Bold as Love

This Sunday we welcome Dr. Bob Roberts, Jr. to Grace. He is the founding Pastor of NorthWood Church near Dallas, TX. NorthWood has started over 173 churches in the US and is a center for training new pastors.

Bob has worked extensively in Vietnam, Afghanistan, West Bank and Gaza, Indonesia, Syria, Belize and other countries. He is the author of several books including his most recent effort, Bold as Love – What can happen when we see people the way God does. He will be preaching Bold as Love content from Colossians 4:2-6.

Bob is a graduate of Baylor University (BA), Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (M.Div), and Fuller Seminary (D.Min). Bob is married to Niki, his wife of 30+ years, and they have two children, Ben and Jill.

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Grace Fellowship Church
Bob Roberts
June 2, 2013

Bold as Love
Colossians 4:2-6

It’s good to be here with you this morning. I love your pastor, Buddy Hoffman. I think a tremendous amount of him. I’m from Texas and I talk really fast, lady. I hope you can move those hands really quickly. You’re going to look like a charismatic something or other over there, confusing all those people. I’m kind of ADD, so I can’t look over that direction. I’m not going to be looking at y’all this morning. No offense. I’ll start watching that lady. Some of you are probably watching her anyhow. She’s saying bad things about you right now. I’m teasing.

It’s good to be with you. I’ve known your pastor for many years. We have a similar heart. We love the world. We have planted 175 churches, but we didn’t plant them for the lost people all over the US. That’s where they are. We plant churches for the world. We require every new church we plant to pick a hard spot in the world and mobilize their members to go back and forth.

Your church understands contextualization. You understand the gospel and how to communicate the good news of Jesus Christ in such a way that people can understand it. I saw that yesterday. How you talk to Muslims is incredibly critical. Here’s the great tragedy, though. We live in the twenty-first century, and we’re doing missions and even ministry as if it’s the seventeenth century. It really doesn’t matter if you get your verbiage right if we don’t release the whole body of Christ.
The reality is if we’re waiting for missionaries to fulfill the Great Commission, it’s never going to happen. There will never be enough missionaries, pastors, and vocational ministries to fulfill the Great Commission, but there are two billion people who call themselves followers of Jesus, and if we learn to release the entire body of Christ, the Great Commission will be fulfilled. We have to shift our thinking about how the Great Commission is going to be fulfilled. You’ve shifted your verbiage; shift your process.

There are very few churches like your church in America. As a matter of fact, you can probably count them on one hand. I’ll be very candid with you. I’m all over the world speaking, frankly, at secular events with different state departments around the world because of what we did in Vietnam. I’m here for one reason: your pastor. I’m invited to speak to churches all the time. I just can’t. I’m a pastor. I’m gone a third of the time, so when I’m home I have to be at my church. I’m here with you because you have the potential of being one of those churches that’s going to turn the world upside down.

Acts 17:6 says, “These men who have turned the world upside down have come here also.” (Acts 17:6) Do you want to turn the world upside down for Jesus? Do you believe it’s possible? Did you know other generations have merely dreamed of the fulfillment of the Great Commission? If the church were to get serious about the Great Commission, it could easily be done in five to seven years. “Now Bob, why would you say something like that?”

Because technology, communication, travel, like no other time in the history of humanity, have allowed us to connect. Yet we’re using old language, old systems, old processes. It’s as if we’ve been given cars and we’re riding horses. I want to challenge you to get in your car, take off the brake, and floor the sucker. That’s what I want to challenge you with today. I want you to take your Bibles, and I want you to turn with me to Colossians 4. Buddy told me he preaches about an hour, so I’m going to give y’all a break today and do it in about 20 minutes. Are you ready?

“Continue steadfastly in prayer, being watchful in it with thanksgiving. At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ, on account of which I am in prison––that I may make it clear, which is how I ought to speak. Walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the best use of the time. Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.” (Colossians 4:2-6)

I want to draw your attention to three or four things in this verse. I’m going to tell you a story for the majority of my message, and I’m going to give you nine principles to apply at the end. If you notice about this passage… It’s very interesting, because we always talk about how we ought to pray for lost people. How many of you have a list of people you’re praying for to come to faith in Christ? Could I see your hands? All right. Amen. I figured you would.

