This Sunday we welcome guest speaker Tim Hein. Tim is a minister and speaker from South Australia who is deeply passionate about people encountering Jesus Christ and helping to grow a movement of young, Biblical, missional leaders within our culture.
Tim will be picking up from where we left off last week with JOY from John 15:11, then he will launch us into Acts 16:6-10. The mission-field around us seems vast, even overwhelming. And our default posture can be reduced to just cruising with the culture, attending to our own needs, and losing vision for what God is doing around us. We’re going to explore how God can get our attention and shift us into a clearer and more effective missional lifestyle.
Tim is currently on faculty at Uniting College for Leadership and Theology in Adelaide, Australia and for several years served alongside our own Chris Moerman on Pastoral staff at Hope Valley Uniting. He speaks widely on the gospel, culture, discipleship & mission. He loves films, and he and his wife Priscilla have two young daughters, Claudia & Zoe.
Podcast: Download (Duration: 46:32 — 32.0MB)
Downloads
Notes Transcript Video Audio iTunesGrace Fellowship Church
Tim Hein
July 28, 2013
The Man from Macedonia
Acts 16:6-10
Well, I’ve been really loving being in your country. I can’t wait to get home, because of this heartburn from the Southern food. Chris has decided that while I’m here I have to eat as much Southern food as I absolutely can. I had grits for the first time the other day. I thought he might be joking with me. You guys eat that? That’s a thing? I’m looking at him and going, “Really?” We eat Vegemite. That’s right. Whereas you grease your tractor wheels, I think, with Vegemite, is that right? That’s what I thought.
It is a real pleasure. I haven’t been in America before. I have always had a great affinity for your country. I was down here last week and preached at Grace Midtown, and then during the week, I went down to Myrtle Beach and spent some time with the young people down there, several days of teaching with them. Man, they are going wild down there for Jesus. Maybe in other ways too. That’s great.
Then I went to New York for a couple of days to have a look around. Man, that’s a whole other country again. Myrtle Beach to New York. That’s the two Americas, okay? That’s fantastic. Then it’s a pleasure to come back with you today.
Chris has been a friend of mine now for many, many years. We pastored together on staff at a church in a place called Hope Valley in Adelaide, in South Australia. He has become such a great friend. Since he has come over here… We had his wife Jess come and live with us for a year over there, and that was a great blessing. Then we sent him out over here with you guys. We said, “Look, America needs Jesus, Chris. You’d better take him over.” That’s fantastic. That’s good. He’s doing a good job.
Since then, with Grace Midtown and what’s happened there, we’ve been cheering him on and praying for him. I know that place is a place you have sent and you really are the parents of in a way, and you should be very proud. It’s thrilling to be amongst Matt and those guys down there and see what God is doing. May we just do it again and again and again. Let’s do it, because the harvest is big, and we need some clarity about getting in amongst it.
That’s a bit of what I want to share with you today. I want to share with you something about what it means for us as the people of God, as the church, to be on mission. But I want to begin with a particular passage right out of where you’ve been spending some time the last couple of weeks, in John 15.
I know you’ve been talking about abiding with the Lord. I was so thrilled to hear that because that’s right at the heart of what I want to share with you today. What does it mean for us to abide? Jesus uses the beautiful metaphor about the vine and the branches. This is not some cookie cutter kind of copy that’s going on. We are intrinsically linked to God and to his mission and to his life.
So I want to read today to you from John 15, and then I actually want to jump to Acts 16, if that’s okay, for a little story there to give a practical application for what I want to share. But for now, let’s start with John 15:10 and 11. This is Jesus talking.
“If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love.” Then he says, “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.” (John 15:10-11) I love that. “I have said these things to you so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete.”
So Jesus is making a direct link between the thing that is at the joy of our heart, the thing that is going to give us the most happiness, the most profound happiness and meaning and connection in life, and what it means to be in God. As Saint Augustine said, “We were built for God, and our hearts will ache and long until we find our home in him.” Jesus is saying that at this point, that whatever it means to live a life of fullness and happiness, and whatever we get told about that, real joy will be found in abiding in Jesus.
