Morning everyone. So what Charlene was saying about the core discussion is just an opportunity if you haven’t taken advantage of it, we’re trying to have everyone in the church just spend a few moments discussing the Great Commission. Just the passage at the end of Matthew chapter 28 and we’ve been actually focusing our messages the last few weeks on the Great Commission as well and we’re continuing with that today. It’s just what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ. We’ll just review the Great Commission. This is what we’ve been thinking on for last month or so. It says then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything I’ve commanded you, and surely I’m with you always to the very end of the age.” So the commission just instructs all of us as followers of Jesus to have this priority in our lives of making disciples, which means we have to intentionally engage with other people with the purpose of seeing them become Christians and and following Jesus then as we do. So we’re instructed to carry on these activities of baptizing and teaching, but there’s one essential verb that comes first in that string and that’s that therefore go. A small verb that encompasses all of the missions work that’s being done across the globe, but it also includes all our little efforts in our city at trying to engage people with the gospel of Christ. Therefore, go. So that’s Jesus’ word to us today. We could stop there, but I’ll I’d like to talk about a little further and just reaffirm the importance of going and having our imaginations enchanted with the adventure of evangelism cuz really easy This is the easiest part of our Christian lives, I think, for us to allow to atrophy and to get rusty through disuse because it’s not something if we don’t if we’re not active in it, if we’re not doing it, it just goes away from us. And our first I think the big hurdle that we have maybe holds most of us back from engaging in evangelism is we we just lose a little confidence in the gospel to change lives and we forget the potency and the power of the gospel message. And we read a passage in Luke 9 last week and Luke 10 a moment ago. Both chapters deal with people being sent out by Jesus. In chapter 9, Jesus sent out his 12 disciples, his inner core, his inner circle. Says he gave them power and authority to drive out demons, to cure diseases. I sent them out to preach the kingdom of God and to heal the sick. So, those 12 men went out on their short-term mission trip. They’re going to deal with a wide range of problems and afflictions in people’s lives. Especially people weighed down with a torment of demonic influence. You know, we’d probably identify people like that today as people suffering from severe mental illness, but the demons are real and uh they would be delivered and people would be made whole and crippled bodies ruined by disease that’d be made well. And as the disciples were doing that, they were to preach the kingdom of God. And you think about it, it’s kind of shorthand for letting people know that there’s a king over the over the universe who loves them. That they that human beings they’re they’re not alone and adrift in a cold universe. They’re not They don’t have to be locked into their own narrow worlds of little habits and small ideas. There’s a king above that loves them. And as bodies were healed and demons were tossed out, it would prove and confirm the message that the people had a king who has a kingdom and who wanted them to be part of that kingdom and enjoy its tremendous eternal benefits. So, Luke chapter 9 is great. And the 12 disciples went out and they returned and they told Jesus about their adventures and it was so much fun that in Luke chapter 10 Jesus decided to up the ante and increase the workforce by six times. 72 missionary ambassadors of Jesus were recruited. Not just the OG, the original disciples, but an additional 60 anonymous believers that we know nothing about. As we read that, it should be obvious to us that Jesus doesn’t need a professional class of clergymen or seminary trained missionaries to go out and represent him. You know, we might think of Jesus’ 12 disciples as these special handpicked uh Navy SEALs, tightly disciplined, closely monitored, kind of a professional class of Christian workers and they’re the ones who really are qualified to do the work. But then Jesus shatters that paradigm by throwing the door open to include these 60 anonymous individuals who weren’t anywhere near his inner circle. He was just looking for people willing to trust him and go. And go not under their own authority and power, but under his. So, at the start of chapter 10 we read, “The Lord appointed 72 others, sent them out two by two ahead of him to every town and place he was about to go.” Their mission was very much the same as the as the 12 in the chapter earlier. Said, “Heal the sick uh who are there. Tell them the kingdom of God is near you.” And then to those amateur