Enacts Mission

We are moving on in our series on Luke to look at mission, to look at evangelism. We are busy, if you're not aware, on a series called breaking bread, and we're looking at specifically hospitality and how Jesus was portrayed in the gospel of Luke as a man who sat and ate with sinners and he shared the gospel with them, and he shared teaching with them around a meal, around the dinner table. And we looked at what sort of things came out in these instances. And so this morning, we're going to be looking at Luke 14, and we're going to be seeing another angle on Jesus' teaching in someone's home. So we can turn to that, Luke 14.

We're going to be reading from verse one. But before we do that, if someone came up to you and they asked you to describe what it's like to be saved by God. If someone said this is a really airy fairy sort of concept, put it in an analogy so that I can understand. And this is actually a really good practice for us to go through when wanting to witness to people. How would you describe what it's like being saved?

Perhaps you'd say that it's kind of like being a passenger on the Titanic, and the boat is sinking and we're all floating in the cold water, and there's a few life rafts around. Being saved is like being pulled out of this water that's going to drown you and being put into this lifeboat. Jesus, you might say, is our life raft. Perhaps you'd say it's not like that. It's more like someone standing on one side of the Grand Canyon, this huge beautiful landscape, but dry and barren.

And we need to get across to the other side of the Grand Canyon because that's where the toilet block is, or that's where the water is, and we need to get to the water. We need to be pretty thirsty. But we're separated by this huge chasm, and this huge chasm is our sin. But Jesus is our bridge. Jesus gets us over the chasm to God.

Perhaps you've heard it explained in that way. This morning, we're going to be looking at how Jesus described it. Do you know how He said it was? What it was like? He said it was a massive party and everyone is invited.

God is a host, His people, His disciples are the messengers and there's absolutely no limit to who's invited. When we think of God's mission, when we think of doing mission, doing evangelism, how do we view it? Have you considered ever that it's a party? Have you ever viewed it in that way? And if you have or if you haven't, what sort of things do you associate with the word party?

What sort of images does it create? What do people then associate with the church today? Outsiders, what do they think of church? Do they think it's a party? How much easier would it be to do mission, would it be to do evangelism if we were able to invite them to a party here?

Say, come on. Be invited. How much easier is it to invite people to a party? Much easier sometimes than inviting them to church. Let's have a look at what Jesus specifically teaches us about mission this morning.

Let's have a look at Luke 14. We're going to be reading from verse one. All the themes that we've been looking at in the last four weeks is here again: hospitality, a meal, friendship, fellowship, and Jesus is teaching again. So we see again God's grace.

We see God's grace come through again. We are the poor. Jesus says His listeners, the Gentiles, we are the poor, we are the crippled, we are the blind who have been urged and invited by God to come and join Him in His banquet feast. And again, like we've seen previously with the Pharisees, it is the religious, the self righteous, the self important that miss out. The ones that think they deserve it, they miss out.

And we see it all unfolding before Jesus even begins to tell the story. We see the self righteous just set up the stink from the start. Jesus, it says in verse one, He's invited on a Sabbath day to go and eat at the house of a famous or a prominent Pharisee. And then it says there at the end of verse one, and He was being carefully watched. This wasn't a social call.

This wasn't a party that they arranged because they like Jesus. They had to test Him. They were looking for something that might trip Him up. And then they threw in the booby trap. They placed a man with dropsy, a man with a shrivelled hand in the room, in the house.

Now, when I have read this in the past, it didn't come to me, but as I was researching, the structure of the sentence is they were watching Him carefully, and right in front of Him, it just so happened to be, was this man. And so they placed this guy here to see what Jesus is gonna do. Is He gonna heal him? Is He gonna work on the Sabbath day? Because if He is, we can judge Him.

But if He can't and if He doesn't heal this man, well, then we have the other excuse. He's not powerful enough. He's not a prophet. So they place him in this catch 22. If He heals, He's a bad man.

If He doesn't heal, He's not the Son of God. And Jesus again, full of grace, knowing all that was going on, heals the man anyway and challenges them. Now if your son, if your ox falls into a pit, won't you help that son of yours, that ox of yours on the Sabbath day? And again, the amazing thing is this poor man, probably a beggar, probably someone that can't earn a living because of his disability, he's placed like some weird object in this thing, as in this play of this, in this something that they're constructing, and he's completely humiliated, you'd think. Jesus heals him and sends him away.

That's interesting again because Jesus is all about incorporating people, but he sends this man away, and I believe it is because he knows how bad this guy's feeling. Standing right in front of this crowd of prominent people, Jesus heals him, the text says, and He sends him away in verse four. Jesus heals him, and we see His grace again. But we see in this setup, in this preamble to the parable that Jesus is about to tell, we see that religion has nothing to offer this crippled man. Religion has nothing to offer this man.

