Gospel Mission

, what a great blessing to, be able to come together on the Lord's Day. And to, to worship God by opening our hearts to Him. And also now by opening our ears to Him and allowing him to speak to us. It's an amazing thing that God would even speak to us.

We deserve for him to be silent towards us. And if he speaks at all, to speak judgment, but instead, God opens his heart to us and he speaks to us and it's words of grace, Amazing grace, words of salvation, words of blessing, and we get to hear those words from the God of the universe, this morning. let me invite you to turn in your Bibles to 1 Corinthians 9. 1 Corinthians chapter 9 for our time of study in the word this morning.

we're in the middle of a, like a five-week series on the journey from brokenness to, wholeness. And as we've been looking at the different points in the journey from brokenness to wholeness, we've been doing topical messages, on those themes. Today, it's somewhat of a topical message, but we're going to be spending our time in 1 Corinthians 9. most of the points that we need to make are found in 1 Corinthians 9:16 through 27.

And so if you want to give a title to the message, it would be Gospel Mission. Gospel mission. I thought about bringing a prop in, but didn't have time to do that. But if I, just for the sake of illustration, if I were to connect my fingers like this, in fact, do this.

Connect your fingers like this into a circle. Very good, very good. if we all went outside and pointed this at the sun and allowed the rays of the sun to pass through just the area inside of my connected fingers or your connected fingers, there's actually enough power in the rays of the sun that just passed through this area to burn a hole through a leaf or to set kindling on fire. But that normally doesn't happen because the rays of the sun passing through the area in between my fingers is diffused light.

However, if I took a magnifying glass about this size, and I held it up to the sun. That glass would bend the rays of the sunlight until they join at a single point. And that single point of light would easily burn a hole through a leaf or set kindling. On fire.

And I want you to keep that image in your mind, this morning throughout, the message, and ask yourself how your life matches up to that picture, how we as a church match up to that picture. You and I have been given so many gifts from the Lord. We've been given the gift of time. and abilities and resources and brain power.

We've been given the gift of the Holy Spirit. We've been given the gospel message, the privilege of prayer and access to God, the privilege of community with one another, the ability to do good deeds, and to show love to others along with the ability to communicate in language. We've been given so much from the Lord. And yet the question we should ask is how much damage are we doing to Satan's kingdom?

How many holes are we burning through Satan's strongholds? If we're not burning many holes through Satan's strongholds, or if we're not doing much damage, it's not because the power is absent. Or because the power is not there, but it's probably because our lives lack focus. We have plenty of light from God coming towards us, but the light that comes through us often gets diffused and scattered in a million directions.

It's not concentrated. In the right direction leading to a particular or single point of focus. And my hope is that this morning's message will serve to convince you and I that there is nothing more powerful on earth than a Christian, than a church whose faculties are honed and concentrated on what we're going to talk about today, and that is gospel mission. Concentrated and honed to the point where everything we do is designed to serve this end of gospel mission.

To the point where gospel mission is not just something that we try to squeeze into our already busy lives, but where everything we are and everything that we do is bent in the direction of serving this precise goal. Of gospel, mission. Imagine just the potential if all of us in this congregation were of the same mind and united in purpose and all that we are and all that we have and all that we do gets bent in this direction and serves this one great end of gospel mission. How could God use us if we did that?

Our purpose as a church is to help people to journey from brokenness to wholeness, to the gospel of Jesus Christ. We've been looking at the different critical points in that journey from brokenness to wholeness. There's gospel conversion. there's gospel immersion, there's gospel community that we looked at last week, and today, we come to the 4th point in the journey from brokenness to wholeness, and that is gospel mission.

We've been tracing the life of Saul of Tarsus, later known as the Apostle Paul, and observing his journey from brokenness all the way to glory. And we've seen how he lived a life of gospel immersion after being converted. We learned last week how he lived a life of gospel community. Today, we're gonna see how he lived a life that was utterly, completely focused on gospel, mission.

Let's define what we mean by this expression, and I believe this is in your notes that are in your bulletin. gospel mission we can define in this way. It's living life with unrelenting gospel intentionality, focusing all that you do with the goal of influencing others to become a fellow partaker of the gospel with you. B, it's doing all that you do with the goal of maximizing God's gospel purposes in you and in others.

Or C, it's living a life of full devotion to the task of imparting the gospel to others through word and deed. This is what it means to live a life of gospel, mission. and this is the life that the apostle Paul, led a life utterly and completely devoted to gospel, mission. In fact, Not only does Paul match this definition, his life creates this definition.

He created this category by the life that he led. It's impossible to define what it means to live a life of gospel mission without in the process, essentially just describing his life. That's the life that Paul lived. And because of his focus, his unrelenting focus on gospel mission, Paul was a man who wielded enormous power on the world of his day and the generations since then.