evangelists he also said, “The harvest is plentiful. The workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send out workers into the harvest field.” So, Jesus was telling them and I think his words are for us this morning as well that making disciples is a large enough project that everyone here who decides to climb aboard is a welcome addition. It’s not like Jesus is perusing 300 resumes to pick out five uh best candidates. He invites all of us, every one of us to to pray for this harvest, which means we’re involved in this harvest. Numbers of people hearing who need to hear the message, it’s intimidatingly huge. Harvest is plentiful. More people need to sign up as workers. More people need to enlist who will believe that the ministry and the message Jesus gives us, because it’s jammed with his authority and his power, we assume that it has a great potency if we take it out with us. You know, about the time that the uh Presbyterian Christians here in Strathcona were organizing themselves into what would become our church, Knox Church, there was a vibrancy to missions in Presbyterian circles and other denominations in North America and elsewhere. Pastors of that generation were urged to preach at least 20 missionary sermons a year. That’s a lot of messages on missions. Virtually every other Sunday, and if you think folk are focusing for a few weeks on the Great Commission is a big undertaking, think what Knox Church might have been like 100 years ago if you were sitting where you’re sitting right now. One of the areas the Presbyterian mission sought to evangelize was this mysterious hermit kingdom of Korea, a nation that hardly anyone knew anything about. It wasn’t mapped, people didn’t know the geography. Uh population estimates varied so widely that some estimated the Korean population about 250,000. Other Others estimated it about 16 million. And one Canadian missionary who was being sent to Korea, he packed his bags for a Mediterranean climate, later confessing that he’d confused Korea with the Mediterranean island of Corsica. So, not long before our church building was built, this is the year 1889, 25-year-old American Presbyterian from Ohio named Sam Moffett, he informed his church family he’d be moving to that unfamiliar kingdom on the other side of the world. When he eventually arrived, he found a lukewarm reception to the for the to the gospel in the south in the region of Seoul. But when he ventured into that wilder region in the north centered in Pyongyang, this was a city that was labeled by the missionaries as the Sodom of Korea. But when the missionaries started sharing the gospel there, just miracles occurred. When he first got there, Sam Moffett had to be accustomed to having rocks thrown at him all the time whenever he was walking around, but the gospel message just began to blaze, and in seemingly no time at all, convert after convert after convert came to Christ, wave after wave of sincere Christians highly intent on studying the Bible, learning the Bible, worshipping, singing their favorite hymns like All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name, praying for hours and sometimes days on end with all their might. So within a highly compressed period of about 10 to 12 years, the greatest challenge for the missionaries was just trying to keep up with the growth. A new church uh would be built and immediately be overflowing and they’d have to get working on on another one right away. So there was in in Pyongyang, First Presbyterian, Second, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Central Presbyterian. They just couldn’t keep up with the buildings they needed and thousands of people would walk for miles in January weather just to get to a Bible conference. And though the Korean Christians were poor themselves, they they heard about a famine in India and they scraped together what they had and they sent it away. And the missionaries, they just couldn’t keep up with the need for teaching and baptizing, educating new believers. They started schools, they started seminaries. One missionary, when he baptized a Korean baptized a Korean family, said it was like putting a match to dry prairie grass. At that time, a single missionary might be overseeing as many as 50 churches and 30 other outposts and just trying to trying to maintain some kind of teaching ministry. Of course, that massive Christian growth brought enormous changes to the Korean culture, particularly in the way it affected girls and women because prior to the coming of the missionaries and the proclamation of the gospel, girls and women were so devalued compared to boys and men, they wouldn’t even be given names. They’d be known as things like number two or the one with the birthmark on her ear or so-and-so’s daughter, and they lived in the most squalid rooms in the houses. They weren’t allowed to have meals with the men or the boys. They were cloistered at home all day. They were only allowed outside with