The Motive of Our Mission

On Mission --Allen Snapp
 --Grace Community Church

July 14, 2013

The Motive of Our Mission: Love for the Lost

For the month of July we are in a series we’ve titled On Mission and it’s our desire to look at the mission that Jesus left his church, and particularly consider how that mission intersects with GCC and what the Lord has called us as a local church to do. Last week Matt went through our mission statement: loving God, growing together, serving others, going to the world, which is our way of summing up the Great Commission: making disciples who love God, are growing together, serving others and going into the world with the gospel. Disciples making disciples – we all need to be disciples, and we all need to be making disciples. That’s
So that’s the task, that’s what we’re supposed to be doing. This morning I want us to look at why we’re supposed to be doing what we’re supposed to be doing. What should motivate us to do the mission Jesus gave us? To discover that, let’s turn to what may be the most famous – and the most familiar - verse in the Bible.

John 3:16-21 

I can sum up the point of this message with one simple sentence: God loves the lost, and He calls us to love them too! That’s to be the motive of the mission. The thing that motivated God to send His Son to die on the cross was, according to John 3:16, love. Not just love for a few, not just love for those who would believe, but love for the entire world. God so loved the world. And that little word, so, gives us the measurement of God’s love for the world.

How much did God love the world? He so loved the world that He gave His only Son. Jesus gave his life for us on the cross at tremendous personal sacrifice, but the Father gave more, if possible. He gave His Son.

I am not eager to die – and I am especially not eager to die an extremely painful or terrifying death. While on vacation, Jared, Matthew and I got to watching a show on Animal Planet called Off the Hook, Extreme Catch where this guy, Eric Young, does fun stuff like diving 50 feet down holding his breath to catch an octopus and bite its brain out the way they do in Hawaii to prepare for a louou feast. In one episode we watched, he went on a free diving spear-fishing expedition in a river under ice. Before he dove, his guide assured him that there were many ways for him to die: getting disoriented and lost under the ice and not being able to find his way back to the surface, being crushed by ice floes, hypothermia, and so on. Sure enough, Young got lost under the ice, and almost ran out of air before finding the surface. I respect his courage, but honestly I can’t relate to him. I have zero interest in needlessly risking my life that way.

But as much as I am not eager to die, I would rather give my life for my kids than watch one of them die. That would be much harder. To willingly giving one of them up to die would be a far greater sacrifice than to die myself. That’s the sacrifice that God made, and made for us. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son – not only to die an excruciating death on a cross, but as Jesus hung there on the cross, the Father would pour out His hatred and disgust for the sin of the world on His Son – a crushing weight of wrath and rejection laid on the One the Father loves the most. That little word so measures a love beyond our comprehension, and far beyond our worth. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son.

If you aren’t a Christian, I can confidently tell you based on God’s word that God loves you with an immeasurable love. But that doesn’t mean that God can or will therefore save your soul no matter what you do or don’t do. This wonderful verse makes it clear that God gave His only Son so that whoever believes in him (Jesus) should not perish but have eternal life. It’s only by believing in Jesus that any of us can be saved. There’s no other way. Jesus goes on to say whoever does not believe in the Son is condemned already – and he warns that many will reject the love of God because they love the darkness, they want their sin more than they want God and salvation. No one ever born will be able to say, “God didn’t love me.” But Jesus himself said that many will hear Him say on that day, “Depart from me” and be shut out of the kingdom of God forever because they chose darkness over light. Please don’t be that person who loves the darkness more than the light – I pray you will give your heart to Jesus this very morning.

What motivated God to send Jesus was love. What motivated Jesus’ mission on this earth was love. And what is to motivate the church as we carry on the Lord’s mission on earth is to be love. In 2 Cor. 5:14 Paul writes the love of Christ compels us...God loves the lost, and He calls us to love them too.

I believe that in the life of any local church there are seasons that are ordained of the Lord. When I look back on the ten year history of GCC I can see different seasons that the Lord has brought us through. I believe that the Lord is bringing us into a new season – I don’t know all that that means, but I believe – and I pray – that part of it is a new season of fruitfulness. Of kingdom growth. Of our vision and our mission expanding.