There's really no doubt, no one disagrees with this at all, whether Christian or Non-Christian, that the apostle Paul is the greatest Christian missionary of the last 2000 years. There has never been another missionary who comes close to generating the impact that the apostle Paul generated throughout his life, which is really an astounding thing. Paul, by most counts, That the time period between his conversion and his death is about 34 years, 34 years from his conversion up to his martyrdom, and yet in those 34 years he impacted the world in a way that even secular observers agree is utterly profound and almost unrivaled.

In fact, several years ago, a, secular historian named Michael Hart came out with a book entitled A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History, and in the book, he provides a list along with explanations of the top 100 most influential people in human history, and guess where he ranked the apostle Paul?

6th 6th As the 6th most influential person in the history of the world. A few years ago, the historical Atlas of the Mediterranean engaged in an exercise where they made a list of the top 10 people. Most influential people in the history of the world, and it ranked the apostle Paul as second on the list of the most influential people who have ever lived in human history, and they suggested that 18.43 billion people have been in some way impacted by the apostle Paul over the last 2000 years.

That's a staggering.

Influence of one life and all of that influence was post conversion, that 34 years that Paul lived from his conversion up until his martyrdom. Imagine that a Christian missionary who even secular observers rank in the top 6 most influential people who've ever lived. So, therefore, I think it's safe to say that if we want to live a life of gospel mission, and we want to be effective at it, and we want to impact our culture today, the lives of other people, I think the apostle Paul is a pretty good guy to look at.

And to study.

We should want to get inside his head. How did this man think and find out how, not only how he thought, but how he lived and operated and what his goals were so that we can be influenced by him, even today, and let our lives be shaped by his influence and live lives that are devoted to gospel mission in the same way. That his was and wield an enormous impact in the process. What we're gonna do this morning is look at 1 Corinthians 9:16.

And following, and we're just gonna go through this passage, and we're not gonna exegete every single thing we see in these verses, but we're just gonna observe seven ways that Paul lived out his lifestyle of gospel mission, and we'll try to learn from him and from his example as, as we go. The first thing that He does. The first way that he lived out his lifestyle of gospel mission is he preached the gospel to others. He preached the gospel to others without shame and without compromise.

In Romans 1, Paul says, I'm not ashamed of the gospel. I'm not ashamed to preach it, I'm not ashamed to believe that it's true for me. I'm not ashamed of the gospel. And we see here in 1 Corinthians 9, Paul preached the gospel to other people.

Look at the language in verse 16, I preached the Gospel. I preach the gospel, verse 18, preach the gospel, offer the gospel. This was Paul's obsession. When he opened his mouth to speak to people, he spoke gospel to them.

When you see the expression, preach the gospel, it might be easy to go, well, Paul was a preacher and I'm not a preacher, so this really is not a great example for me. No, the word translated preach the gospel is the Greek word evangelize. I evangelize, I evangelize, I evangelize, I offer the gospel is what Paul is saying, and we're all called to the same lifestyle of evangelizing others, going to all the world. And preach the gospel or evangelize every creature.

Jesus says in Mark 16. Go into all the world, Matthew 28 and make disciples of all the nations. At the center of the Christian faith is an announcement of staggeringly good news, and Paul gave his life to Spreading and announcing this good news to other people. Later in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul describes what the gospel is, you can just write down in your notes, 1 Corinthians 15:38, Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures.

He was buried, he was raised from the dead on the third day according to the scriptures, and then Paul goes on to say 4 times, he appeared, he appeared, he appeared, he appeared. There's no denying. That Christ was raised. He died, was buried, he was raised, he appeared, he appeared, he appeared, he appeared.

Just to make sure you get the point that he truly was raised from the dead, and that is the core of the gospel, and then there are a million ramifications that spin off from that core, and Paul spent his life announcing these core realities in history about Christ and then teasing out. The ramifications of those truths and applying them to people's lives. That's what it means to evangelize and Paul gave himself to this calling and all that he did. He preached what he preached the gospel.

There are many today and a number of ministries today that are trying to gain people on their church or ministry roles and so they know that the gospel is offensive. So they modify the gospel in some way, they alter it. In order to make it more palatable to people in our culture today, but Paul didn't do this. He preached the gospel as it was given to him.

He knew the Jews were scandalized by the gospel, he knew that the Gentiles, many of them looked at the gospel and said this is foolishness, but Paul preached it anyway because he knew that the gospel is the power of God. Paul wanted God's power in his ministry, just as we want God's power in our ministry here at Cornerstone. And if we want the power of God in our ministry in its thickest density, then we need to speak gospel to one another, to ourselves, and to a lost in a dying world.