Do you know what’s interesting about this? This is prayer not for lost people, but it’s prayer for people who know Jesus to challenge others who need to know him. Isn’t that interesting? In other words, it’s prayer for us. The prayer we need to pray for people to come to faith in Christ really doesn’t start with praying for lost people; it starts with praying for us to recognize the doors God is opening, to recognize the opportunities God is bringing our way. The prayer starts with us.

Then notice he says, “That God may open a door of opportunity.” The greatest things we’re involved in as a church are not those things we planned and processed out. They’re the things God sovereignly… What looked humanly like accidents and unexpected things came together in order for doors to be opened.

Then he says, “That I may know how to speak toward outsiders so they’ll get the message, so they’ll understand, that I may walk in wisdom.” It’s not just speaking, but how do I talk? How do I walk? How do I act? How do I live, where my life and everything I am is able to communicate the gospel?

I grew up as a little boy wanting to be a missionary. As a matter of fact, I would not marry my wife until she heard God call her to be a missionary. I told her that. She was wondering, “Why won’t you ask me to marry you?” I said, “I’m waiting for God to call you to be a missionary.” It was amazing. That night God called her. So I asked her to marry me. We got married. The first thing we did when we got out of seminary was apply to be vocational missionaries, but we were rejected.

When she was 5 years old, they brought a newborn baby home from the hospital. They were out for a Sunday afternoon drive. A drunk hit them head-on, killed her mother, killed the little baby, and messed her head up. They said if she made it she would be severely retarded. She wound up being valedictorian of her high school, magna cum laude at Baylor University, and had scholarships to be a medical doctor but felt called to work with inner-city kids who were first-generation Americans who were coming into the country.

She was magna not summa because when she was 8 she was in another car wreck. This car wreck killed her other sister and crushed her hips and her body in such a way that she would have to have all of these surgeries the rest of her life. But she didn’t…until about six weeks ago when she had her hip replaced. I had my hip replaced a year ago, but that’s okay. That was just from all the wild sex. So it wasn’t a bad thing that happened; that was a wonderful thing. We’re both kind of gimping along and haven’t quite got right back in the rhythm, but we will. We will.

Being turned down three times to be missionaries really upset us. It broke our hearts. “What’s wrong with us? Why can’t we do it?” They didn’t want to have to pay for all of the surgeries they said we would have to have. I settled on starting a church. So I started a church. I go to this church, and we start it. I started it because I’d been on a huge church staff. This was before there were many megachurches, about 30 years ago.

I assumed everybody at a megachurch was there because you prayed harder, you worked harder, and you loved God more. I go to this church, being groomed to take it over, and I found greed, I found immorality, and (I’m just being candid) I became very disillusioned. I thought, “This is not what I went into the ministry for.” So I wanted to start a church. I thought, “I’ll start something that’s pure,” as if I was pure, but on the outside I looked pure.

So I started our church, and it began to grow, and it grew very fast. We had a chance in the process of that growth to see God do many things. We bought some land, and we were getting ready to build. We went through a hard time in the church, because we had already built a building, and we had to wait for the other building to be built. We had to move to a different location. During that period, we lost a bunch of people.

I was real discouraged. I live in Texas, so I walked out early one morning, walked out on the hill, and was checking on my oil wells and my cattle. Every Baptist pastor has those in Texas, you know. (I’m kidding.) I’ve always prayed for the nations and faced the different places of the world. So I’m praying around, and I’m facing this one particular direction, and I see this huge church steeple.

This pastor was in trouble. He had to step down and resign his church because he’d had affairs with five different women, and they all found out about one another. They thought they were the only one he was having an affair with. Now that they knew there were five other women involved, they were burdened about it. So they came together with a lawsuit, sued the guy, and if he would admit it and step down, then the lawsuits went away. It’s amazing how quickly he admitted it.

I’m upset. I’m saying, “God, I don’t understand why you’re blessing that scuzzball. I mean he has thousands of people. I have a few hundred. You couldn’t give me another hundred? Look at him!” Then I get my mind off that and I say, “Well forgive me, Lord.” So I start praying again, and I see another steeple. That pastor had a church of several thousand I could see on top of the hill (that’s true) where I live, and as I was seeing his church, he was going to the penitentiary because he’d embezzled like a million dollars from the church.

