The Vineyard Church of North Grand Rapids, MI

Christmas is here!  While the holiday probably means lots of different things to different people, we've been preparing for Christmas by remembering that Jesus' birth 2000 years ago was a startling revelation of God's kindness.  

Maybe you've wondered, what's God like?  What is in his heart?  What sort of attitude, power, or agenda is driving this universe?  Is God a demanding authority figure?  A ruthless, cosmic dictator?  A glorious and terrible warrior?  A mean-spirited judge, giving out maximum penalties for our failures and sins?

The Christmas story reveals that God-the majestic creator, the sovereign king of the universe so loved you-that he stripped off his royal robes, his glory and majesty, his power and prerogatives and came into our world as a naked baby, born in a stable to a peasant girl who laid him in an animal feeding trough.  Why?  He wanted us to understand his heart.  He wanted us to know that he was putting the power in our hands-we can receive him or reject him.  He came as a friend to offer help, not a king to force his rule on us.  He came as a helpless baby; we can decide whether we need him or not.  He's not going to retaliate for a bad decision.  He's given us the freedom and power to decide.  He's made himself vulnerable.  He's not going to force himself on us.  We can refuse to look at him or to embrace him.  We can smile and walk away.  We can decide we're too busy or that we just don't need any help.  God came into our world in a way that minimized intimidation and assumed all the risks.  He gave us complete power to decide to receive him or reject him.

The Apostle Paul describes Jesus' birth as an expression of God's kindness (Titus 3:4-5).  Within God's heart there is a warm, friendly, generous desire to help in very practical ways.  You may be a woman looking for love in a man's arms, or significance in a career.  You might be a man hoping for success and fulfillment in middle-age.  You might be a college student trying to build a solid foundation for life-long happiness and success.  You might be a man or a woman in crisis this winter.  Christmas is an annual reminder that God wants to help.  His motivation?  Simple kindness.  There are no tricks up his sleeve.  There's no fine print.  He won't force himself on you.  He didn't come into the world to condemn us.  He just wants to help.

PRAY.

Today is the last talk in a teaching series we've called "Open Before Christmas-4 Gifts that Show I Care".

We began December by talking about shocking our family members with kindness this holiday season.  Real faith always starts with our families.  Next, we've look at how Jesus-brand spirituality nudges us toward our neighbors (becoming Good Samaritans to the people in our community).  Last Sunday we examined Jesus' challenge to reach out to people in distress-people who get in our way when we're on our way someplace else.  Jesus promised that when we stop to help them, we're helping him.  When we open our hearts to people we normally overlook and pass by, we're touching Jesus' heart.

Today I want to wrap up this series by inviting you to take on Christmas as a personal mission.  Christmas is much more than a family holiday and break from school and work.  It's a revelation of God's kindness and it's an invitation to join the cause of taking the message of God's goodness and kindness to others-from here to Timbuktu!

I.  IT'S OUR TURN TO CARRY ON THE CHRISTMAS MISSION.

A.  Christianity is trusting and following Jesus-living his life! 

When Jesus left our world to return to heaven, he handed off the Christmas mission to his followers.  He said, now it's your turn to spread the Christmas message, tell the story of my Father's kindness, and invite others into the journey of fiath.  We can read Jesus' commission in Matthew 28:18-20.  In fact, let's read this statement out loud, together.  READ MATTHEW 28:18-20 (TNIV).

There's a popular misconception in West Michigan, that the essence of Christianity is going to church and trying to be good-at least better than other people (you know, like the Spears sisters).  That's a pretty strange twist on the truth.  The essence of Christianity is receiving Jesus into our lives because we know we need help and are willing to go public with our weakness.  The heart of Christianity is trusting our lives to Jesus Christ, and following him into the future.  Here at VN we call it "Living Jesus' Life Together"

This means that we're always thinking like Jesus.  Who's next?  Who needs help?  Who needs to hear the good news?  Who needs to come in from the cold?  Who's still afraid to open his heart to God?  Who is still on the outside looking in?  Who still believes that God wants to force himself on us?  Jesus stripped off his privileges and left heaven to reveal God's heart and kindness to us.  Now it's our turn to leave our comfortable little worlds to share the good news with people who don't know God's kindness.  Christians are people on a Christmas mission-365 days a year.

TRANS: Let's break down Jesus' statement into bite-size pieces and see if we can digest it in a way that will carry us into the new year as a healthier, stronger church.