In 1 Corinthians 1, Paul says, the word of the cross, the message of the cross is to those who are perishing, foolishness, but to us who are being saved, it is the power of God.

We preach Christ crucified to the Jews, a stumbling block. This is the Greek word scandalon, from which we get the word scandalous, and the Gentiles foolishness, and that word foolishness is a translation of the Greek word we get our English word moron from. The Gentiles would hear the gospel and say that is idiocy, that is moronic foolishness. But Paul said that's what I'm preaching.

And I'm not gonna compromise. He said to the Corinthians, when I was with you, a few years ago, I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified. You guys were amazed and in awe of all of these other gurus who knew all this other stuff. I was content to know nothing but Jesus and Him crucified.

And he didn't waffle on that. If you want your ministry to others to be infused with the power of God, then make sure it is infused with gospel. Some will be offended, some will scoff, some will be horrified, but some will believe, and you will see the power of God in your life and in the lives of those that you minister the gospel to. This is what Paul did without compromise.

Paul could have accommodated himself to the philosophies of his age. And had he done so, had Paul put his finger to the wind and said, what is the prevailing current of philosophies in my day today and whatever that is, I'll just adapt myself and roll with that and fit in. If Paul would have done that, He would have been forgotten on the pages of history and become just like everyone else. He would have gone down in history if remembered at all as one teacher who ended up just like all the rest.

In fact, let me take notes here. Here's the key to having an utterly forgettable ministry. An utterly forgettable life. Just look around at the prevailing culture.

And become just like them. You do that, and you will be nicely forgotten. You'll be loved in the short term, but then forgotten and abandoned when cultural trends lead people beyond what you are saying. Paul did not do this.

He believed that he served his culture best, not by being like the culture, but by colliding against the culture with the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel message did not fit into the spirit of Paul's age. Paul didn't care. Paul preached the gospel anyway, he knew that his message was about 3000 years ahead of its time.

Paul preached the gospel and his message touched the people in his own generation and has impacted every age since. I don't know that we understand how staggering. How staggeringly different the gospel really is. All of the wise men of the world in Paul's day, these philosophers that crowded the streets in Corinth and people would pay money to hear these philosophers and, and other philosophers that preceded Paul's day.

They, they, they're all clustered over here and they're hot on the trail. They think of finding the truth about God and the way to God through their wisdom. And then on the other end, there's differences between them, but they're all over here on this end of the spectrum. But then over on this end of the spectrum by himself is the apostle Paul, pointing to a tortured, twisted, writhing, naked man upon a cross gasping for air.

And he says, no, no, no, this is the glory of God. Behold God and behold the only way to God. And all of these wise men over here looked at Paul, pointing to that and said, that's foolishness. That's a scandal.

But that's what Paul preached. The essence of the Gospel, if you read First Corinthians, God said in advance, I'm gonna destroy the wisdom of the wise. And the cleverness of the clever, I'm gonna set aside. I'm going to craft a way of salvation.

That no wise man or woman would ever arrive at on their own. And in order to embrace Jesus, you must become a fool, as it were, and abandon your own wisdom and come to the foot of the cross and bow before the Lord Jesus Christ and believe in this dying. And then raise savior as your one and only hope for eternal life. This is the gospel that Paul preached.

People living a life of gospel mission, don't compromise the gospel, they don't sideline the gospel, they put this gospel front and center in their life and in their ministry, no matter how jarringly different it is from anything that anyone else has ever come up with. And just real quick before we move on, you might look at Paul's life of preaching the gospel and think, man, What an amazing guy. I hope one day to be mature enough to do what Paul is saying that he does here in preaching the gospel.

Actually, you'll be interested to know that Paul entered into a life of gospel mission when he was a baby Christian.

When he was a brand new Christian. In Acts 9, look at this sequence of events. He was baptized, and he took food and was strengthened. Now, for several days, he was with the disciples who were at Damascus, and immediately he began to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues, saying he is the Son of God.

Paul entered into this life of evangelizing and speaking gospel truth on the first day. The very day that he was baptized. And so this is not something to wait for and to hope you grow into, you were not just saved through the gospel, but you were saved for the gospel. You were not just saved by Christ, but you were saved for Christ's cause of gospel mission.

There's a 2nd thing that we observe in Paul, a 2nd way that Paul lived out his lifestyle of gospel mission, and that is he preached the gospel to others out of a sense of sacred and if you could add the word, and delightful duty. He preached the gospel to others out of a sense of sacred and delightful duty. He says in verse 16, for if I preach the gospel or evangelize, I have nothing to boast of, for I am under compulsion for woe is me if I do not preach the gospel. Paul does not just preach the gospel, he preached it in the right spirit.