The Pharisees hadn't experienced grace. They didn't understand grace and they didn't recognise their own need of it. And so as a result, they had no grace for this man. In fact, they thought they could just use him. They had nothing to offer him.

They had nothing to say to him. Our times together, I was challenged this week, are times of grace. It can be times of grace. Our worship services, our meals, our fellowship times are a visual representation of what's going on in our hearts. If our hearts are concerned for self righteousness, for power, for position, for status, for approval, like the Pharisees were, they were jostling each other for places of honour at this meeting.

If that is what is our main priority, that will be reflected at home, at church. Consider how our times together express our understanding of God's salvation. Who comes to our church? Better yet, who is coming to your cell group? Who's coming to your dinner table to your home?

Those places that are close to home, those places that get uncomfortably close. Who's invited? How are they being served? Do these occasions accurately reflect the description of Jesus and the great banquet that He describes here? What's new in this story, and we've heard Jesus talk about banquets.

He gave a huge banquet at the feeding of the 5,000. What's new about this story this time is actually the command to go out and invite others. To go and invite others. And Jesus tells this story while eating at a Pharisee's house. He's eating with a whole bunch of educated, well off pastors and academics.

He's eating with people like Jesus, so it's okay for them to invite Jesus. He's like one of us. But Jesus says in verse 8, when you give a dinner, when you give a banquet, don't invite people like me. Don't invite your neighbours. Don't invite your friends.

Don't invite your relatives because they're just gonna repay the debt. Instead, provide a feast for the poor, for the crippled, for the lame, for the blind, and you will be blessed because they can't repay you, and so God will repay you. This new teaching is completely counter cultural. This is a teaching in a society that was all about reciprocal indebtedness. If I give you a lavish feast, one day I hope you invite me to one of your lavish feasts.

That's how it worked. And Jesus is saying, try something different. That is what makes, I believe, mission and evangelism difficult for us. We are dealing with insiders and outsiders when we do evangelism. It's difficult. It's easier to invite someone that's on the inside to my house because I understand them, I act like them, I behave like them, so I know what to expect, and I know that they are going to be doing something that's understandable to me.

But the outsiders, the ones that are different, the ones that are awkward, the ones that are weird, you don't know what to expect. But it makes it difficult for us to do evangelism when we live in that way. Because we're all a bunch of insiders, but we're trying to reach outsiders. Think about church ministries in general. I'm not talking about us.

I'm talking about most church ministries, youth groups. Is it about reaching rat pack kids in the community, or is it about having a safe haven for church kids? Talking about general churches. What about small groups in general, home groups?

Cell groups? Are they doing adventurous mission together or do they offer something of a cosy support group? Our attitudes towards the marginalised, the outsiders, the weirdos, the people who swear, the people who cheat, the people who lie, that is to be shaped by God's grace to us. That is what Jesus is saying here. Knowing how little we've deserved to be loved by God, to have been invited by God to the great banquet.

Jesus says we are the ones that were in the alleyways, that were in the byways, that were out on the sticks. We're the second rate people that got invited. But somehow, we often forget that we were those guys, and we wanna invite the first class people. But Jesus, we see again, is a friend of sinners. We're called to follow Christ into a broken world, into the alleys and the byways.

Simply writing a cheque keeps people at a distance. Inviting them to a once off carol service or something like that is different. It keeps people at a distance. They remain outsiders. How do we make them insiders?

How do we reach out to people in a way that we feel comfortable with, but that's acceptable, that's understandable to them as well? How do we do this? How can we become more effective at bringing the lost to Christ? I believe it's simple. It's just following what Jesus did, following His example.

We think it comes from preaching and teaching. That's what I thought for many years. Educating people about their sin, about the doctrine of justification, but if we read about Jesus' life carefully, we see how He did it. He met with people. He ate with people.

He sat down with people. And in that moment, something amazing happened. We get awesome teaching from Him, but if you were to read the gospel of Luke, you see how many times He's just moving from one place to another, sitting down, having a meal, having a yarn with someone, just chatting. What's a great way? What is a great way to teach or reach out to the non believers around us?

It's simply to be with them, to invite them into our home. That's all. That is all. There's no need for preaching. There's no need for a PhD in theology.

Just give them a place to rest for the night, to be themselves, to feel safe, to share a meal with them. Think of how different the dynamic is when we sit and eat with someone. We meet as equals. We've, in the past, you know, had, maybe have had bread runs or soup kitchens or pancake cook ups or whatever. Doing that says, here you go, I'm giving you some food.