Literally, this is what I prayed. “God, I don’t get it. I’ve kept my pants on and my hands out of the offering plate. You can’t bless me? Look at those guys.” Have you ever felt that way? God is blessing everybody else but not you? “Throw me the ball, for God’s sake! I’m open! Can’t you see?” Now guys, let me tell you, I believe in the Holy Spirit. I’m pretty passionate about the Holy Spirit. I’ll just tell you that right up front. I’m not going to make you talk in tongues. I can’t do it. But I believe in all of the gifts. How’s that?

Anyhow, I believe we ought to pursue the Spirit. I’m pretty passionate. I teach our church that. I’ve also discovered sometimes the Spirit shows up, and he’s pursuing us. When that happens, you’d better put your seat belt on, because it’s now on his nickel and there’s something God is about to do. This little question came into my mind, and it was from the Holy Spirit, because I was giving God my sob story. It was simply this: “Bob, when is Jesus going to be enough for you?”

That question stabbed me. I thought, “You know what? What’s wrong with me? He’s not enough for me.” It hit me. I’m telling all of these young professionals he’s enough for them, but he’s not enough for me. I want to be successful in the ministry. I want to put Rick Warren to shame. He’s from California; I’m from Texas. We’ll show those guys. I mean, what’s wrong with me?

I began to think, “I have the Holy Spirit, I have the Word of God, I have a wife and two kids, and I have 350 people left. That’s 50 more than Gideon. Hey, there ought to be something I can be okay about.” I began to say, “God, what is wrong with me?” I simply prayed, “God, from this point forward, instead of being the biggest church in the area, help us church the area.”

I died to being a big church. Now if you were a bunch of pastors, I’d talk to you at length about this. I didn’t understand all that took place at that time, but I shifted from thinking like a pastor to thinking like a missionary. Here’s how a pastor thinks: “How’s my church?” Here’s how a missionary thinks: “How’s my city?” How you answer that question is going to determine what your ministry is like.

We began to plant churches. I didn’t know you were supposed to put a church 30 minutes away from you, so our first one was a mile and a half to the east. Our second one was a mile and a half to the west. We now have 23 churches that are between two and four miles of our church. You’ll pass several of our churches before you get to us.

I’m not the bishop and the lord god almighty. They’re independent and autonomous. There are 23 of them. This Sunday morning while I’m preaching here, back at our church we’ll have over 2,000 at my location, 23,000 in those other churches, and across the 170-something churches, over 70,000 all over the US.

What I began to discover was God’s kingdom is bigger than my church. What I discovered is you can have the church but not the kingdom. You can have the kingdom and you’ll always have the church, but you can have the church and not the kingdom. I defined the kingdom as the church. I didn’t understand. So I began to pray, “What is the kingdom?” I remembered a seminary professor of mine said, “If you want to understand the kingdom, you have to read the Sermon on the Mount.”

So literally on that hill I sat down for the first time in my life and read the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5-7, and I sobbed, because I found out I was a phenomenal Baptist but a lousy follower of Jesus. It said things in the Beatitudes like, “What does it mean to be empty and filled with nothing but Jesus?” It talked about how to live without guilt and shame, but also not to put guilt and shame on others. What does it look like to be salt and light, and what is prayer, and what does it mean to be in community with God, to be transformed, reconciled, restoring all things?

It began to rock my world. I was just writing notes, and I couldn’t stop. Jesus redefined the Ten Commandments. He said, “You shouldn’t murder.” Well I’ve never murdered. But he said, “If you have ever hated, you’ve murdered.” He said, “You shouldn’t commit adultery.” I’ve never committed adultery. My wife is the only woman I’ve ever known. But he goes on to say, “If you’ve lusted, you’ve committed adultery.” I’m a Baptist pastor; we haven’t done that one. (I’m kidding.)

He redefines everything. I realized I really look great on the outside, but on the inside I’m a wreck. God began to change my life. I got in a small group of guys where we held one another accountable, and it began to rock my world. I began to discover the kingdom. For three years all I did was preach on the Sermon on the Mount and the kingdom of God at my church. That was it. Do you know why? I was teaching myself.