He did so humbly, not boastfully, and he was driven out of an inward sense of compulsion to do so. In verse 16, he's basically saying, if I preach the gospel, there's hardly, in my opinion, any virtue in that. I don't even feel like I'm making a choice. I'm driven to evangelize.

I'm driven to preach out of an inner sense of compulsion, a compulsion that must be satisfied or I'm not happy. If this compulsion is not satisfied, I'm a miserable man. This language tells us that the gospel was a fire in Paul's bones. He's like Peter and John in the Book of Acts who were told to stop speaking in the name of Jesus and they said we can't stop.

We can't stop speaking what we have seen and heard. Paul is much like Jeremiah, the prophet, who knew that he could never quit preaching, even if he tried. Listen to what Jeremiah says in chapter 20, verse 9. But if I say I will not remember God or speak anymore in His name, then in my heart it becomes like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary of holding it in and I cannot endure it.

what Jeremiah is saying? If, if I close my mouth and try to stop myself from speaking in the name of God, it would create a suffering that I would not be able to endure for long. And that's what Paul is saying here. I can't stop evangelizing.

If I tried, the misery would be too great. That's why he goes on to say, woe is me if I do not preach the gospel. And you might think reading that statement from Paul that he must be afraid of some judgment. Down the road, like if he fails to preach the gospel, then he's gonna get into trouble with God down the road, or some judgment awaits him.

They're actually commentators that understand Paul in this way. In fact, one of them, who's actually an excellent commentator, says this by way of explaining what Paul means when he says, woe is me if I do not preach the gospel. He says, and I quote, Paul must preach the gospel of salvation. If not, he would incur God's wrath and its consequences.

I strongly disagree. And find the statement actually to be theologically careless. Paul did not live in fear of the wrath of God. The woe that Paul feared and that he's speaking about here is not some future woe that might come upon him down the road if he failed to preach the gospel today.

But here's the deal, not preaching the gospel was itself the woe. That he dreaded most of all. It's like a man saying to a woman, woe is me if I can't have you. In fact, if you guys are thinking about proposing to a gal, use this line, Woe is me if I can't have you, and then pop the question.

What a man would be saying by a statement like that is that not having the woman he loves is itself the woe. His life is a ruined life if he cannot have her. And Paul is talking the same way. He's like, woe is me if I cannot give this good news to other people, woe is me if I am not able to talk about Christ.

A life wherein I cannot evangelize other people with the good news about Christ is already a ruined life. I cannot imagine myself not being allowed to preach Christ, and unevangelizing life is not worth living. In fact, it's one of my greatest woes, Paul would say. Paul is saying, I have an inner compulsion.

Paul was so filled with the love of Christ, so controlled by the love of Christ, people accused him of being crazy. And in 2 Corinthians 5, Paul's like, what, I'm guilty. If you define a crazy person as someone who's not in control of their own faculties, I'm crazy, because I'm not in control of my own faculties. The love of Jesus is in control of me.

Paul knew that he was a recipient of an amazing salvation of grace and forgiveness, and he knew the love that God had shown to him and forgiven him of his many, many sins, and Paul wanted to spread this message. He knew what it meant for him. But driven by God's grace toward him, Paul wanted others to know and it was a fulfillment of his own happiness to be able to speak to others and to share his delight with others. So he preached the gospel.

Humbly and out of a sense of sacred and delightful duty. Let's look at this 3rd way that he lived out his life of gospel mission. He preached the gospel to others at no charge. Paul did not put this on other people and say that every other gospel preacher needs to do what I do, but it's just what he decided to do.

And I think what's more instructive for us is the thinking process by which Paul arrived at that. He says, for if I do this, if I preach the gospel voluntarily, I have a reward, but if against my will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me. These are actually some difficult statements that are hard to completely understand. we'll do our best with this, very quickly.

Paul is basically saying, I preach the gospel and I don't charge for my, my services. And no matter how you look at it, there's two ways of looking at what I do. And either way, I don't want to charge people for my services of evangelizing other people. He says, if I preach the gospel of my own free will, then When you, when you get to do what you want to do, the doing of that is its own reward, right?

Think about it. The things that you really want to do and you voluntarily choose to do them because you want to do them. Do you expect a reward for that? You go on vacation to some foreign country and see all these amazing sights.

Do you, do you come back and expect a reward for that vacation, for doing what you were delighted to do? No, the doing of that is already its own reward. If you want to sit down this afternoon and relax and watch a football game, or even take a two-hour nap, and you choose to do that because you want to do that very badly, would you call someone up tonight and say, hey, I need you to compensate me for watching the football game today, or taking a nap? You wouldn't do that.