But the wonderful thing I take from that is my mind immediately flips to something else Jesus said when he just talked again about abiding and the connection between his relationship and the Father and our relationship to him, and that’s about mission. Because whereas he says, “My connection with the Father; I do only the Father’s will, and if you abide in me, your joy will be complete,” my mind immediately flips to where Jesus complements that by saying, “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”
You see, there’s that connection there, folks, between where we find our identity and our love and our belonging in God and abiding in God and participation in that mission to invite other people into that same relationship. We have the privilege not just of being saved and huddling together; we have the privilege in participating in the ministry and the mission of Christ in this world. That matters, and that’s a thrilling thing to do. That’s actually what it means. He’s talking about you don’t go on mission just on your own, but if you’re going to be the branches in relation to the vine, then you need to abide in Jesus.
But friends, let me make it really clear to you this morning. To abide in Jesus is to abide in Jesus’ mission. One of the things we can do as the people of God is we can get a bigger perspective to enlarge our world of what it means to participate in this mission of Jesus. One of the great things about coming across the water from Australia…
Who here has ever been to Australia, by the way? Hands up if you’ve been to Australia. Fantastic. I see who the holy people are in the house. That’s fantastic. You guys who have been to Australia, we have a bit of a connection. Your job is to pray for me while we preach. So you be praying. But let me tell you one of the great things about coming over here is you get a sense of, “Oh wow, not just an Australian church, but also an American church.”
When you travel around the world in different cultures and different towns, you get a wonderful sense of the breadth of the people of God, the big household of God, and it’s a wonderful thing across cultures. Because we can get very closed in and think that just our house, our neighborhood, our way, our denomination is the one. But we get a great sense of the culture and breadth.
The other thing we get when we read the book of Acts is we get a wonderful sense of the history of the church, that we’re not coming up with this on our own in this generation, but we are actually recipients of this baton that has been handed down through the generations right back to 2,000 years ago.
We have this biography, this history. In that history at times there has been some unfaithfulness in that mission and other times there has been some wonderful faithfulness and fruitfulness. Let me tell me, we stand in that trajectory today. It started with the book of Acts, and here it is today with us in the mission we are living in our lives.
If we’re going to be faithful in that in our generation and abide in that vine and abide in Christ and feel that joy and sit in that sweet spot, then we do well to go back to the beginning of that story and see what we can glean as that mission was starting out. That’s where I want to take you this morning right off the bat, to Acts 16. Let me tell you, if you haven’t got a Bible, put up your hand. The Bibles will come around. I think they may have done that already, but I think it’ll be up on the screen anyway.
There’s a lot of exciting stories in the book of Acts. This is kind of a little passage in between a couple of them. You may never have heard a sermon on this passage before. It’s more of a geography lesson than it is a passage or an exciting story, but I think there are some profound principles in here for us as we seek to be the people of God on mission with Jesus in our generation.
This is Acts 16:6-10. Let me read it to you. By the way, this is talking about Paul and his companions out on the mission field, on the journey. It says, “And they went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
“And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas. And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, ‘Come over to Macedonia and help us.’ And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.” (Acts 16:6-10)
This is a bit of a strange passage. The first half is just like a geography lesson. These towns and cities you may have heard of or you may not have heard of. We’ve heard of Galatia, of course, because that’s where Paul writes the letter of Galatians to, but if you don’t have a map or you don’t know the area well, it’s going to seem a bit strange, but it’s actually important to name them.
Friends, I don’t want to bring you a word that’s just like some vague, spiritual concepts. That’s not what God’s Word is. It’s rooted in some occurrences in history. So getting that geography actually helps root that, but there’s another principle too, and I’ll come back to that in a moment. Then the second part is it says Paul, during the night, had a vision of a man in Macedonia. All the towns he has mentioned, and then there’s Macedonia. Now Macedonia is over near Greece, in Europe. One man pleading, “Come over here and help.”
Now as I’m reading through this particular passage, a whole bunch of principles jump out at me, things and observations I think are well worth us taking some note of. The first one I have to say right off the bat, it seems obvious, but you get it right through the book of Acts, but in particular, this unusual little passage, and that’s this.