their all but their faces covered between the hours of 8:00 p.m. and midnight. A bell would ring, and that was the time when the women could be released for a few hours outside. But as Christianity spread like wildfire, one of the first acts of the missionaries was to give Korean women names when they were baptized. Names often like mercy or faith or love or patience. Missionaries began educating girls along with boys, and that was a stunning cultural shift. Christian families began eating meals together. And the Presbyterians, they also had a term for women who were not eligible for ordination, but they were so trained and so knowledgeable and so effective in ministry that they’d be given the term Bible women. City of Pyongyang became known as the Jerusalem of the East. There was nothing else like it in all of Asia. And it continued being filled with more and more churches and Christians. And And they weren’t just increasing in number, they were being utterly transformed on the inside. 1907, the year our church was built, there was an awakening of holiness in Pyongyang that’s really difficult for us to imagine. First rumblings came during an evening worship service on Monday, January 14th at their Central Presbyterian Church. And toward the end of that meeting, just hundreds of believers rushed forward in front of the sanctuary to confess long-hidden sins, fit of weeping and wailing unlike anything the Presbyterian missionaries could ever had ever seen or ever imagined would happen. The whole meeting became electrified, they said. And it continued that meeting continued until 2:00 a.m. and then day after day followed and the revival really didn’t subside until the spring several months later. And people would groan and beat their breasts and drop to the floor in great agony and really the awful ugliness of sin was being revealed. This is a culture that for many centuries had been dark and brutal and very pagan place, but when the son of God’s grace shone on it, everything that needed to be exposed was being exposed. So men would speak out their sin and they would break out in awful agony as if they were in terrible pain. One night even one of the American Presbyterian missionaries confessed to adultery and wound up leaving the mission field. Another day a 20-year-old believer confessed to beating his baby brother to death. That was only one of of many murder confessions that were made during that revival. One missionary recalled thinking he’s watching a Korean man beating the wooden floor in torment until his hands bled. He says, “Is this what sin is? We never knew it was so awful.” So Korea was transformed by the power of God, the gospel of Christ just a handful of missionaries determined to follow the Great Commission to go and make disciples of all nations. Jesus said the harvest is plentiful, there’s a shortage of workers. It’s difficult, I know, for us to relate to that kind of gospel effectiveness, but only 100 years ago in this little small section of Edmonton where we’re sitting right now, three large churches were built and filled with Christians. Knox Presbyterian across the street, Strathcona Baptist, and just beyond Strathcona Baptist, there’s a parking lot there now, Metropolitan Methodist, all within a single city block. So, if I think if these walls could talk, what stories might be told of people coming to Christ and growing and filled with the spirit and evangelizing and making disciples and being sent out as missionaries? I think the the long deceased saints who are sitting where you’re sitting right now might look at us and say, “What are you waiting for? The harvest is plentiful. Go out and be a worker.” And to them, you know, we might we might push back. We might whine a little and say, “Evangelism’s hard here. You don’t know what Edmonton’s become. You don’t know how resistant the soil is to the gospel message. You wouldn’t believe it. We’re a very secular city now. Right now, we’re at a point where our Edmonton neighbors might think it’s okay for us to believe what we believe, but they don’t think we should ever try to persuade anyone else to believe what we believe.” And in return, those old Knox saints of old might say, “Can’t you read? Jesus never said it would be easy.” But to believe what we believe about the gospel, that it’s the universal saving truth for all people, be deeply unloving not share it with others. They would say, “That would be like finding the cure for cancer, deciding to share it only with your own family.” And the fact that evangelism’s hard shouldn’t prevent us from extending the one cure that everyone needs for the sickness of their sin. When Jesus sent out the 72, he didn’t envision that have an easy time. He told them that some of the towns they entered would be very hostile, closed to the message of the kingdom of God. So, Jesus told his evangelists, “When you enter a town you’re not welcomed, go into its streets, say even the dust of your town that sticks