Here’s the great tragedy of the American church. We have people who are religious, we have people who have prayed the prayer, but they’ve not been transformed. I submit to you if you’ve not been transformed or if you’re not in the process of being transformed, you may have never had the seed of the gospel planted inside of you, because God Almighty cannot come live inside of you and something not happen. Sorry. We’ve made it too easy. Jesus went to the cross. I do not believe in works-based salvation; I do believe in repentance, unapologetically.

The greatest obstacle to the church today is the hypocrisy in the church. That’s all over the media. We have preachers who aren’t being transformed by the gospel. We wonder why we can’t change our cities. The idea is if we just get a church big enough and we keep leading people to the Lord, we’ll change our city. Where is that church?

Supposedly you have more megachurches here in Atlanta, Georgia, than anywhere else in America. Tell me, have your churches transformed Atlanta? Ask yourself that question. Does it bother you that we can see megachurches explode and our cities continue to decline? Something is wrong. Something is seriously wrong. What is this gospel we’re preaching? So that’s what I learned, but that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about.

It wasn’t long after that God began to speak to my heart, because this man who discipled me, a Presbyterian, believe it or not (some of those guys know God)… A Presbyterian comes up, and he winds up taking 20 of us, and he begins to pour into my life. He’s a well-known Presbyterian minister. He comes to Southwestern seminary, and he’s doing a conference. He needs a grunt, so he asks me if I would help him out. I agree to, and I go there.

It was on evangelization, but it was on global evangelization, and that just really upset me. I thought, “Why in the world, God, are you going to have me sit and have to listen to this?” I’ve been rejected three times to be a missionary. I’m upset about it. So I’m listening. I come home. I’m upset. My wife knows I’m upset. She said, “What’s wrong?” I said, “It’s on missions.” She said, “Bob, you have to let it go. We’ve done all we can do.” I said, “I know it, Niki. I’ve begged God to let this desire go, but it doesn’t go.”

I’m driving that morning to the conference, and all of a sudden the Holy Spirit shows up for a second time with another question. He said, “Bob, you’ve thought of the church differently. I want you to think of missions differently. What if the church were the missionary?” That’s the second question the Holy Spirit asked me. I want to say it again. What if the church were the missionary? See, we made the missionary the missionary. All of a sudden it hit me. “Wait a minute. What we’ve done is we’ve turned missions into a vocation, a job some people have.”

I grew up in a mission-minded church about as extreme as you could be. What that meant was we took up offerings for missions, we prayed for missionaries, every year we emphasized it, and sometimes we even took mission trips, but we didn’t think about the fact that we were missionaries. Those were special people God called to be missionaries. We funded them and sent them, because that was God’s call on their lives.

Can you tell me where that is in the Bible, please? Would somebody show me the passage where it says God calls some to be missionaries? No. The Great Commission was given to every single follower of Jesus Christ, and not just to fund it and not just to send people, but for you to get on your horse and go to the ends of the earth.

I know I may sound like a madman, crazy, radical. I’m telling you, there is nowhere in the Scripture where there is a missionary call to people going into the ministry. It’s for every single one of you. Read Matthew 28. Read the end of Mark. Read the end of Luke. Read the end of John. Read Acts 1:8. It was given to all of you. I’m not looking at a thousand people at this church this morning; I’m looking at a thousand missionaries. You’ve been called; you just haven’t heard it. He has called you to the ends of the earth.

I began to think, “Okay, God, but how do I do that? I don’t know of a church where the church is the missionary.” I went back on a Sunday morning and I said, “I’m just curious. How many of you have ever felt called to be a missionary?” We had tons of new Christians in our church. I expected 10 or 15 people to raise their hand. About a third of the people in the church raised their hand. All of a sudden I thought, “Oh my word. What if God called them but we didn’t know what to do with them? What if God is doing something different?”

So God laid a man in my path who was an atheist. He was shot down three times over Vietnam. He survived all three times. He came back to the Metroplex and became a very prominent surgeon. He was an atheist, but I led him to the Lord. I got a small group of people, and I said, “Let’s focus on a country. What does a missionary do? They don’t bebop all over the place; they go deep.”