1. Paul and his companions have an expectation for the guidance of the Holy Spirit in their mission every day. They’re just expecting God to speak to them about where they should go and what they should do. All the way through the book of Acts, we see a combination of strategic planning and spiritual sensitivity. Paul is very strategic about where he goes on his missionary journeys. He goes to these cities and he goes to strategic ports and different places and finally ends up in Rome, of course, where eventually he’s in chains.
He’s very strategic, but along the way, in the midst of his strategy, he’s incredibly sensitive to the Holy Spirit’s guidance, and he has postured himself in such a way that he expects the Holy Spirit to direct his path. Friends, all I want to say, if we want to be people of God on mission, we want to be people who are effective, who are faithful in what Jesus has called us to do, then we want to be people who are sensitive. We actually posture our lives and our attention to hearing the Holy Spirit to direct our path in life.
When is the last time you asked the Holy Spirit, “What do you really want me to do with my life?” When is the last time you’ve attempted to do something in your life that if you have not heard from God on it, it will certainly fail? You see, that’s the faith dimension in mission.
When’s the last time (to be really practical) that you’ve been driving to work, praying to God and saying, “Lord, today, if nothing else, please lead me into a conversation with someone where I can share the gospel with them, or I can demonstrate the gospel with them by loving them unconditionally and listening to them in such a way that no one else ever would do. Don’t let me just run through today without posturing myself to hear you in a moment. Direct my path into a conversation”?
Friends, that’s a missional prayer, but if we want to be people of God who are remaining and abiding in that vine, we want to be people of God where the joy of God dwells within us, it will not be something we hold to ourselves. It will be a sense of, “Lord, let me find someone today. Let me see who it is that I may share that joy with,” even if you’re just demonstrating it, even if you’re just loving on them in a way that quite obviously is not the way someone would love if they were not compelled by the Holy Spirit and the Lord Jesus.
That for me is the first observation. They just take that for granted that they should posture their lives by the guidance of the Holy Spirit, listening attentively to him.
2. As they do that, they’re aware that the Spirit closes doors which might otherwise have seemed the most obvious path. Now get this. This is where the geography actually helps us in the first part of the passage. Because if you look at map later (you might have one in the back of your Bible or you could look at a map later), you’ll see what’s going on there.
They’re walking along. They’ve obviously heard this strategy. “We’re going to go down this way. We’re going to reach these places.” But as they were heading down there, on one hand, they have the coastline, so they can’t go left. On the other hand, they have Asia. There’s a few million people over there God wants to reach, but remember, they’re forbidden by the Holy Spirit to go to Asia. So they’re like, “Okay, we can’t go that way.”
So we keep going down in this direction. Then they reach Troas, and they can’t go there. And Bithynia. “We can’t go there.” So they have this sense of heading in a direction with their strategy, but as they’re going along, it’s God closing doors for them.
Now that can be a liberating thing in your life. You’re going to be overwhelmed by opportunity and need and so forth by life and by how big the harvest field is unless you get a sense of the Holy Spirit closing some doors. It can be a wonderful and liberating thing, because if everything is mission, nothing is mission. So there needs to be some clarity about what not to do.
Then we’re here, but as they’re going down there, they’re heading in this direction, and then God is saying, “No, no, no.” Then suddenly, quite unexpectedly, Paul has a vision. The vision out of the blue comes from over in the other direction. Totally unexpected. They have their strategy, and then Paul has a vision and gives them direction by the Holy Spirit back towards Europe. Now I’ll come back to that in a moment, but I want you to get this sense of the doors closing because I think this is actually key in our very overrun, over-busy, ambitious lives.
Let’s say you’re at work (to make it really practical), and you’re working with a team of people. You have this team. You know this team well. You love this team. You share things. You have some relationships with them. It’s a pretty normal kind of office. But because you’re a person who lives with Jesus on mission, you want to reach these people for the gospel. That’s where God has called you.
So you build relationships with them. You demonstrate the gospel. You don’t gossip about them. You don’t play the normal games in the office environment, do you? You love. You share them. Every now and then, you have an opportunity to invite someone to church and so forth. Maybe one of them came, another one didn’t come, but there’s an investment there and there’s a strong sense of, “Hey, we’re making some progress now.”