to our feet we wipe off against you. Yet, be sure of this, the kingdom of God is still near. It’s close.” And then Jesus says, “I tell you, be more bearable on that day for Sodom than for that town. Woe to you, Chorazin and Bethsaida! For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes. It will be more bearable for Tyre and Sidon at the judgment than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted up to the skies? No, you’ll go down to the depths. He who listens to you listens to me. He who rejects you rejects me, but he who rejects me rejects him who sent me. So, Jesus was saying, “Even when you encounter hostility, keep preaching to them that the kingdom of God is near. Don’t take it personally if they reject you, because you’re my representative. If they’re rejecting you, they’re rejecting me, but don’t use difficulty as an excuse to stop trying to tell them the good news of the gospel that the kingdom of God is near. Of course, there’s going to be opposition. You know, Pyongyang, Korea, once the Jerusalem of the East, after the Second World War, there was kind of an artificial line drawn, and the Soviets were given control of the north and the US control of the south. And now three generations of that Kim family personality cult have ruled in North Korea. Christianity’s been brutally persecuted. When the Kim cult was being established, a great many Christians fled to the south. And today, North Korea ranks consistently as number one on the Open Doors World Watch list as the most dangerous place on Earth to be a Christian. It’s held that top spot on that list for almost every year since 2002. Kim Il Sung, the founder of that vehemently anti-Christian personality cult, he’s the grandfather of the current leader. He was raised in a devout Christian home. His His father prayed many, many hours for the Korean nation. His mom was one of those Bible women who would go out to the villages, give names to girls, teach them how to read, explain the scriptures to them. Kim Il Sung himself played organ in church, performed in church plays, he taught Sunday school, he led a youth group, lived in a pastor’s home for 2 years, eventually wound up doing everything he could to stamp out the faith and replace the true Messiah, Jesus, with himself as the Messiah in the brainwashed minds of his people. He essentially plagiarized the practices and the power of Christianity that he knew so well to present himself as the as the substitute Messiah. Toward the end of his life, he wrote an eight-volume memoir and he pulls back the curtain a little bit on on how that came about. He recounts that he’s in this one room and in the next room he hears one of his top right-hand men talking to a simple peasant. And the peasant is saying, “Is it true that Kim Il Sung can walk on water and dodge bullets and teleport and do all of that?” And his right-hand man kept saying, “Oh, yes, he can. Oh, yes, he can.” And later Kim Il Sung talks to his right-hand man and says, “Why did you let this simple Why did you lead him on like that? Why did you say yes when he asked those questions? You know I can’t do any of that.” And the right-hand man says to him, “Well, the people need someone to believe in.” And Kim Il Sung in his memoirs kind of turns uh to the face of the camera and says, “That’s right. The Korean people did need someone to believe in. Who am I to crush this man’s hopes? I should be this Messianic figure that they want me to be. I should be this Korean Messiah.” You know, one Korean man who had prayed many, many hours with Kim’s father said his parents were the most devout Christians who always prayed with tears for the country, but the son is the worst enemy of the Christian church. Of course, none of us ever get to choose our era or the local we’re told to evangelize. I think it might have been really delightful for any of us to be a Christian in North Korea in the first half of the 20th century. Today, it’s a nightmare. In the first part of 20th century, the South Korean region of Seoul, well, largely uninterested at first and and resistant to the gospel, but today, although South Korea ranks 30th in world population, it has some of the largest megachurches in the world. And it sends out more foreign missionaries to other other countries than any nation other than the US. So, for the present, North Korea is like the towns Jesus said his followers would go where they wouldn’t be welcomed. South Korea’s like the towns that Jesus said would welcome them joyously. We all might have been really comfortable being a visible, vocal witness, Christian witness in Edmonton 100 years ago, but today, it’s a harder mission field. There’s more rocks and thistles and compressed soil. But this is the field God has given us to work. This is our era, and he wants us to find a harvest in our city. So, we need to encourage one another to work our field together. We need some balance and some poise to keep working a field even if it’s difficult. We