers in your ears for just a minute. Do you know what? When I was a kid, and we were Baptists we were told the way to win Catholics to Jesus is convince them that the Pope was the antichrist. That doesn’t go very far, whether you think he is or not, it doesn’t matter. Get into an argument over the Apocrypha, which will help. Do you know what Catholics need? What do Catholics need? Same thing Baptists need. Same thing the Methodists need. Same thing the Pentecostals need. Same thing atheists need. They need Jesus. That’s what they need.

So we just kind of decided we’re going to change the subject and talk about Jesus. It’s a miracle what happens when you change the subject. Have you ever done that with your wife? It might not solve the problem immediately, but at least…anyway.

There are a lot of other things I want to say, but here is what I want to invite you to. I want to invite you to involvement. Here is what you can do. I actually had my list of what you can do. This is just like my office. If you can’t find it, look on the floor. The first thing you can do is pray. You can pray. The second thing you can do is be informed. Intercede, be informed.

We have a study called Jesus in the Qur’an that we’re improving constantly. We’ve trained about 500 people. You can lead your Muslim friends to Jesus, but you need to know what to say. You need to know how to go about it. I could tell you stories all morning long. I don’t have time. You’ll hear more about this. Be informed. Thursday night, Friday night, maybe Saturday night, the focus…Jamie Winship is speaking who is the first guy we ever really heard explain how to do this…rocked my world to the core. The guy who actually discipled him will be speaking next Sunday. There are lots of things going on. Get informed. Get involved…get involved.

Invest wisely. Do you know how many people are Jesus followers, and I’m talking about born again Christians, not just named Christians or whatever, but Jesus followers…do you know how many Jesus followers there are by the best estimates in the whole country of Jordan? How many do you think? The whole country of Jordan…4,500…it’s a generous number. That’s fewer people than attended Grace last week. There were 5,000 people at Grace last week. In the whole country of Jordan…

Do you know how many Jesus followers there are in the whole country of Lebanon? Thirty-five hundred. In Southern Lebanon, it’s about 100. Do you know how many Jesus followers there are in Turkey? About 6,500. There are 78 million people in Turkey alone…78 million people. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen…you just start naming all these countries.

These people have no opportunity, but let me tell you something, their cousins are living right among us. Some of you work with them. You have no idea what to say or how to reach them. Get engaged. Learn how to do that. Here is what I would encourage you to do. Consider maybe you’d be bold enough this morning to pray that prayer I prayed in that dirt behind that plywood shack on 9/11, “Lord, if You can use me, I’m in.” But let me tell you something. If you don’t mean that, don’t pray it.

Let’s pray: Lord, thank You for You. Lord, I thank You for being part of a church like Grace. Lord, I pray for those hundreds of missionaries and workers who are going to be here next week. I pray for the leadership of Common Ground. I pray for those who are going to be sharing, those who are going to be teaching, and those who are going to be just hanging out and talking to these folks. Lord, we pray for their health and we pray for their attention, and we pray for You to open minds. Lord, we pray that if You could use Grace Fellowship to reach the nations, Lord, You’ve blessed us. Lord, use us to bless others. In Your name we pray, Amen.