Then all of a sudden, the boss comes to you out of the blue. The boss says, “Champ, well done. You’ve been doing a good job here. It’s fantastic. You’re well known around the office. You’re doing it good. You’re a good person. We’re going to promote you. We’re going to move you over to the other side of the office. You’re going to be overseeing a team rather than being part of a team, and you’re going to have your own office, and we’ll give you a car.”
Now if you’re not postured towards listening and being attentive to the Holy Spirit, it’s just going to seem like that’s God’s blessing. You’re going to come back to house church or home fellowship during the week, and you’re going to say, “God has blessed me this week. I have this place in the office on my own. I have a team. I’ve been blessed. It’s more money and it’s a car.” Everyone is going to go, “Hallelujah. God really is blessing you.”
But unless you’re attentive to the Holy Spirit, you’re going to miss that he may have a mission and a purpose for you in that workplace that could even be…now get this…more important than your promotion and your car and your office. Could God have something in mind even more amazing than that?
Wow, I don’t know. It could be the Holy Spirit says, “Actually, you’re my chosen agent to reach that team, and I haven’t put you in there and built relationships for a year just to suck you out of there and take you and isolate you over here, because that’s not going to be helpful for my mission.
I want you to turn down that promotion and I want you to stay there and invest in those lives and double your efforts, because this is not a job for money, and this is not a job for promotion, and this is not a job about you. This is about a mission. This is about a kingdom that is coming in that place, and you have the privilege of being there and sharing the gospel, because I am making my move, and you are a key player in that move.”
Friends, over our history for 2,000 years, people, thousands upon thousands, have been martyred for the gospel. Can you believe that in this generation God might ask you to turn down a car? But if you don’t get that, you’re going to think that the American Dream or the Australian Dream is God’s dream, but God has another dream that’s even more profound than your personal success.
God may call you. Now friends, he may call you into a promotion. He may call you into another place and a realm of influence, but friends, it may be either way. But you’re not going to know unless you’re waiting on God, unless you’ve postured your life for the mission of Jesus Christ, unless you’re committed to abiding in that vine no matter what. God will close some doors that ordinarily you would’ve just run through if you’re attentive to the guidance of the Holy Spirit on mission.
This mission will take you into some unlikely places. Is that okay? Is that radical enough for you? Is that all right? All right. I was told not to hold back. They said, “Oh, Buddy really whips them, so you just go for it.” Is that right?
3. The people of God on mission, the Spirit of God guides their direction at this point through a vision of pleading need. Get this. They’re being told, “No, no, no, no, no,” and then all of a sudden, they have a vision of pleading need.
In the church I grew up in, we had a lot of visions. A vision is fantastic. A vision is like a spiritual visual prophecy where God gives you a picture of something to encourage you, to inspire you, and to give you direction, call you to faithfulness. Right? It’s a wonderful thing. In the church I grew up in though, we only ever had one of two types of visions. The first vision we had was often the vision where God would just want to encourage us.
Someone would stand up and they’d say, “I feel the Spirit of God leading me to tell you today that God just loves you. I see him putting his arms around us.” There are a lot of waterfalls in this kind of vision. A lot of shepherd, a lot of sheep hugging. Do you know what I mean? A lot of lambs. Sort of like a Keith Green album cover.
It’s a beautiful thing. It’s very encouraging. Now, that’s okay. I mean, the Psalms are full of that, right? God does want to encourage you. It seems a little corny sometimes if you’re not going through a hard time. If you are going through a hard time… Sometimes I know I need that. That’s why I’m friends with Chris Moerman. Chris Moerman is just like Keith Green. He’s just a cuddler, right? He’s just a beautiful encouraging guy. He’s just like Jesus. He’s a bald Jesus, but he’s a good Jesus, and he encourages me.
There’s a wonderful sense… A lot of our songs are written that way. God’s Word is written that way to speak to our hearts, not just to our heads. So that’s okay. But that was the one type of vision we got. The other type of vision we got was the kind of success vision. If God wasn’t encouraging us, he was telling us we were going to be successful.
This kind of vision was the sort of vision where the minister or someone would stand there and they would say, “I see this vision of millions of people coming into our church and us having a massive, bigger and bigger church with a massive corner office and a Learjet outside.” Do you know what I mean?