You don't need compensation for doing what you want to do. And that's how Paul felt about preaching the gospel to people. It was his favorite thing to do. And so the doing of it was in and of itself, its own reward.

He didn't need to be paid. He says, let's look at it another way. If I do this against my will, I have a stewardship entrusted to me. What Paul is probably alluding to here is the fact that the call to preach the gospel with his life was not something that he sought after.

In fact, he was on the road to Damascus in order to persecute and imprison Christians. But Jesus confronted him on the road to Damascus, and Jesus called him to go and to preach to Jews and to Gentiles, and Christ didn't ask Paul, hey, would you like to do this? you're on my short list of people that I'd really like to give this responsibility to, but I want you to tell me whether you want this or not. Christ didn't ask his opinion.

He basically told Paul what Paul's gonna do. And Paul, in a sense, he would say, I, I didn't choose this, I didn't seek this, I was actually engaged in the opposite of this, and Christ confronted me, and he laid this calling upon me, almost as it were, apart from my will, because I didn't seek after it. And so based on that, Paul viewed himself as having been given an incredible stewardship of the gospel. This amazingly precious and valuable thing that's been handed to him by Jesus and Paul's like, I can't believe I have this and, and even the gospel, it's not his gospel.

It's not his announcement. It's from Jesus, it belongs to him. And Paul is merely as a steward passing on to other people. What doesn't even belong to him, but belongs to Jesus and it's from him.

And so Paul's like, either way you wanna look at it. I'm doing what I wanna do, and that in itself is its own reward, and I didn't seek after this, but it was given to me, a stewardship has been entrusted to me, and this gospel isn't even mine as it were, it comes from Jesus. So why would I want to get paid for giving to people something that didn't even come from me? Now Paul argues elsewhere that Those engaged in Christian ministry have the right to be financially compensated.

And paid for their ministry. He even mentions that in this book and we won't take the time to get into that. But Paul basically says, in my case, even though I have the right To insist that I be paid, I willingly lay down that right. Because it's one of my ways personally of living out the reality and the ethic of the gospel.

You say, well, what is your reward, Paul? Well, verse 18, Paul says, what then is my reward? Here's my reward that when I preach the gospel, I may offer the gospel without charge so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel. He's saying, my reward, my greatest reward in life is to simply preach the gospel and to do so without charging money for it.

Paul worked full time as a pastor, as a missionary. In evangelism, preaching the gospel, planning churches, and then on top of that, he worked another full-time job generating income to meet his own needs, so it's not to be a burden to, to any others. That's the way Paul chose to live his life. Of unrelenting focus on gospel mission.

There's a 4th way that Paul lived out his lifestyle of gospel mission and that is he preached the gospel to others as if he were their slave. He preached the gospel to others as if he were their slave. Verse 19, for though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all that I might win the more. Paul had the mindset of a servant of other people, of a slave.

Paul was not some celebrity preacher who viewed everyone as his slaves to serve him. He did not view a congregation as someone that he could use for his own selfish purposes. If anything, he viewed his audiences as his masters, and he viewed himself as their slave, and he ministered to them from the posture of a servant seeking the good of others and all that he said and did. He viewed himself as their servant or a slave who owed.

To his audience, the service of sharing the gospel with them. In Romans 1, Paul uses a little different language, but it's the same idea. He says in Romans 1:14, I am a debtor. I'm in debt.

I'm a man deep in debt. I am a debtor both to Greeks and the barbarians, both to the wise and to the foolish. So for my part, I'm eager to preach the gospel to you who are at Rome. Paul says, I, everyone that I meet, I feel like I'm indebted to that person and what I owe them is gospel.

Whether they're saved or whether they're lost, I am in debt. And I owe them gospel and the ultimate service that I can render to people is to give them the good news of the gospel. Imagine we all had this mindset, not just toward the loss, but even towards our fellow Christians. We should, when we relate to one another, we should feel like we're debtors to one another.

And what we owe to one another is the good news of the gospel. And every counseling session. That you may have with someone, you are indebted to that councilee. You owe them the gospel and you need to pay on that debt.

Whenever I stand up here to preach on a Sunday morning, I am your slave. You are the elevated ones, and I am the one who is at your feet, serving you, and I'm indebted to you, and I owe you a debt every single Sunday. To give you the gospel, and I'm paying on that debt, every opportunity that I have to minister to you and you are worthy. In Christ of the labor.

that I or any other preacher from this pulpit needs to endure in order to pay that debt and to give you the precious gospel of Christ. We should feel a sense of debt to the people of this community. Part of why we're here at Barnes in this facility is to expand our ability to reach more people with the gospel of Christ. We've got really amazing news and there's so many people around us.

who have never heard. A pure gospel. The amazing news of salvation through Jesus. Many people have heard parts of it.