I thought, “You know, we went on mission trips all over the world. What if we were to focus on just one city? Instead of trying to bebop everywhere and just doing a little dabbling, sprinkling everywhere but really not doing anything, what if we got a laser-beam focus?” So literally our whole church came to prayer, and we began to pray, “God, what one spot do you want us to focus on?” That was in 1994. He said, “Hanoi, Vietnam.” I said, “No way.” I said, “That’s a closed country.” I had my doctorate in missiology from Fuller by then.

Would you please listen to me? There are no closed countries. There are just those who want to do religious work and disciples who want to go serve in the name of Jesus. The problem is the world is fed up with our religious work. They’ve had it with whitey showing up on the other side of the world telling them how to do it. We don’t have church-planting movements; they do. Let’s be honest about it.
We go over, study them, write books about it, and go back and tell them what they’ve been doing. It’s time for us to go to the ends of the earth, sit down, shut up, ask questions, take notes, see what God is doing in China, India, Indonesia, and everywhere else, and say, “Teach us.” We’re not on the horse anymore, people. I don’t know if you realize that or not. We have more to learn from the global church than we have to teach it. I didn’t understand that at the time, though.

So we were praying about Vietnam. I didn’t want to go there. My dad was a pastor. He buried a lot of soldiers during the war. I had to sign up for the draft. It stopped right before it was time. I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. But we wind up going. He said, “Bob, I’m a doctor. I can go anywhere in the world.” All right, great. So we go and photocopy our doctor’s licenses, him, another doctor, and myself. They don’t know what a doctor of ministry is. They call ministers government leaders. For all they knew I had a doctor’s degree in being a government minister.

So I take it, and we go to the general hospital, the national hospital in Hanoi. We show up (this is no joke), and they took all three of us to operating rooms immediately, me included. I tried to explain to them, “That’s not the kind of doctor’s degree I have.” They wouldn’t listen to me. The good news is the man whose gallbladder I took out is still alive today. Thank God for that. (No, I’m teasing.)

So we began to work, but we didn’t know how to make it go further. We had a couple of families wind up with exchange students. Vietnam in ’98 passed a law that students from Vietnam who were exchange students could come to America for the first time ever, and our church wound up with two of these kids. I wish I had time to tell you the whole story. These kids’ parents were some of the top leaders in the whole country. Their parents would be in the news on a regular basis.

I didn’t like it when I found out about it. I tried to push back, but they came anyhow. We didn’t even know if they’d come to church. One Sunday morning when we were in our little chapel they did come to church. I remember sitting on this side of the room. We were worshiping, and I looked on that side of the room, and one of these kids had their hands lifted up and they were sobbing. I thought, “Oh my word. That kid is going to accept Christ, and I would have been the biggest obstacle because I didn’t want them to come.”

My second thought was, “That kid is going to accept Christ and mess up our work in Vietnam.” Not that we’d had anybody accept Christ, but we had a good plan that could lead to that one day maybe. Well that kid did accept Christ. It didn’t stop there. They wanted to be baptized. I wish I could tell you what their parents did. It would help you understand the severity of this. They wanted to be baptized. Legally, I could not baptize them without their parents’ permission.

They came over to our house one night without me realizing what was going on. They got their parent on the phone. This is one of the top leaders of Vietnam. He spoke broken English. The kid said, “I want to be baptized. He won’t baptize me. Dad, give them permission.” The man asked me would I come to Vietnam and see him. I agreed to. By this time I’d gotten rid of all of my suits. I was trying to wear flowery shirts like Rick Warren. I had to go out and buy a nice boring conservative diplomat suit with a boring tie.

I change right before the plane lands. I’m sitting on the plane before it gets to the gate. This big black car comes up and a couple of other cars. A couple of men in suits come up to the platform, stick their heads in, and they ask… I don’t go by “Dr. Roberts.” Nobody calls me that. They stick their head in the plane and say, “Dr. Roberts.” I’m looking around. I thought, “I’m the only white guy on the plane. There’s some guy named Dr. Bob Roberts.” All of a sudden I snapped and jumped up. So I get in the car with them, and the first thing the man asks me is, “Why would any intelligent man believe in God?”