This is the things-are-going-to-be-amazing kind of vision. That kind of taps something inside of us that wants things to be better. There’s nothing wrong with that vision. There is something wrong with the Learjet vision. But just generally speaking there’s nothing wrong with that, because the book of Revelation is that kind of vision. The people of God are a pilgrim people on the way somewhere, and the place where we’re going is this throne room with the reconciliation and the renewal of all creation when Jesus is King. It’s made plain to the whole culture.
Heaven and earth comes, and this city comes down, and Jesus rules over and judges on a throne. All the metaphoric, beautiful, allegorical language that’s given there in the book of Revelation is about the fact that we win. There is going to be a wedding feast, and it’s a wonderful thing. We should be oriented in our hope because of that sure reality up ahead. So that’s okay.
But it seems like in my church we only ever got those two visions, but Paul doesn’t get a vision like that. He gets another vision, and we never got that vision, and that’s a vision of pleading, desperate need. He has a vision of a Macedonian man crying, “Help!” He doesn’t have a vision of thousands of Macedonians bowing the knee to Jesus. He has a vision of a man in Macedonia crying, “Help!” He’s oriented by that.
Friends, I want to tell you today, when you’re going to live a life where you’re following Jesus into his kind of mission and you’re oriented towards listening to the guidance of the Holy Spirit, you’d better be prepared for the fact that the Holy Spirit will give you a vision, and it may not be encouraging in one sense, and it may not be successful. It may be a vision of a need you’ve never dared see before that freaks you out.
You look out into the culture, and it may be a person, it may be a people group, it may be a neighborhood, it might be a nation in Africa, it might be a nation in Asia, it might be somewhere else, it might be in your house in your street, but you’ll suddenly have a vision, and out there it’ll look like the culture is like this, kind of aloof and angry, but on the inside you’ll see the Holy Spirit has revealed there is a person inside going, “Help!” If you dare, the Holy Spirit will get your attention, and you’ll be oriented in your Christian life not just toward what you want to do, but there will be a clarity. “How can I not?”
I’m a bit of a World War II buff. I love and am intrigued by history and particularly World War II. I was reading a biography of a man called Albert Speer. You may not have heard of Albert Speer, but he was one of Adolf Hitler’s senior officers. Speer was originally an architect. In fact, he and Hitler would build these scale models, and he would design what Berlin would look like when they had conquered Europe in the Third Reich and all that they would do, like recreating Rome in a way, these big buildings.
But then when the war began, he became Armaments Minister, sort of Munitions Minister. He oversaw the factories where they would create the bombs and the bullets and so forth for the war. So he was a very senior man in that top group of seven or eight. What happened was, when we got to the end of the war and the Nazis lost, Hitler committed suicide and several other officers did the same or were shot, but several of them were gathered together and they were put on trial. It was called the Nuremberg Trials.
These trials were a way of the Western world bringing justice to dealing with these guys in terms of war crimes. Even before the night of sentencing, when they had been found guilty of many things and various things, several of them… One of the senior officers, Goering committed suicide in his cell. But Speer didn’t. Speer went to his sentencing, and in fact, because of the way he had given testimony and participated, he was only given 20 years in jail. So he did his 20 years in Spandau prison, and then was released. So by the late 60s, this guy was out there.
He wrote a book called Inside the Third Reich, a fascinating book which sold incredibly well around the world, because the world was deeply fascinated about what had happened inside the Nazis…how they thought, how they responded, what Hitler was like personally, all that stuff. In fact, the book is still in print it was so popular.
He traveled around the world on talk shows and being interviewed and so forth, because people were so fascinated by him. He became very well known and very wealthy because of it. The question was asked of him that I know you would probably want to ask. “Why did you do it?” The death camps. The Holocaust. The gas chambers. Millions of Jews and Gypsies. “Why did you do it? Why didn’t you stop it? Why didn’t you say no?”
He said to them again and again and again, “I didn’t know about that. I didn’t know. I was there. I was doing my factories and so forth.” They were like, “You must’ve known. You were there in the top leadership team. You would’ve known what was going on.” He says, “I didn’t know.”
They said, “But we have the records now. We know there was a meeting here and the people were there and Hitler arrived. You were at that meeting, and that’s where it was decided about the Final Solution for the Jewish question. That’s when you decided to do it.” He says, “I left early before lunch. I was not there. I did not know until after the war what had gone on, and I was horrified.” “You must have known.” He says, “I did not know.”