B.  A new year invites new steps in our journey.

1.  Look outside your (ethnic) box.

Go.  It's a command to look outside our daily routines, our comfort zones, our families, circle of friends, our church.  ILLUS: Have you ever noticed that everything Jesus said and did happened on the way to some place else?  He never built a headquarters complex or a counseling center.  He never established a conference center in the mountains.  He never took his followers away on a retreat where they could relax, focus inward, and get centered.  He was always on his way . . . teaching on his way, counseling on his way, performing miracles on his way . . . ultimately to Jerusalem to the cross where he would die for us.  

All nations.  When we hear the word nation, we think nation-state (distinct countries with national boudaries, border crossing guards, custom agents, and so on-like Canada, France, or India.  All nations should probably be understood as all people groups-all people of different races and cultures and languages and traditions and nationalities-all people everywhere (especially those we consider really different).

Jesus was communicating that we need to think like God was thinking the first Christmas.  Christmas invites me to reach out to people who are outside of my box-my faith box, my race box, my language box, my culture box, my age and gender box, my never-gone-to-jail box, my never-been-to-an-AA-meeting box, my suburban middle class Republican box, my upwardly mobile American box.

I don't have to go to a different nation-state like China or Venezuela or Indonesia to reach out to different sorts of people groups outside my box.  We had a middle-eastern Muslim extended family with us last Sunday night at our Candlelight Service.  The largest Muslim community in the U.S. lives in Michigan.  I don't think I'm stretching Jesus' meaning when I say that we have different people groups in Forest Hills and Wyoming, Rockford and Eastown, in Kentwood and Allendale . . . in the church on Sunday mornings and in Starbucks on Sunday mornings.

c.  Christians are men and women on a Christmas mission, taking the message of God's kindness to people outside our ethnic box.

2.  Tell your story  (Acts 1:8-be my witnesses).

All of us have different stories . . . what our lives were like (how we really did feel lost). . . how we discovered Jesus . . . how the lights came on . . . how we invited him into our lives (a radical, dramatic decision; or, a slow process of growth to faith) . . . how we can look back and see answers to prayer as well as changes in our attitudes and values.  

Some of us discovered a wonderful, peace-filled forgiveness when we received Jesus into our lives.  Others found new freedom to change, step up, break through self-destructive behaviors and even addictions.  Some of us, if we told our stories, would say that the thing we value most is the feeling of purpose and significance and fulfillment that joining Jesus in his mission brings us.  We all have different stories, and all of them have a "Christmas Moment" when we got it; when we relaxed and accepted God's kindness.

c.  Everyone is living a story.  What some folks don't know is that Jesus came into the world to help folks who are stuck or lost or bored rewrite their story.  People on the outside need to hear this.  So, we should probably learn to tell our story in just a minute or two, so that we can tell it in the time it takes someone from another people group to smoke one cigarette, drink one beer, or listen to one gansta rap song.

3.  Invite others to join you.

The Christmas mission requires some courage.  The process of making disicples is a process of inviting people into the journey.  It's inviting them to make a clear, adult decision.  Jesus made disciples of young fishermen by personal invitation:  FOLLOW ME AND I WILL MAKE YOU ONE WHO FISHES FOR MEN.

Sometimes parents fear that they don't have a right to call their children to costly faith decisions.  It's not true, but our culture tempts us all to think that we don't have the right to ask people to decide anything . . . like faith decisions are too personal, too private, too subjective for anyone to advise anyone else.  That's why Jesus says, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been give to me . . . and . . . surely I am with you always to the very end of the age".  Jesus is saying, "I've deputized you to urge your children, friends, neighbors, and even people outside your ethnic box to join you in your journey of faith".  First, tell them your story.  Then urge them to make the decision to join you.

4.  Start where you are.

Jesus was talking to Jewish men and women who lived in and around Jerusalem.  So, he was saying that you don't have to leave town to live like a missionary.  In fact, you'll know who the real missionaries are, by how they reach out to people outside their ethnic box right here in the old home town.

This is an important step for young adults and all other would-be, international missionaries.  Start where you are.  If you think God might be calling you and gifting you to be an overseas missionary, test your calling right here in Grand Rapids.  Have you led anyone to Christ in your college, in the place you work, in your apartment complex, in Grand Rapids?  ILLUS: The Apostle Paul was the NT's first prominent international missionary.  He traveled by foot, horseback and boat to the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean world. But, what he did everywhere he went, he first started doing in Jerusalem (cf. Acts 9).  He didn't start in Greece or France.  He just started to live and talk like a missionary right where he became a Christian-in Jerusalem-and eventually the Holy Spirit began sending him other places to do what he had become so good at.