Now you have to understand, I grew up in East Texas. We don’t major in philosophical apologetics. There are only two reasons. First, the Bible says so, and second, you feel him in the heart. Everything else is an excuse. That’s it. I slept through philosophical apologetics, but you know, the Bible says the Holy Spirit will bring things to remembrance, and he does.

I gave him seven philosophical reasons why there has to be a God, four philosophical reasons why God has to be one, five philosophical reasons why the Bible was the Word of God as opposed to other religious literature, which led me straight to the cross. Having been educated in Moscow with high degrees, his response was, “I’ve never heard this before. Would you come and share this with my friends?”

So that night I’m at this incredibly nice hotel, we’re meeting in this beautiful room, and he introduces me to his friends. He says, “This is a pastor, and I thought you all would want to meet him, because we’ve only had trouble with some of the Christians in Vietnam. He’s not a problem for us. Maybe we can understand Christianity.”

Literally, he wanted me to do the same thing, so I went through the exact same thing, why I believe there’s a God, why God is one, why I believe the Bible is the Word of God, why I believe Jesus was God in the flesh. They said, “This is incredible. Would you bring Bibles and start meeting with us?” I said, “I can’t do that.” They said, “Why?” I said, “Well the government won’t let me.”

I really had no clue who I was with at that time. The guy looked at me and said, “Bob, we are the government.” I said, “Okay.” And they really were. I’m not at liberty to tell you what all they were, but they were. One guy said, “We need help with our medical clinics.” By the way, we’ve had over a hundred exchange students from Hanoi, Vietnam. They’re the kids of the top leaders in the country, and all I will say is wonderful things happen and are happening.

Anyhow, I’m still in that meeting with that man, and he says, “Bob, we need help with medical clinics. Would you be willing to help us?” I said, “Sure, I’ll get some of our doctors and nurses to help out.” Then another guy said, “When the Catholics were here, they used to help us with schools. We need six thousand schools. Would you help us?” I said, “Well, I’ll tell you what. What if we focus on just one?”

So I said, “All right. I’ll do that.” When he said that, a light went off in my mind. I thought, “Oh my gosh, here’s what we do. It’s people’s jobs. If I can just get people to use their jobs and to serve their jobs, that could change everything. Instead of taking a missionary and making them a lousy businessman or not good at some other skill so they can get a visa, why don’t I just take an engineer and make them a disciple?

Why don’t I take a doctor and make him a disciple? Why don’t I just take everybody and disciple them, and their platform is their job? They’re not going there to do religious work; they’re going there to serve in the name of Jesus and just naturally talk about him as people ask questions.” Since that time we have literally had thousands of our members… They go back and forth to Vietnam nonstop.

When the government had to deal with human rights, they wound up asking me to be a part of a delegation that’s dealing with human rights because I’m a friend of theirs. I told our state department when they asked me to, “No, I don’t want to do it.” “But Bob, you have all of these friends there.” I said, “That’s exactly right, but I’m not in Vietnam because I agree with their human rights; I’m there because I love the Vietnamese people and I want to serve them in the name of Jesus.”

The next thing I know, the Vietnamese ambassador at the UN is calling me saying, “Why won’t you do it?” I said, “Your Excellency, you and I both know if I disagree y’all will not let me back in the country, and I don’t want that.” He said, “You really don’t know us that well. You have helped our kids. Do you think we will ever turn our backs on you?” So I’ve been invited, sent, connected with the church legally with the Vietnamese leaders, and it has opened massive doors for all kinds of stuff.
Let me tell you what I’ve learned. The whole world is open to Jesus; they’re just not open to Western Christianity. The whole world is open to Jesus; they just don’t want us showing up doing our religious thing. The whole world is open to Jesus; they just don’t want us showing up preaching our sermons. They need disciples. Whatever your job is, when you’re at our new member’s class that will be going on today, you’re given a passport, and we ask, “What is your job?”

My job as a senior pastor is to constantly connect with the leaders of the government. “Tell me what you need. Here are the members I have. Let’s connect them.” Our mission pastors don’t sit in a room and develop mission strategy for Vietnam, mission strategy for the inner city of Dallas/Fort Worth. Instead they serve as traffic cops releasing the body of Christ.