Towards the end of his life, there were several more interviews, and one lady, a biographer and historian, had interviewed him many times. Right at the end of her biography, she has this one last interview with him. She comes back to this again, and she says to him, “How did you not know? You must’ve known.” He says, “I did not know. I did not see.”
She said, “How did you not see?” He says, “I did not see because I looked away.” She says, “Aha! You looked away. How do you look away from something you do not know? If you do not know, you’re just looking. But to look away means you know there’s something to look away from.” He looked at her and he said, “We will never speak of this again,” and he never gave another interview. That was it. He did not know because he looked away.
Friend, I want to ask you today…What are you looking away from? What open wound, what sore, what need? Is it just easier to look away, to change the channel? “It’ll be okay.” Let me be really honest with you. In Australia at the moment, we have an open wound, which is our relationship towards the indigenous people. There is a process of reconciliation that many people ache for, but it’s so complex.
Two hundred years ago when the white folks came to Australia, a lot of terrible things were done. Massacres. Some things since then were done with good intentions. Some mission and different things were done. Other things were done that were very clumsy, misguided. The complexities with the indigenous people and the pain, the alcohol, and all sorts of things there, they are a much reduced people in size because of it. So reduced that it’s actually quite easy for Australians by and large just to look away.
Actually, we’re coming up to an election in Australia for our prime minister. Another issue is really on the boil over there as well, and that’s the issue of refugees. Because in Australia, we’re an island continent, so if refugees want to come into our country fleeing persecution somewhere else they have to come across the water. They may be coming from Iran or from Afghanistan or different places.
They get to Indonesia and then they pay people smugglers to get on these rickety boats and come across, and kids die at sea. Another one died the other day. And adults out in the open seas and so forth. Hundreds of them have died. There’s this hostility. There’s this feeling in Australia. Some people ache for that issue and for their lives, and other people just want to put up a big wall and block them. For most Australians, you see, it’s a complex issue, and they would rather just look away.
Friends, as the followers of Jesus Christ, we can’t look away. It may be complex. It may be dark. But there is no part of our city, no part of our country that is too dark that we can just draw a line and hand over and say, “Too hard.” Because the first chapter of John tells us that a light shines in the darkness and the darkness cannot overwhelm it.
Friends, we need to get clarity. We need to get a vision of what it means. Friends, what are you looking away from? Because when you stop and you want to abide in this vine and have that passion of Jesus Christ and posture yourself for his Spirit to speak into your life about to whom you are called, you may get a vision, and God will give you the courage to look onto something that you would rather not and walk towards it. He will give you a vision of pleading, help.
Who is your Macedonian man? Who is calling, “Help!”? Who’s trying to get your attention? Is it a person at work? Is it a people group around the city? Is it a neighborhood? Who is it? Who is God calling? Who is God brewing a heart burst for? Who is God giving you an ache? Who does he want your heart to break for in the way his heart breaks for him? Because friends, he’s already there.
You don’t take God on mission; God takes you. He’s out there by his Holy Spirit. That’s why. God is over there with the Macedonian man. That’s why he’s giving you a vision of it. You don’t take God; he’s out there, and he’s calling to you, “Come on. Come out of that safety zone. Come on. Get out of that meaningless life. Come over here. Come and get wet. Come and get dirty. Come and get a part of it.”
It’s going to take a lot of work. It’s going to take a lot of thought. It’s going to take a lot of planning. It’s going to take a lot of money. It’s going to take a lot of time. You won’t be able to come in and just backyard blitz and fix it up and get out of there. You may have to stick around. You may have to work through things. It may be tough, but they’re calling out, “Help!” And guess what? No one else in the culture has any kind of motivation, because the American Dream is probably going to say, “Over here,” and God is saying, “Over here.” You have to get that revelation. Australia is just the same.
Friends, we have that gospel, that beautiful, magnificent gospel, that there is a kingdom and there is a King. That King is King because Caesar is not king. Because he is King, then culture is not king and drugs are not king and armies are not king. Jesus has died and risen again and has been given all authority on heaven and earth, which means that a comfortable and meaningless life is not king. There’s something else.