can’t afford to be enthralled with success or deflated or crushed by failure, or we’ll never be consistent evangelists. There’s that interesting exchange when the 72 return, almost it seems drunk with success. They said to Jesus, “Lord, even the demons submit to us in your name.” It’d been really successful missions trip. And Jesus didn’t want to pour cold water on their excitement. He rejoiced with them over their success over demonic forces. He said, “I saw Satan fall like lightning from heaven. I’ve given you authority to trample on snakes and scorpions, to overcome all the power of the enemy. Nothing will harm you.” But then Jesus added a word of great wisdom for all of us would-be evangelists, to not get too inflated by success or deflated by failure. He said, “Don’t rejoice that the spirits submit to you. Rejoice that your names are written in heaven.” So, the first thing on the minds of those returned evangelists, it wasn’t that they’d helped a lot of people. They didn’t talk about making sick people better or preaching the kingdom to hungry ears. They focused on those spectacular power encounters with demonic forces. But, Jesus wanted them to know that the spectacular was really not the most important thing. The most important thing was more significant, having their names written in heaven and proclaiming a message that other people would receive so their names could be written in heaven as well. Jesus was saying to them and he’s saying to us that power and performance, although it it’s given in the authority of Christ, shouldn’t be the thing that drives us in ministry. Helping others know Christ, be made whole, have their names written in heaven, that’s where the real action is. So, Jesus said, “Your performance, that’s not the thing you should be grateful for. The only valid motivation for making disciples and doing evangelism is that our names have already been written in heaven in past tense. You know, none of our lives are over. We haven’t found out yet how well or how poorly we’re going to run the rest of the race, but our name is already on our room reservation in heaven. And it’s Jesus’ performance, it’s not ours, that causes our name to be written down. We know the story. He was a He lived a sinless life. He was in tempted in every way as we are. He never gave into that temptation. He never sinned. No sin of his own that he was accountable for. All the mess of our sin, he took on himself. Remember that missionary seeing the revival of holiness that overpowered the church and he said, “Is this what sin is? We never knew it was so awful.” None of us really know the true awfulness of our sin and how God views it and how much we’ve offended a holy God with it. If we did, we’d probably all be on the floor right now pounding our fists into the wood and crying out in agony as the Koreans were when they were confessing their sin. Sin’s awful, but Jesus took the penalty, took it from us, put it on his own back, allowed himself to be pinned to the cross as our ransom payment and during the ultimate cost himself for our benefit. So, our sin was transferred to Jesus, suffered and died for us, his righteousness was transferred to us when we put our faith and trust in him alone. Our names immediately were written down in heaven when we put our faith and trust in him. Meaning no matter how how we do the rest of our lives, that name is not going to be erased. Knowing that, knowing what Jesus has done for us, if that filters down into our pores, means we don’t have to get depressed or angry if any of our evangelistic efforts are rebuffed. We don’t have to get angry or aggressive, don’t have to try winning arguments. Jesus tells us don’t rejoice in your accomplishments, just rejoice in my grace instead. He knows how weak and fragile all of us evangelists are. At the close of our passage, we read Jesus full of joy through the Holy Spirit said, “I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth because you’ve hidden these things from the wise and learned, you’ve revealed them to little children. Yes, Father, for this was for your good pleasure.” So, we’re all we’re all little children trying to do a big job of making disciples. Jesus rejoices over us, our names are written in heaven. He delights to bestow his authority and his power on us, uh given us this this field to work, and he wants us to find a harvest. We’re children, we know we’re not very skilled, we’ve been saved by God’s grace, that’s the only thing that qualifies us and properly motivates us to do evangelism. So, spend a couple of moments just with some practical suggestions. You know, the late Tim Keller, he spent many years pastoring a church and helping people come to Christ in that hardened field of New York City. And he says that when he had finished seminary and his denomination leaders were interviewing him for his first pastoral placement, he says they were quite evangelistic and they asked him how many people he had led to