And that’s why I think it’s so important that as we consider our mission, we take time to consider our motive. What God wants our motive to be. God is never just concerned about what we do, He’s always concerned about why we do it. He never just looks at the outside of a man, He always slices the heart open and examines what is at the center of that heart.

What motivates the heart.

Mission can be fueled by many different motives

1. Mission can be fueled by a desire for excitement and meaning. Messages on mission can aim to stir the emotions up and get people all pumped to “do something for God”. That’s not necessarily wrong, and we can all use to have our emotions stirred up to live for God – but emotional excitement isn’t to be the primary motive.

2. Mission can be fueled by pride – the desire to be known as a great evangelist or pastor or church or missionary. Large ministries can be tagged with the name of a man or a woman and become monuments to that person’s greatness. On smaller scales, we can look to our role in the kingdom expansion as some kind of validation of our personhood and worth. Wrong motivation.

3. Another form of pride in mission can be the obsession with being “relevant” – where churches focus on being hip and cool, cutting edge, non-conformist. It’s not necessarily wrong to want to connect with our culture in a relevant way – in fact it would be wrong not too – but when that becomes our focus instead of a means to achieving our focus it may well be more pride than love compelling us.

4. Mission can be fueled by a desire to leave a legacy. That can be a good thing, but again, it can easily become misguided – we’ll talk a little more about that in a minute.

5. Mission can be fueled by guilt – we can feel like we’re never “doing enough for God” and try to throw that burden off by doing more. Wrong motive.
GCC, may we ask the Lord to give us His heart of love for the lost, so that when God slices our hearts open, what motivates our mission as a church and as individuals is love. Why did Jesus leave heaven to come to earth on his mission to seek and save the lost? Why did the Father send him on such a costly mission? John 3:16 tells us very simply. God so loved the world that He gave His only Son...

I. The mission of the church calls for a love that can only be given by the Holy Spirit

The last series we were in reminded us of our ongoing and desperate need for the Holy Spirit, and when it comes to our mission that is especially true. We need power and boldness from the Spirit, but we also need the love of God poured into our hearts. Romans 5 begins with an amazing proclamation of the results of our justification through faith in Christ which includes peace with God and access into a grace that enables us to stand before God’s holiness and joy and hope and character and endurance and more hope – and then in verse 5 Paul writes that all this is possible because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. God’s love, poured into our hearts, through the Holy Spirit. We don’t have the love in and of ourselves, we need it to be poured into our hearts – and that is what the Spirit does!

Years ago I had the opportunity to travel to Guatemala on a missions trip, and one really hot day one of our Guatemalan friends told us that he could take us to some water where we could cool off and swim. So we threw on shorts and hiked down this really big, really steep mountain – sweating our heads off but looking forward to cooling down with a nice swim. But when we got to the bottom, the water was only literally about one inch high. There wasn’t enough water there to cool my big toe, much less jump into and cool down. We climbed back up the mountain almost as hot and sweaty as we came down.


When it comes to loving people the way God loves people, that’s my heart and that’s your heart. The love residing in our hearts apart from Christ is an inch deep. Not enough to refresh the troubled soul. Not enough to, as Jesus commands us to, love our enemies and do good to those who hate us. But there is a promise that we can take hold of by faith and live out of and do mission out of: God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.

So a good place to start is by asking God to pour His love into our hearts more and more (and displace our selfishness more and more) by the Holy Spirit who was given to us by faith in Christ.

II. The mission of the church calls for a love that gets close to a messy world

Mission motivated by love creates a kind of odd paradox in the church. We are called to be holy and in 2 Cor. 6 Paul states that God calls us to “come out of the world and be separate from them”, and so there is a way that holiness separates us from the world and yet there is a way that holiness engages in a meaningful and close way with the world. Paul in that same passage declares that God has given him (and us) the ministry of reconciliation – not the ministry of isolation. There are churches that pursue a kind of holiness that isolates them from the world in a way that hinders them from any kind of mission impact in the world. Holiness is seen as calling us to move far away from people in order to maintain that holiness.