Friends, when we answer that, when we get clarity around that, there can be in that moment a mighty outpouring of the Holy Spirit in our lives when we get converted to the mission of God. The most profound and magnificent question you can ever ask as a follower of Jesus is…To whom are we sent? “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” “Where, God? Tell me where. And be specific.” “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Refugees don’t drown in heaven and they shouldn’t drown on earth. That’s what it means to follow Jesus.
One of the things I was moved about in coming to New York the other day was being able to go to the location of the World Trade Center. It’s all transformed now. Well, as you know, it has been 12 years. I can say it was kind of meaningful because we were with you in that moment. It seems strange because we’re so far away in Australia, but I was up late near midnight watching The Footy Show.
Then I turned over the channel, and there was one tower live, burning. Then I watched it unfold, the second tower. Because of the media and communications, we were kind of there with you in that moment. I’m sitting there in my lounge room in the middle of the night crying on the phone to my girlfriend just watching this unfold and aching for you guys.
I was thinking about that when recently I was talking with a friend of mine who a few years ago was sharing about what it’s like for him to be a fireman. He was kind of disillusioned with being a fireman. I don’t know what it’s like here, but in Australia he says, “Look, we don’t get very well paid. There’s a sense by which you’re sitting around kind of all the time, and that you’re cleaning trucks, and it’s pretty mundane. Then when something happens, it’s horrific and horrible.”
So he was feeling disillusioned. Others weren’t, but he was. In fact, he has now left it, and he’s now a teacher. He has gone to be a teacher in Indonesia. But I was thinking about that when I was thinking about the World Trade Center and wondering about that in the sacrifice that was made in that moment for firemen. I was thinking their friends must just feel, “Well, it’s just not worth it. This job is not worth it.”
But all of those thoughts came to a head a little while ago when I found a recording of a U2 concert. Now this U2 concert is a recording from Madison Square Garden about one month after 9/11. They were on tour at the time, you see, and it was just coincidental they were playing Madison Square Garden just a month afterwards.
You can just imagine what kind of concert that was. U2’s music is sort of healing and anthemic and hopeful anyway, but there was a sense even in the room that night you could hear in the recording that they were way above that. The crowd, of course, would be grieving and hurt, and yet hopeful and bonding together. Just an intense concert. Incredible emotion.
I’m listening to it, and the band is playing so well. I was so moved by it and getting chills. Then they got to the end of the concert. The last song they played was a song called “Walk On.” At the end of the song, the singing stops, Bono stops singing, but the music keeps going on for another like seven or eight minutes, and the crowd is just getting more and more intense, clapping and screaming. I’m like, “What’s going on?”
So I went and found footage of it on YouTube. I was watching it there and going, “What happens at the end of this song?” I suddenly realized at the end of the song they finished singing, and as they’re playing, a whole stream, dozens and dozens of New York firemen come onto the stage. They walk on, and they come on, and they’re standing there around there jumping and screaming. Of course, the crowd is just so full of appreciation. Here are guys who’ve lost friends, brothers in the towers just a few weeks beforehand. And so they’re honoring them.
Then finally the music stops. The crowd just keeps screaming and yelling and cheering. One guy comes forward and he takes the microphone, and he says, “I’m a fireman, and my brother was a fireman, and he died in the towers just a couple of weeks ago.” People are like, “Wow, to lose your brother.”
He said, “He was a rock ‘n’ roller, but he never made it to this stage, and I’m here tonight in Madison Square Garden, and I’m here for him.” People just showed their appreciation and honor towards his brother. Then he says, “New York, you call us New York’s bravest, but I have to say, we really appreciate this, New York, and we’re here to tell you tonight that whenever you call 911, we will be there. We will come.”
I’m listening to that, going, “Wow.” That’s the total opposite response I would’ve expected. Surely, if anyone has any right to throw in the towel… “It’s not worth the pay. It’s not worth it, and now my brother. Are you serious? No way. Nothing is worth that.” But he responds in the exact opposite way.
He says, “Okay, this is personal now.” He finds his calling. He finds his vocation. It’s now not about the money. It’s not about anything. This is a vocation now. “This is what I’m here to do, because I tell you what, whenever you call 911, we will be there. We will save you. We will turn up. It doesn’t matter, but we will be there.”