Christ. Tim Keller said he didn’t know of anyone. And he says that for a very long time he would say that he was not very evangelistically motivated or fruitful. That began to change for him when he read a biography of evangelistic sermons of great 18th century preacher George Whitfield, part of the Great Awakening at that time and time of evangelistic flourishing. And something clicked for Tim Keller at that point. He says then it’s like he couldn’t wait to start talking to non-Christians about the gospel. And after many, many fruitful years in New York City, there are some tips he would offer us. And six of them he says are dead simple, very easy. He says the first level of testimony is simply to let people know you go to church. Just dropping on them the fact that you’re a Christian believer. Number two, talk with non-Christian friends and colleagues, relatives about how your Christian faith helped you out with some issue. Helped you forgive or relax or gain peace. Testimony level two. Level three takes more guts, but no not not more knowledge. Just talk to people about ways Christ has changed your life. Number four, ask people questions about what they believe themselves. Don’t give any answers. Don’t try to refute them. Don’t argue. Just ask them what they believe themselves. What do you live for? What gives your life meaning? Just giving them questions that takes the conversation to a more serious level. Five, he He give people things to read or a podcast to listen to, or YouTube video to watch, something to get them thinking about the Christian faith.” And six, he says, “Take some courage, but ask them to come with you to an event of some sort, a lecture, or a concert, a talk, even a church service.” And you notice Tim Keller says about those six things, “None of them require a lot of knowledge. None of them require giving a gospel presentation. None of them even require opening a Bible.” It’s relational before it’s informational. All of us can do those six things. But one last thing, and this is something that comes before we can do any of those six things, is that we have to have a lot of non-superficial relationships with non-Christians. Friendships where a conversation can go below the surface level. See, it’s really easy, I know, for all of us to have all of our non-superficial relationships with one another, with other Christians in the church. And uh then we go outside these walls, and we have superficial relationships with everyone else. It’s hard to find a It’ll be hard for us to find a hearing for the gospel if our relationship with everyone we talk to is always on a superficial level. And uh we don’t we haven’t got their relational credibility to go below the surface. So, there’s some relational integrity needed to approach those six levels of testimony. Tim Keller says, “For a long time, he wasn’t very motivated. He wasn’t fruitful in evangelism.” But he says he discovered since then that evangelism is the tide that lifts all the ships in the church. If evangelism’s happening, all the other ministries in the church are raised up. Evangelism elevates justice ministry. It elevates small groups and Bible studies, and preaching, and everything we do as a church, from potlucks to garage sales. So, as we turn to prayer, I just want to point something out. Very New Testament way to pray. For the most part, evangelism prayer in the New Testament focuses on the believer, not on the unbeliever. Here are some examples. Luke 10:2, we read it. Ask the Lord of the harvest therefore to send out workers into his harvest field. In Acts chapter 4, the Christians are a little afraid and they say, “Lord, consider their threats. Enable your servants to speak your word with great boldness.” See, they’re praying for themselves, not necessarily for the unbelievers. Colossians 4:3-4, uh Paul’s in prison and he says, he recruits prayer for evangelism. He says, “Pray for us, too, that God may open a door for our message, so that we may proclaim the mystery of Christ for which I’m in chains.” And you see how utterly dependent Paul was was on on God in evangelism. This is Paul, who you would think would be the most clear presenter of the gospel in the world and he says, “Pray that I might proclaim it clearly as I should.” And then 2 Thessalonians 3:1, “Finally, brothers, pray for us that the message of the Lord may spread rapidly and be honored, just as it was with you.” Why does evangelism prayer always focus on the believer, not the unbeliever? Because the message itself is utterly powerful. Romans 1:16, “I’m not ashamed of the gospel. It’s the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. The harvest is plentiful. It’s the worker that’s where the shortage is. So, just these are very biblical prayers to pray for yourself and to pray for our church for the next few minutes. Now, we’ll take a We’ll take about three or four minutes for this. So, just pray these things for yourself. Pray these things for our church.