So seriously, start where you are.  Do you have a heart for the orphans of Calcutta?  How are you doing with the children of single mom's here at VN?  Are you a big brother or sister to any of them?  Do you serve on your church's children's ministry team . . . the Regeneration Youth ministry team?  Do you want to plant churches in Indonesia?  How are you doing at leading and building a home group right here?  Want to preach the gospel in Europe?  Maybe you should start in Eastown and test your abilities in that neighborhood.  Feel called to India?  How far have you gotten befriending the Indians who own the gas station up the stree?  You get the point.  Start right here where you are and . . .

5.  Go as far as you can.

After sharpening your skills right here at home, go regional (i.e., Samaria).  Trying spending a summer at a Detroit area Vineyard as an evangelism intern.  If you have the opportunity, go national.  And, international would be great, should your skills and fruitfulness and finances open a door for you.

As a local church, we're supporting a church planting partnership in Indonesia in which we're helping to support 40 indigenous church planters in the world's most densely populated Muslim nation.  We hope to send a small team in February to continue to process of building supportive relationships with a few of these church planters.  Carol and I will be going to Africa in March to investigate whether it would be profitable for VN to join in a church planting partnership in Malawe and Mozambique.  We want to be a missionary church-a church that carries the Christmas into the new year and into the whole world.

TRANS:  Look outside your box, start telling your story, invite people to join you in the journey, start where you are, go as far as you can.  Why?  It's the spirit of Christmas!  It's what God did when he invaded our world as a baby born in Bethlehem.

II. What do we love about jesus?

A.  A week ago I went to the video store to rent a popular DVD.  On my way out I noticed a different DVD-a documentary.  The title was "An Unexpected Kindness".  It was an hour-long documentary narrated by Robin Williams, telling the story of Father Damien.  I didn't know who Father Damien was, but I thought "An Unexpected Kindness-that's a great description of Christmas".  So I rented the DVD.

It's story of a young man who grew up in a devout Catholic family in Belgium in the middle of the 19^th Century.  He became a Catholic priest and decided that he wanted to go to that place and that people who knew least about Christianity and the good news of God's kindness.  So, he went to the South Pacific and found himself in Hawaii, on Christianity's eastern frontier (about the same time David Livingstone was taking his faith to Africa).

Leprosy had also come to Hawaii about that time, a gift from the white man, and the Hawaiians were unusually susceptible to this incurable disease.  To stop the spread of the disease, the Hawaiian authorities began to segregate men, women, and children from their families and tribes to a remote peninsula on the Island of Molokai.  In the beginning, they were simply dumped off there, without shelter or medicine or food-to fend for themselves.

Father Damien was the first Christian to say, if anyone needs to know and experience God's kindness, it is the lepers on Molokai.  So, against warnings from his Catholic superiors and criticisms from Protestant missionaries (who believed that leprosy was a final stage of the STD syphillus, a disease indicating God's judgment), Father Damien went to Molokai and became pastor, doctor, father, brother, son to the 600 dying lepers there.  Not surprisingly, living with them, touching them, caring for them, he too eventually contracted leprosy, lived with it, served with it, and died from it, as he cared for these abandoned people.  Father Damien was canonized by the Roman Catholic Church in 1995.

If you ask me, Father Damien probably earned the title Father Christmas.  He showed the Hawaiians the spirit of Christmas-the spirit of Christ- and, he, as well as anyone I've read about (protestant or catholic), shows us how to live in the spirit of Christmas in a new year.

What we love about Father Damien, we love about Jesus.  He had eyes for the outsider . . . a heart for the outsider.  He came into our world as a vulnerable baby.  Isaiah the prophet said that he carried our diseases.  Jesus came to reveal God's kindness to a world of men and women abandoned to their own devices..  The first Christmas REALLY was an UNEXPECTED KINDNESS.  

A couple of you here this morning might consider yourself outsiders.  You wife or your husband, your parents, or the friend who brought you would never call you that.  But, that's how you think of yourself.  You've come this morning because you're considering Christianity as an option for your life, but you haven't actually made the decision to open your heart to receive Jesus into your life.  I WANT TO PRACTICE WHAT I PREACH AND INVITE YOU TO MAKE THE DECISION TO JOIN US ON THE JOURNEY OF FAITH . . . RIGHT NOW, THIS CHRISTMAS.  I want you to experience God's kindness for yourself.

Prayer: Jesus, thank you for taking the first step toward me by coming into the world as a baby.  I'm starting to get it.  I'm deciding to begin trusting you.   Right now I'm deciding to open my heart-my real, inner self-to receive you as my Savior, my God.  Please come in.  Forgive me.  Set me free.  Put my feet on the path to deep fulfillment.  Thank you.

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