Then diluted and mixed in with a bunch of other stuff that ends up nullifying the very parts of the gospel that they have heard. It's amazing to me living in our country, even people who have talking to people who've attended churches for years, sharing the gospel with them and then hearing them say, I have never heard this before. That's the most beautiful thing I've ever heard in my life. You guys have heard those types of statements when you've shared the gospel with others.

God has given us a stewardship. We have a debt that we need to pay to the people of this community. By giving to them the gospel, we are their servants. We make ourselves willingly the servants of others in doing what we do to get the message out to others that they might hear this good news of the gospel.

There's a 5th way that Paul lived out his gospel missional life, and that is he was willing to adapt himself to people in order to win them to Christ. Just a few points about this, look what he says in verse 20, to the Jews, I become as a Jew that I might win Jews, to those who are under the law, I become as one under the law, though not being myself under the law that I might win those who are under the law. Verse 21, to those who are without law, I become as one without law, though not being without the law of God, but under the law of Christ, that I might win those who are without law.

To the weak, I become weak that I might win the weak.

I have become all things to all men that I may by all means save some. Notice Paul's obsession in these verses. Verse 19, so that I may win more, verse 20, so that I may win Jews, verse 20, so that I may win those under the law, verse 21, so that I may win those who are without the law, verse 22, so that I may win the weak, verse 22, so that I might by all means save some, and then even in verse 23, so that I may become a fellow partaker. Of the gospel with others.

Paul was willing. To flex on just about anything except the gospel. He was willing to dispense with all other traditions and practices and dietary regulations and practices. He was willing to become as much like those he was seeking to reach as he possibly could in order to open a door to share Christ with them.

He's so flexible with that, that it might be startling that he was so inflexible with the gospel. If you try to change one detail of the gospel, Paul would pronounce a curse on you. If an angel from heaven came down and spoke a gospel that was slightly different than what Paul preached, Paul would pronounce a curse on that angel. If Paul ever caught himself preaching a different gospel than the gospel that Christ had given to him, Paul would pronounce a curse on himself.

You don't mess with Paul when it comes to the gospel. You don't take away from it, and you don't add to it. He was absolutely rigid and inflexible when it came to the gospel, but then he held loosely to everything else. He was willing to give up his Jewish customs.

He was willing to give up the way that he and his parents and grandparents had done things for centuries in order to be able to reach more people for Christ. He was willing to have Timothy. circumcised, if that would help in his outreach to the Jews. Paul was willing to eat ham.

With Gentiles, if that would help him to reach Gentiles with the gospel. And we should ask ourselves, what are we willing to give up? What are things that are in our lives that we can do without in order to enlarge our capacity to reach more people for Christ. Paul was willing to give up anything so as not to cause offense and close doors.

That's the context, but I think we do well to ask what we're willing to give up in order to make the time and create the opportunities. To spend time with people and to share Christ with them. What are we willing to give up? David Platt in his book Radical Together, early in the book, he tells about Two Baptist missionaries that went to an island a number of years ago to preach the gospel to the tribal people on that island, and they preached the gospel.

The tribal leaders did not like the message, so they killed these two missionaries and ate them. Sometime later, a Lutheran missionary came to the island to preach the same gospel. This time, the tribal leaders listened and believed in Christ, and soon thereafter, a majority of people in these tribes had become Christians, believers in Jesus. But David Platt goes on to say, to bemoan the fact that, let me just read what he says.

In the years since their mass conversion to Christianity, this tribe has turned inward due to a variety of factors including cultural isolation and religious persecution. These Christians have virtually kept Christ to themselves. He goes on to say this, he says, take the issue of pork. Muslim tribes across this island do not eat pork because they believe it is unclean.

This Christian tribe, on the other hand, loves to eat pork. Naturally, any Christian wanting to reach Muslims with the gospel would be wise to abstain from pork around Muslims. Yet most Christians here are not willing to take even this small step. One believer succinctly said to a friend of mine on the island, I would rather a Muslim go to hell than for me to have to stop eating pork.

And we shake our heads. Oh, it's terrible. It's terrible. Someone would have that attitude.

But would you give up pork? For someone who would very much like to behead you. For sharing the gospel with them. That's not as easy as you might think.

Would you happily give up pork? In order to have the opportunity to dine with Jihadi John in Britain. The one beheading people. To have a lunch with him and to be able to share Christ with Him.

Are you willing to give up things out of your life that really are of no account for eternity? In order to enlarge your capacity. To share Christ with other people. In this case, they had pork, they didn't want to let go of, but we've got our own versions of pork, right?