The message to the Western church today is this: Loose them and let them go. We’ve held on to them. We’ve held them tight. We don’t let them go, because we want to control everything. The gospel needs to get out of control. Stop taking mission trips; start going on a regular basis because you love people based on what your job is. You’ll be invited to do things you can’t even imagine.

Let me tell you what it looks like. We have two or three big orphan trips, because everybody wants to go see the orphans. So we’ll have a huge trip where tons of people will go to the orphanage. One lady who went to see the orphanage was an executive with Fidelity. Do you know what she winds up doing? She winds up mentoring the top 50 female entrepreneurs in Hanoi, Vietnam.

They then come up with an idea about microfinance up in the mountains. So they go up to do microfinance, which involved some of our financial people who do banking, and then they wind up buying the water buffalos, but these farmers are so poor they’ve never had that, so some people who are veterinarians and work with the animals wind up going to teach them how to work with the animals.

They need corrals, so some of our landscapers and lawn men who work all over the Metroplex, who are Hispanic and white and everything else wind up, going to build the corrals, and some of our bodybuilders who have fitness centers who are real strong wind up going. One bodybuilder who goes to build the corrals is also a PE teacher.

He winds up being invited to go to Vietnam to teach special education to 160 PE teachers in North Vietnam. So he leaves in about three weeks with 10 PE teachers, and they will literally teach physical education. Guess what? We don’t preach, we don’t pass out tracts, but we have an understanding. Anyone who asks us about Jesus, we have to tell them because we’re Christians. Not to do so is to deny our faith. Guess what? Everybody asks.

That’s what we do. I don’t have time to tell you the rest. You’ll have to get the book. We wound up being asked to do the same thing in Afghanistan, so we did. Through a fluke, I became friends with all of these imams. You have to understand, I’m from deep East Texas. We grew up with something called “dispensational premillennialism.”

Basically, it tells you exactly when Jesus is coming back. It makes you scared to death of everyone, paranoid of everyone. It makes you want to go hide in a bunker. It makes you want to be nervous about everyone and blow everybody up, the opposite of the Great Commission. “Things are getting worse. You’d better stockpile.” I’m from Texas. We’re crazy.

So we wind up becoming friends with all of these Muslim imams, and the next thing you know, I’m invited to speak at the World Islamic Forum where presidents and kings are. By this time, I’ve come to see the kingdom of heaven is not dependent upon some temple being built in Israel; the temple has already been constructed in my heart through the Holy Spirit.

We’re not going back to the past; we’re moving forward to the future. That temple is gone. This temple is the one that’s present. Amen? I didn’t understand that. In East Texas we know he’s coming back. We all believe that. I believe that. But in East Texas we feel like our job is to tell everyone else, “Now!” So we began to work, and I simply made a statement at that conference that I do love the Jews, but I equally love the Palestinians.

Only Satan would have evangelical Christians exalt one people over another people. Let me tell you something Paul wrote. God is no respecter of persons. Evangelicals need to hear that, because you’re not a Jew. You’re as Gentile as the Palestinians are. I’m serious. God loves all peoples. Amen? I really believe that. As a result of that, it has opened up doors around the world.

So those nine principles I was going to give you? Buy the book. There’s only one box of 40, so you’d better buy it fast. If you can’t get one, just go to Amazon. You can get it there. Here’s what I would say to you. Can you imagine if your church was to take this to heart and you were to say, because of your passion for Muslims, “As a church for the next five years, we’re going to exclusively focus on Baghdad”? Can you imagine what would happen? “We’re going to focus on Bethlehem, on Ramallah.”

I’m friends with all of these world leaders. They’re always asking our church to adopt their country. I tell them I’ll wait until we start a church that wants to work in their country. I’ve been invited recently by the leaders of these countries: Algeria, Libya, Tunisia, Egypt. I’ve met with many of their presidents, and I get to talk to them about Jesus.
I met with one leader, and I said, “I want you to know, sir, I am an evangelical. I really believe Jesus is God, and I believe he’s the only way to God, and I believe the Bible is the Word of God, but I also want you to know I love your people. I do love the Jews, but I love you guys just as much.” Do you know what he said? “Are you kidding me? Never heard evangelical say this.” I said, “There are some of us.”