In the 4th century there was a famous monk named Simon Stylite who, in his desire to get away from the crowds, climbed a pole and spent the last 40 years of his life living on top of a pole 60 feet above the crowds. A humorous postscript to his life was that 600 years later one of his ancestors who came to be known as Simeon the Simpleton decided to follow in his more famous ancestor’s footsteps and live atop a pole the rest of his life. The problem was that he had lousy balance and kept falling off. After six years on and off the pole (and having broken almost every bone in his body), Simeon the Simpleton decided to become a hermit instead and spent the remainder of his life in a cave becoming widely known for the amazing predictions he made, none of which ever came true.

In his quest for holiness Simeon followed the pole-sitting example of his ancestor but he badly missed the example of the Lord Jesus. Jesus lived among the crowds – getting close to the lost, the hurting, the wretched, the sinner. He became known as the friend of sinners by those who thought that holiness meant giving wide berth to anyone who could infect them with their sin. Jesus never partook of their sin, but he was moved with compassion by their need and lostness and he loved them deeply. That’s what we need to remember as we pursue holiness, not to be stained with sin but to be close to the sinner. To be close enough to get messy in the lives of those who, like us, desperately need a Savior.

Those who keep themselves to themselves, like hermits, and live a supposed sanctified life of self- absorption, are not likely to have any influence in the world, or to do good to their fellow-creatures. You must love the people, and mix with them, if you are to be of service to them. ~ CH Spurgeon

The mission of the church – and the example of our Lord – calls for a love that gets close to a messy world. From a distance, most of us can create the illusion that we’re “all together” – but when we get close to people, we find that sin is messy. Our brokenness is messy. Our need is messy. Our hearts are messy. Jesus came close to the mess – he touched messy lives and imparted healing and deliverance and hope and forgiveness all the while never having his purity contaminated.

If the Lord’s will is to enable us to purchase the building on W Water Street, it won’t be so that we can finally rest and just “do church” more comfortably. Our prayer is that the Lord will use that building as a tool to expand and deepen our capabilities as a local church to reach out to our community and reach out to the world. If for some reason the Lord were to shut that door to us, it wouldn’t – and it shouldn’t – shut down our mission as a local church. I’d be really disappointed, but we would trust the Lord to expand His kingdom through us in different ways.

Prop: God loves the lost and calls us to love the lost too. That’s to be the motive behind the mission!

III. The mission of the church calls for a love that lives to leave a legacy – but doesn’t try to measure that legacy 

This really could – and probably should – be an entire message, so maybe at some point we’ll come back to it. But I want to share briefly that Christ’s love in us should desire to leave a legacy – not just for time, but for eternity.

Jesus said we should store up our treasures in heaven, not on earth. What treasures can we take with us into eternity? I submit that one of the few treasures we can take is redeemed souls that we lead to Christ. Paul often speaks of that day when he will stand in the presence of the Lord with those he has led to Christ and discipled and they will be his joy and his confidence.

But our mission cannot always be accurately measured in moment. Sometimes we may think we are being greatly used by the Lord but it might be wood, hay and stubble and not last on the day of testing. And sometimes we may feel like our lives aren’t making any difference at all, but God may be using us to sow seeds that will reap harvests we never see this side of eternity. I’m really not sure that we can ever truly measure our legacy. But we can attempt to measure our love and ask God to help us to grow in love, trusting that what is done out of the love of Christ will have lasting effect. And because of the love of Christ, even what we do imperfectly and with mixed and sinful motives will be washed and sanctified to God’s eternal and perfect purposes and we will rejoice to see, not what our lives accomplished, but what God accomplished through our lives.

John 3:16 tells us that God loves the world, He loves the lost, so much He gave His Son. And as we press into the mission God has for us, let us also press into God’s heart in that mission. God loves the lost, and He calls us to love the lost too! That’s to be the motive fueling the mission. Let’s pray and ask God to make love the motive fueling our mission as a church, and as individuals serving Jesus.