There's a lot of pork that we don't want to give up. In order to expand our capacity to reach people for Christ, Paul. If there was any legitimate way in his conscience that he could obey Christ at the same time forego certain things or to modify his behavior, Paul was happily, happy to do that in order to enlarge his capacity to reach people for Christ. We're running short on time.

Let's move on to a 6th way that Paul lived out his life of gospel mission. That is, he oriented his life completely around the goal of being a fellow partaker of the gospel with others. This is an amazing statement by Paul. It's all inclusive.

He says, I do all things for the sake of the gospel that I may become a fellow partaker of it. Everything I do in my life, everything I do for the sake of the gospel, that I may become a fellow partaker of the gospel together with other people. Whenever Paul was evaluating anything in his life, should I allow this into my life or not? Should I do this or not, he asked himself, will this serve God's gospel purposes in me and through me in the lives of other people?

Will this activity serve to deepen my participation? In the gospel together with other people. Will this activity make me more effective in reaching others for Christ? He evaluated everything through this filter.

Will this serve God's gospel purposes in me? And if his answer was, no, Then Paul didn't do it. That's how laser focused he was. That's how a guy like him could live for 34 years after his conversion.

And say things and do things that end up marking the lives of over 18 billion people over the last 2000 years. You don't just accidentally happen into that influence. That's a man with laser focus on the gospel. Where all that he did was bent in that direction of gospel mission, and so Paul wielded and generated enormous impact upon others.

Everything I do, Paul says, I do for the gospel, everything I do. I do to enhance my goal of being a partaker of the gospel with other people. Paul didn't just fit the gospel into his life, or he didn't just fit gospel mission into his busy life. No, everything he did was bent in the direction.

Of gospel mission. And if there was something in his life that didn't fit that mission, he happily dispensed with it. Imagine living just for this week. With that focus.

Imagine that. What difference could we make? How different would our we be? I love his language.

It's not what we would have expected. And by the way, we're gonna stop here at 0.6. Paul says, I do all things for the sake of the gospel that I may become a fellow partaker of it. That's an interesting way of wording things that we wouldn't have expected.

Paul didn't just want people to be a partaker of the gospel. He was partaking of the gospel and he wanted them to partake with him. Also, Paul's passion was not just I gotta get other people to partake of the gospel. no, no, Paul wanted to partake and then share with others what he was partaking of.

And when he did partake of the gospel, he didn't want to partake alone. Paul is like a man enjoying a sumptuous feast called the gospel. And he's enjoying this feast, and he's like, this would be so much greater if other people were sitting at the table with me sharing in this incredible dining experience. I don't want to just be a partaker of the gospel, I wanna be a co-partaker of the gospel together with a bunch of other people at the table.

And so Paul spent his life sending out invitations to this incredible sumptuous feast of the gospel so that he could partake together with others. Imagine applying these three questions to everything you do. Number 1, will this activity serve to deepen my participation in the gospel? Will it deepen my own participation in the gospel?

Number 2, will this activity help me to deepen other people's participation in the gospel? And then thirdly, will this activity deepen my ability to participate in the gospel together in community with other people? Those 3 questions were questions that Paul would ask himself. And if something passed those tests, He happily included them in his life.

If they didn't pass those tests. Paul simply didn't waste his time doing those things. I'll just give you the 7th point so you can fill in the blank. Paul endured any discipline necessary to preach the gospel to others with maximum impact.

He goes on, guys, to describe this incredibly disciplined life. Paul's like, when I run, I wanna run straight toward the goal and When I box, I want every blow to land. I don't. Life is short.

I don't want to waste my days. I don't want to waste my energy with beating the air. And guys, so many times in our own lives, we, we can be, we run from this to that and our energies get so dissipated in a million different unconnected directions. Imagine living with this surgical focus.

Every blow lands. Every stride takes you straight toward the goal that you are striving for. And Paul says in these verses, I'm, I'm going after a wreath that is imperishable. And you might say, what is that wreath?

Just write down 1 Thessalonians 2:19. Paul says to the Thessalonians, he looks at them and says, who is our hope and our joy and literally our wreath of exaltation? Is it not even you? It's people that Paul was pursuing.

They were his crown. They were his wreath. Paul spent his life in gospel mission, making friends for eternity, and he was willing to undergo any rigor or discipline or sacrifice in order to make that happen. And there are some ways that Paul's situation as we've seen this morning are unique and he lived out his calling in a way that's not exactly the way that yours or my lifestyle is supposed to look, but, but you need to be able to do something similar to what he does, and that is, here's the life that God has given to me, and here is how I am living my life with laser focus on gospel mission.

