10/20/24 Romans 15:14-22 “Save One More for Jesus”

16 Oct 10/20/24 Romans 15:14-22 “Save One More for Jesus”

10/20/24     Romans 15:14-22            “Save One More for Jesus”

I have to make an admission today.  This is not my favorite time of year.  I know that the leaves are very pretty.  I know that the crops change and the harvest is on if the weather remains dry.  For me it is a rather sad time because everything goes to sleep for the winter.  Many plants die.  It won’t be long before we are in our 5-month season of what I call brown and white, that is brown trees and white snow.  How drab!  I’m just not a fall or winter person anymore.  I would much rather have summer where I can go fishing when its 75 degrees and everything is green for golf.  And as much as I like fishing and golfing, I really can’t tell you too much about the fish I’ve caught but I can tell you about the fish that others have caught when they have been with me.  I get very excited when someone else catches the big one or catches lots of fish.  To me, that is the high point of my fishing.  It is the very same way with golf.  I think that the same can be said about many other things I do also.  I love it when others enjoy themselves.  I’m sure that many of you are the same way.  Today, we are going to talk a little about our missions.  Let’s see if we can figure out that when we do things for others, we feel soooo good about it ourselves.  This will translate into God feeling good also.  If God feels good, then all is well.

Is there anyone here today who was a Seinfeld follower when it was on TV?  I hate to admit it, but Sharon and I have seen most of them several times but that is a whole other story.  Anyway, there was one episode where Judge Reinhold was playing the part of a friend of Elaine’s.  They were kind of a couple if I remember right.  Anyway, Judge Reinhold met Jerry’s parents and they all went out for supper or something.  Judge would try to help Jerry’s parents with anything that came up.  As the show progressed it was evident that he wanted to spend all his time helping out the older Seinfeld’s instead of being infatuated with Elaine.  At the end, he is trying to do everything for the Seinfeld’s.  As the elder Seinfelds were leaving, he gets them settled on their plane at the airport. Then he comes back to Jerry and Elaine and says, “I could have done so much more for them.”  He is sad because there was more he could have done.  Have you ever felt like that, like you could have done so much more for someone?  I know I have and I’m usually kicking myself for not doing more.  Why; because it feels sooo good to help others.

In this week’s service we are going to talk about missions and my question to you is this, “Can you do more?”  I’m going to begin talking about world missions.  I think we all know that we are one of the richest countries in the world.  We now have an estimated population in the world of about 8.1 billion.  Out of this there are about a billion people who chronically undernourished with just 16 million coming from developed countries like our own.  These figures come from World Hunger and Poverty Facts.  They also change all the time.  I guess that no matter how you look at it, there are a lot of hungry people in the world as we speak today.

I ran across a couple of Mother Theresa stories that I want to pass along to you.  If you remember, she was the nun who worked with the extremely poor in India, the untouchables.  We also have to understand that with Jesus as our boss, there is no such thing as an untouchable but then we live in a broken human world.  Anyway, Brett Blair talks about after her death there was a television special made about her.  They talked about these destitute people she served in these absolutely dreadful places.  They showed the lepers she served and the advertisement for this segment was bikinis.  When they had a mass starvation segment it was sponsored by designer jeans.  The agonizing poverty section was sponsored by ads for fur coats.  The ads that followed abandoned babies were for ice cream and the ads following the section on all the deaths were for diamond watches.  This is definitely an example of tales from two worlds.  There is so much poverty in our world that we cannot even begin to imagine it so usually we try to ignore it.  I praise the Lord that we have young people organizations who are raising money for mosquito nets to help stop malaria.  We need more people doing things like this.

But you know that the mission fields aren’t just in third world countries.  We have poverty in this country.  I remember when I took some of our youth to Spirit Lake Nation a few years ago.  I remember parts of this like it was yesterday.  On one of those days, it was not quite 55 degrees with clouds, wind and the threat of rain which came periodically in the form of light sprinkles.  I remember it so well because of a little girl about 3 or 4 years old who came to our makeshift Bible school we had set up in their playground.  I also remember it so well because she was wearing only a light house dress with no shoes.  She was cold and shivering.  We tried to get her to go home and find something warmer to wear.  It was then that we found out that was the only thing she had to wear.  She had no jacket, no shoes, no nothing else to wear.  We also found out that this isn’t uncommon.  My question was, “What do these poor children do in the winter when it is really cold?”  After all, this is near Devils Lake where temperatures really dip down.

I praise the Lord that we have people like the missionaries there who have dedicated their lives to helping the children of this area.  These children haven’t done anything wrong.  They are victims of the bad choices made by their parents.  They are victims who are only 4 years old.  My heart cries for them.  If you have clothes or anything warm, let’s get them gathered and sent up to these poor children who have next to nothing.  There are things that we can do so let’s try to do them.

And the reason is because of my second Mother Theresa story.  According to Robert Schuler, when Mother Theresa was young, she was so moved by seeing a homeless, dying woman in Calcutta who was being eaten by rats that she begged the Indian government to give her a building that she turned into a crude hospital for the dying.  Her comment to this became her life’s motto: “If there is a God in heaven and a Christ we love, nobody should die alone.”  She went on to establish colonies for over 10,000 lepers in 28 cities.  After this she was interviewed for the BBC news and asked this question, “Mother Teresa, the thing I noticed about you and the hundreds of sisters who now form your team is that you all look so happy. Is that a put-on?”  She replied, “Oh no, not at all. Nothing makes you happier than when you really reach out in mercy to someone who is badly hurt.  Service is its own reward. True mercy begets genuine joy.”  In other words, you can’t serve God without joy.