I thought to myself, “Man, every Christian needs to get that revelation.” We need to get a revelation of whoever is calling “Help!” saying, “It doesn’t matter what it is. There’s a promotion in that direction. There’s persecution in this direction. Friend, you’re calling ‘Help!’ We will be there. We will come.”
If you don’t get that clarity, friends, the harvest, the mission field is always going to seem general and big and overwhelming until God gives you a vision of a person, a people group. He brings focus, and it burns in your heart, and you can’t let it go. Give me a revelation of my Macedonian man. Who is it God is calling you? To whom is God calling you? And you will never be the same again.
There is a word that we as the people of God have used all the way through our history. We use it in worship. We use it in other times. It’s an Old Testament word, and it’s the word hosanna. We often think hosanna just means hallelujah or praise the Lord. But actually, hosanna has a very specific meaning. It means, in the Hebrew, help. Help.
But it’s not a help like a lost help. It’s not a help of despair. It’s a help with a double meaning, which means, “Ah, there is my helper. I recognize my helper.” So when we say, “Hosanna,” we’re saying, “Help,” and, “There is my helper. It’s on the way.”
Think about it in terms of you’re at the beach. In Australia, we pretty much live at the beach. We love the beach. But you’re out there in the water, and you are swimming out a bit further back, and suddenly you get caught in a rip, and suddenly, whoa, you realize you’re in trouble. Even though you can swim, it’s dragging you further and further. So you call out, “Help! Help!” Well, that’s just help.
But then suddenly in the midst of your despair, suddenly in the lost and the, “Help! Help! Help!” you get a vision, and you see the lifeguard, and you suddenly realize… You lock eyes, and he sees you, and he gets up, and he starts running towards you, and he’s looking at you. You call out again, “Help!” That’s hosanna. Hosanna and, “Oh, help. There is my helper.”
Can you see it now? Can you see why we do it in worship? When we look to our God, we say, “Hosanna! Hosanna in the highest. There you are. There is help, and there is my Helper.” Friends, that’s our mission, to look out into the world about us to the culture in the direction and get clarity from the Spirit of God to whom is calling “Help!” to us and to go and turn that “Help!” into a hosanna. That they would lock eyes with us and see and we say, “We are coming. You cannot stop us. God has called us. We are going to turn there. We hear your “Help!” We are on the way.”
They look at us, and not just feeble us, but behind us they see Almighty God coming in like a flood. He is coming. He’s chosen to use you. “Hosanna! Yes, we’re coming.” That is our call. To have ears. To not look away, but hear and see the “Help!” and turn that into hosanna. Would you stand to your feet and let’s pray together?
Loving and gracious God, we thank you that you are not a God who has remained far away from us, but you are a God who has come near. You are not a God who just sent something in the mail, sent an email, posted a letter, put up a billboard, but you turned up in flesh. You wore sandals. You walked around. You saw equality with God not as something to be grasped, but made yourself a slave even to death. You got involved. You moved into the neighborhood.
Lord Jesus, as you were sent by the Father, and you have sent us, help us to abide in you. Help us to know that joy and not keep that joy to ourselves. Help us to know that joy complete, to participate in that mission.
Even now, across this place, I would pray that by your Holy Spirit you would speak to each person. As they wait on you and as they ask, “To whom am I sent?” that by your Holy Spirit, you would give them a vision of their Macedonian man. Give them a vision of whom it is you love so much as to even send them.
You may have a vision already. You may have been back to that place several times, and you want a confirmation from the Holy Spirit, “Yep, that’s it. We’re on it, Tim.” Or it may be something you didn’t even expect. You’re heading in one direction and God wants to close that door, and he wants to point in the whole other direction. It may be across the water. It may be across the road, but give us a vision of our Macedonian man.
Holy Spirit, I pray you would give us the courage to look, the courage to ask, and then the courage to go. By your Holy Spirit now, even now, speak to us. Give us visions and pictures of who that is. Someone crying, “Help!” and we’ve looked away. We want to look clearly and front on and see them as Jesus sees them and go that we might have the magnificent privilege of participating in that mission and that ministry in helping their “Help!” become a “Hosanna, Hosanna. Hosanna in the highest.” In Jesus’ name, amen.