Enjoy this food. Know that I'm doing this for you. When we eat together around the dinner table, it's completely different. We are on equal terms. We meet as equals.

We share together. We affirm one another and we enjoy one another's company. People don't want to be projects. People don't want to be projects. People don't wanna feel like they're being worked on, that they're being chiselled, that they're being molded into what I think their version of Christianity should be.

People need community. They need Christian community. And again, we see Jesus didn't run projects. He didn't run ministries or establish them or create programmes or put on huge events. He ate with people.

He sat with people. He chatted to them. And that's what I've been really loving about reading and growing through this, is the thought that if our church, if you and I began routinely meeting with people and inviting them to be with us, and I'm not talking, you know, four or five course meals or anything like that, it's just buy them a pie and eat with them. But if we were to be able to create a habit like that, create a habit of meeting with people and develop a deep passion for Jesus at the same time, then there was going to be no stopping the people coming to this church of ours. We'll be doing mission.

It's as simple as that. Having a passion for Jesus and having a routine of loving people in intangible ways. It's not that meals save people, but people are saved through the gospel message that is lived out in those moments. Those meal times are times of fellowship, of hospitality, of acceptance, of grace. Grace is a hard thing to describe to a non Christian, but they feel it when you show them grace.

A meal is an act of grace. It's an act of love. An open home, an open home is an act of grace and love. And so when we share the gospel, it's only natural that it gets seen then in that light of grace and love. Hospitality has always been an integral part of God's story.

It's always been. Abraham, right in the beginning in Genesis 18 or 19, He's in the desert and three people turn up, and they need to be washed and they need to eat something, and He invites them and welcomes them in, and it just so happens to be they're angels of God. In another part, in Joshua, we hear of Rahab, the prostitute in Jericho, inviting two Israelite spies. They stay with her. She feeds them, and she is saved. She becomes part of the lineage of God's salvation story.

God is said to be the host of Israel in the promised land. In fact, God found hospitality so important that He wrote it into the law of the Israelites. Look after the strangers, the aliens within your gates. In the New Testament, again, we find it all over. Romans 12, 1 Peter 4, 1 Timothy 5, Matthew 25, Hebrews 13, don't stop meeting with people.

Don't stop giving hospitality to people. In Hebrews 13 because some have done this and they've entertained angels, Hebrews 13 says. But the sad thing is that in the last 50, 100 years maybe, hospitality, which has been a massive part of Christianity for so long, has faded away. It's probably got to do with just the fast, massively huge rate at how we're living our lives, but it's not really that hard. We can often complain about, hey, I've just got no time for mission, for evangelism, but we all have to eat. In fact, we eat three times a day, seven days a week.

That's 21 opportunities to spend some time with someone. Invite those neighbours for a meal. Better yet, invite them with a family from church, and in that way, you do mission and community at the same time. Your neighbours will have an amazing opportunity to see how the gospel has impacted your relationship with your brother or your sister. They get to see a snapshot of what this heavenly community is.

I recently read an excerpt from a book called God Next Door, a spirituality and mission for the neighbourhood. It's written by a guy called Simon Carey Holt, and he's an Aussie pastor in Melbourne. He was a lecturer for 15 years at one of the bible colleges in Sydney, Macquarie University, and before that, he was a qualified chef. So he was a chef, then he became a lecturer, then he became a pastor. And he wrote a book called God Next Door.

He writes that mealtimes should be an integral part of the mission of any church. This is what he writes in his quote. He says, it is good to be reminded that the table is a very ordinary place, a place so routine and so everyday that it's easily overlooked as a place of ministry. And this business of hospitality that lies at the heart of Christian mission, well, it's a very ordinary thing. Christian hospitality is not rocket science.

It's not terribly glamorous even. Yet it is the very ordinariness of the table and of the ministry we exercise there that renders these elements of Christian life so important to the mission of the church. He says hospitality is about providing a space for God's Spirit to move. Provide a space for God's Spirit to move. Setting a table, cooking a meal, washing the dishes is the ministry of facilitation.

Providing a context in which people feel loved and welcomed and where God's Spirit can be at work in their lives. Hospitality is a very ordinary business, but in its ordinariness is its real worth. I love for our church to start experimenting with this a little bit. I'd love, for example, for us to start a hospitality ministry where, at least in, you know, the early stages, we'll have a hospitality team every Sunday rostered on to say good day to new people and just invite them for a Sunday lunch. Easy.

And from there, we can see where it goes. But start something like that. People need to be welcomed into this community. Hospitality and meals and fellowship brings mission, this really hard, dangerous concept, it brings it into the ordinary. But the great thing is that most people live in the ordinary.

Most people live in the ordinary. So that is where we need to reach them. That is where we will reach them.