Do you want one of those countries? Christians can’t go there. Missionaries try to go in illegally. Guys, you don’t have to go illegally. Just be a disciple. Go in the name of Jesus. You don’t even have to move over there. Just go back and forth like American businessmen do. It’s not that hard. What about Libya? What about Tunisia, where it all started, the Arab Spring? What about Egypt?

Three years ago we began to connect with the Muslim community not around the world but in our church. When we did, we lost 300 people immediately. Do you know what they said? “They’re going to blow our building up.” Do you know what I said? “It’s okay. You’re going to heaven anyhow, aren’t you?” That didn’t comfort them.

Here’s my question. You’re the body of Christ. What in God’s name could you guys do if you were to laser-light focus on just using your jobs? You know how to share the gospel to Muslims like nobody else. You’re the best. That’s why I’m here. I’m taking what you have and I’m stealing it, putting my name on the cover. “Buddy Roberts.” It’s going to be there. I’m getting that from you. Here’s what I offer to you: closed countries no one else can go to. You can’t send missionaries. If you want to do that, I’m not going to help you.

We have 26 couples, by the way, who are vocational missionaries out of our church. I’m not against missionaries. God is going to call people. But we go through the front door, and we don’t lie about who we are. We’re up front. We’re just ready to go to jail or get arrested or lose our lives. We’re candid about who we are. We’re respectful.

We’ve learned how to speak in a way that’s consistent so they know we’re Christians. We don’t keep it a secret, but we’re not pushing Western religious culture on them. Do you want me to list those nine things real quick? Here, I’ll just list them for you. I’m just going to give you some of them.

1. You have to learn to speak one conversation. Like right now you’re videoing me. People listen to my sermons all over the world because I’m friends with world leaders, not because I’m a well-known preacher (I’m not), but because of what our church does. So everything I think, everything I say, has already been said. I have permission to. I’ve built relationships. I think about how it sounds, how it comes across. The whole world is now listening.

2. I don’t like “interfaith,” but I love “multifaith.” The gospel was made to flourish in pluralistic cultures. It’s great to love the ends of the earth. You have 63 mosques in Atlanta. Who’s reaching out to them? Probably nobody unless you are, candidly.

3. It has to move beyond tribal.

4. It has to start with the hand, where you serve and build confidence, then go to the heart.

5. What you believe has to be very clear. We have to make theology simple and understandable in what matters.

6. We bang on the front door first.

7. We serve not to convert; we serve because we’re converted.

Let me explain to you. Some of you are going, “Nuh-uh. That’s not right. We have a pizza supper to get all those people to accept Jesus, and we feed people around the world so they’ll listen to the gospel.” How many of you believe God is sovereign? How many of you believe God saves?

You arrogant little Georgians. You can’t convert anybody. Amen? How many of you believe no man comes to the Father except the Holy Spirit draws him? So both the sovereignty of God and the Holy Spirit. You can’t save them anyhow. Just admit it. So why are you doing what you’re doing? Because you love God and you love others.

If nobody accepts Jesus, you’re going to keep those chunky legs moving because you love him. I was a fat little kid. My kids were fat. I’d tell them, “Move them chunky legs.” I was a chaplain at a hospital. Most kids are killed in parking lots just waiting to go somewhere. Most churches die because they’re waiting to go somewhere. You’ve been given the order. Move it. Let me pray for you.
Father, I love Buddy, and I ask you just to touch his body. In the name of Jesus I ask you to heal him. Father, you have given your Son, and in your Son are all things. Here’s my prayer, Father, that you would pour yourself out upon us, that you would fill us with your Spirit, that you would fill us with your power, and that God, this church, Grace Fellowship, would take the message of the grace of God to the world in ways it has never seen before.

Here’s what I pray, God, that a holy virus would break out, not just among the pastors and staff of this church, but, Father, that it would break out among the everyday disciples of this church and people would begin to use their jobs to work on the grid of the city, not the church, to focus on all disciples fulfilling back and forth, serving, so that it’s all in your hands. We pray this, we ask this, in the name of Jesus, amen.