Finally, I get to the crux of what missions is all about!  The first thing Paul tells his audience is that he is sure of their goodness.  These are competent people who are able teach each other.  This is also what I am telling you.  You are all good people.  There is no doubt about that.  If something comes up where someone needs some help, you will be right there.  You will even come up strong when you do things for poor people where ever you find them.  I think you should collect old clothes and give them away.  I’m sure you will because you are good people.  You don’t have to be rocket scientists to realize that we cannot feed the whole world.  However, I count on you to do what you can.  Every year we send money to Samaritans Purse which is one of the best relief organizations in the world.  There are other good organizations doing work here and abroad.  Give what you can where you can.

Paul is talking about all kinds of service as he tells us to be glorified in our service for Jesus Christ.  What he means here is that when we are doing our mission projects, we are to be doing them in the name of Jesus.  All credit, all glory goes to God and no one else.  It was probably just as hard to do this in Paul’s time as it is today.  There weren’t many Christians in Rome at this time.  They were in a minority and it was a minority that wasn’t that well liked.  In order to help people come to Jesus, everything they did would have to be in the name of Jesus.  They/you have to say the name Jesus out loud.  In this way, the word of Jesus would get out.

I think this is the way we fall down a little.  I’ve said this before and I know that there will be people here who disagree with me.  If you aren’t giving to missions, packing your shoeboxes, or giving clothes to the needy in the name of Jesus Christ, then what is the point?  When you are packing your shoeboxes or whatever you are doing for missions or anything else, you should be praying over each piece you handle.  When we are giving lunches to children in the area, we don’t need to give in the name of our church, but say in the name of Jesus.  People need to know that things come from God.  They need to be led to the knowledge that all things come from God and not us.  We haven’t done a very good job of this as a general body of Christians.  As much as I respect people and organizations who help the needy, the glory needs to go to God first.  Then I praise the Lord that He uses our young people and I ask that He raise some other groups up like this.

You see, it is not about you.  It is all about Jesus.  It always has been and always will be.  If you find yourself in a position where you are getting all the credit, and we have all been there, turn around and pass it all on to Jesus.  This is how the gospel message is spread.  This is why I have always wanted a Gospel tract in our shoeboxes.  We need to be thinking about this all the time when we are doing our projects or even just living our lives.  Do everything in the name of Jesus Christ and you will not be going wrong.

Now don’t get me wrong on this point.  It is always good to be helping others.  I think that in this neighborhood, people know that you come from a holy church.  They know you are working for Christ by who you are.  People have built a legacy on Jesus and that is as good as it gets.  It is very easy for us to do this.  But remember that you also need to be reaching beyond your community.  If you give to the beggar on the side of the street by West Acres, tell them that Jesus loves them as you hand them whatever you are giving.  This is so easy and so basic.

This all leads to the last point that Paul is making here.  Paul is a preacher and he proclaims Jesus where ever he goes.  In Acts we read where there were many disciples and they were all preaching to the people, spreading the joy of Christ.  Out of the 50 or 100 or whatever number of disciples who were preaching at that time, they chose 7 to become service missionaries to the poor and needy.  Their focus was on preaching the Word and they had a few who were the physical missionaries.  Today we have that number kind of backwards.  But that would all change if we did everything in the name of Jesus.

Paul is telling us that if we do these small things, then those who have not been told about Jesus will see and those who have not heard will understand.  This is how the whole world will hear the Good News that Jesus is the only way for salvation.  They will see it in a donated mosquito net.  They will read a tract we give in a shoebox.  They will read about Jesus in a prayer we send in our holiday meals.  It doesn’t take much to spread the word in places that are really dark.  I used to wonder how someone in one of the closed Muslim countries could come to know and love Jesus without any outside help.  This is how it is done, in small steps.

Now I realize that we are not all preachers or teachers or anything like that.  However, I think that we all love Jesus.  Some of us may have some strange ways of doing this but I see the love there anyway.  Therefore, none of this should be very hard for us.  I think we need a sermon on missions once in a while just to remind us that there are things to be done and done in the name of Jesus.

Many of you know the name Rick Warren who is the pastor of a mega church in California that started a few years ago in someone’s living room.  He tells the story of his dad when he was in his final days.  Rick’s dad had been a pastor for 50 years or so and he served mainly in smaller rural churches.  One of the things he loved to do was to take people to other countries on mission trips to help the people there build things like churches or school buildings.  During his last week of life, he couldn’t really sleep like we think of sleep.  He would lapse in and out of delirium.  Rick sat by his father as much as he could and listened to him in his delirium relive all those wonderful mission projects he had helped to build.  Then on about his last night, he suddenly was trying to get out of bed.  He was very weak and there was no way he could get up so Rick’s wife finally asked him, “Jimmy, what are you trying to do?”  He replied, “Got to save one more for Jesus!  Got to save one more for Jesus!”  He repeated this over and over and over.  During the next hour he must have said this 100 times.  Rick sat by his dad listening with tears running down his cheek.  Then his dad stopped and reached out his frail hand and placed it on Rick’s head, as if he was commissioning him and said, “Save one more for Jesus.  Save one more for Jesus.”

This should be your motto as you go into the mission field, whatever that may be.  Save one more for Jesus.  Save one more for Jesus.  If you keep your eyes focused on Jesus as you are ministering to others, then you will be a faithful follower of Jesus.  And if you are that, then that is all you can ask.  Save one more for Jesus.  Let’s pray.