Let's learn from Paul's example and follow his example and let's ponder the impact that we can make on people who are alive today, and let's ponder the impact that we can have on people in the generations to come if we are faithful. You and I are living monuments to the faithfulness of other people in generations past who have lived on gospel mission. That's how the gospel has reached us. And it has reached us so that we can be faithful to pass it on to other people who are not only alive today, but even our burden is we want, we want 100 years from now, the world to be a different place because we were here and we were faithful in the chain of salvation to pass the gospel on from this generation.

To the next. Let me close with this. in 1886, there was a group of men in Chicago standing on a street corner singing hymns and preaching the gospel. There was a professional baseball player who was hanging out with his teammates and came upon this scene.

And he heard them singing the hymns. He was like, those are the hymns my mom used to sing when I was a kid. So he stopped and listened together with his teammates, and he heard the gospel being preached, and that began him on a journey where shortly thereafter he accepted Jesus as his Lord and Savior. That man's name was Billy Sunday.

the, the evangelist of, several decades ago who went on to, he ended up leaving his baseball career, preached in hundreds, thousands of crusades to hundreds of thousands of people and seeing many of them come to know the Lord. During one such crusade, there was a man sitting in his audience who had lost an arm, a one-armed man. And he sat there and listened to Billy Sunday preaching the gospel in this crusade, and he embraced Christ as his Lord and Savior and soon thereafter, this one-armed man felt the call of God to become an evangelist himself.

So he began traveling the country, preaching in churches and in crusades, and often the advertisements for his crusades would say something like, come and see the one-armed preacher.

Well, there was a man named Ray Ransom. Living in a small town in Nebraska. who had lost his arm in a farming accident sometime earlier. And this one-armed man in Nebraska came upon an advertisement where this one-armed preacher was coming into town and it said, come and see the one-armed preacher, and this man, Ray Ransom was not a Christian, but he felt connected to this one-armed preacher and he's like, I'm gonna go and check this guy out.

So he did and he brought his family with him. And he heard the gospel being preached, and on that occasion, Ray Ransom and the members of his family became believers in the Lord Jesus Christ. Ray Ransom had a son named Ira Ransom. Ira Ransom accepted the Lord on that occasion and went on to be involved in Christian ministry.

He's alive today and he's one of the foremost apologists for Christianity in the Mormon community. A few decades ago, Ira was ministering to a group of people and he led a young man. To the Lord and he discipled this young man to spiritual maturity and effectiveness in ministry and this young man that he led to the Lord is now pastoring a church in Utah and overseeing a number of church planning operations in the state of Utah and Idaho doing a great work for the Lord. That young man's name is Lee Whitworth, a man that we as a church have the privilege of supporting.

As a missionary. And Lee Whitworth himself has a number of children whom he is training to send out his arrows into the world. They're all great apologists for the Christian faith. Here's what I know.

Here's what I know. I know that those young men standing on a street corner back in Chicago in 1886 had no clue of the far-reaching impact of their ministry, their gospel ministry that night would have upon hundreds of thousands of other people. Billy Sunday's salvation and then the hundreds of thousands that came to know the Lord just through his evangelistic ministry. And I'm also sure that these young men standing on the street corner in Chicago in 1886 had no idea of the way that their ministry that night would be impacting the state of Utah today, 130 years later.

Just crazy when you think about it. Guys, you and I have not been saved merely by the gospel of Jesus Christ, but we have been saved into gospel ministry. We've been saved for a cause that we're calling gospel mission. And this is something for mature believers to enter into and for baby Christians to enter into.

All that we do needs to be bent, all of our faculties, all of our energies need to be bent in the direction. Of living a life of gospel intentionality and gospel mission. Seeking to spread this message to all those that God brings into contact with us. I ask you this morning, not, do you have gospel mission?

But I ask you, does the gospel mission Have you Let's pray together. Lord, we'll never know until eternity the impact of the choices that we make for good or for evil. We, there's so much power in this room, so much potential, Lord. And just confessing for myself so much of what you've given to me.

gets diffused, it gets scattered, it's not focused. Make me a more focused man, make us a more focused people. To take all that you have given to us, and we, we turn it in the direction of gospel mission. May we not just do this because we're called to, but Being a saved people who are dazzled by your grace, Lord, may we.

Live this life because we're pursuing our own happiness, that we would be miserable if we could not live a life of gospel mission and sharing Christ with others. Do a work in our hearts, refine our lives, help us to live lean and mean. Lord, and with a greater focus than we've had before. That we might be useful instruments in your hand to further your kingdom.

On this earth. We thank you, Lord, for the opportunity that we have right now to give of our offerings to you. We ask that you would receive these funds and do much with every penny that is given for the glory of Jesus. We ask these things in the name of Jesus, and all God's people said, Amen.