This transcript was generated by whisper.ai.

(upbeat music) Welcome to day three of our Look Together through Matthew chapter
10. We're talking together about these principles that Jesus has given us for
going out and sharing the message of the good news in this world. Principles
that help churches to understand what to do, principles that help us as
individuals to understand what to do.

Now when it comes to sharing the good news, for most of us the hardest thing in
getting started is getting started. Where do you get started? How do you make
the first step?

And Jesus teaches us what to do. The eighth principle that he teaches us is you
start where there is receptivity. In verses 11 to 13, Jesus's instructions are
this.

Whatever town or village you enter, search for some worthy person there and stay
at his house until you leave. As you enter the home, give it your greeting. If
the home is deserving, let your peace rest on it.

If it is not, let your peace return to you. So Jesus teaches us here, you start
where there is receptivity. You search for some worthy person.

This is a person who is receptive to the message, to the ministry that you're
going to be sharing with them individually or with the community in Jesus's name.
Luke in Luke chapter 10 calls this a man or a person of peace. This person, by
the way, he says, may not yet be a Christian.

When the disciples went out, there weren't any Christians in the world. They
were the first followers of Jesus. So they're looking for people who are
receptive, but they're not yet Christians.

But they're receptive to your word. They're receptive to your work. I would have
to say that one of my greatest disappointments in ministry is looking back on
time I've spent working with unreceptive people while ignoring receptive people.

I could see the potential in the unreceptive person. I had great dreams for what
could happen in their lives as a person of faith. Now, make no mistake, we're to
share Christ with everyone, whether they seem at first to us to be receptive or
unreceptive.

We never know how people are going to respond. They might just be quiet in their
personality. That doesn't mean they're unreceptive.

But once we see their response, we love everyone, but we work with the
receptive. We can't make someone receptive. Only God's Spirit can do that.

Only a person's response to the Holy Spirit's work within them can cause that to
happen. And in fact, sometimes our continued pressure and work with an
unreceptive person can actually be a detriment to their faith as they start to
push back against us rather than listening to what God's doing in their lives.
So Jesus directs his followers, he tells them start with just one receptive
person.

You can't reach a community all at once, Jesus is saying. You can't reach a
world all at once. You gotta start with one receptive person.

That's where you start. You can only reach one person who will reach another
person who will reach another so that eventually you reach a community, you
reach a world. So how many receptive people does it take to start a church, to
start a work in a community?

Just one. How do you find a receptive person? Here's the key, by listening.

One of the keys to telling the good news is listening to the person you're
telling it to. It's a two-way conversation, not a one-way monologue. As long as
you're talking, you can't really tell how receptive a person is.

You find out that they're receptive by listening to their response to what
you're saying. And then you build on that receptivity by listening to them to
hear their needs. And once you hear their needs, once you hear their needs, then
you can share how the good news of Jesus has met those needs in your life and
can meet those needs in their lives as well.

You must listen. That's how you start with those who are receptive. So if you're
feeling like I'm so concerned with what I'm going to say, don't start there.

Start with being concerned more about what you need to hear. That's how you're
going to hear where you need to start. Listen to people's needs.

Principle number nine that Jesus teaches us in this chapter is really, in a
sense, a second principle for mission in this command to start with one person
and build from there. The ninth principle is you build over time on a single,
clear strategy. That's how we build our mission's efforts.

Stay in that house, Jesus says, until you leave. In the parallel passage in
Luke, he adds, don't move around from house to house. Once you've found a
receptive person, a person of peace, you build the ministry from there outward,
you don't be constantly looking for a better person of peace.

I want to talk about mission strategy here for a few minutes and you may not be
interested in mission strategy. I'm deeply interested in it and I believe you
should be too because every one of us is a part of leading our church to be
better involved in missions and every one of us needs to understand this so that
we can do the best ministry and mission in our own lives. So as we look at this
principle, we're talking about the difference between strategic clarity and
strategic drift.

With strategic clarity, you get expansion and growth. With strategic drift, you
find yourself moving from strategy to strategy or from purpose to purpose with
no clear results because there's no clear direction. While there are always
going to be times when the strategy is unclear and we have to search for new
methods for a new situation or a new generation, once you find a viable
strategy, you have to stick with it in order to build in a healthy way.

Now the enemy of this principle is our need to build fast. This is the enemy, by
the way, sometimes they're reaching people for Jesus. They gotta accept Jesus
today or else I don't believe they will.

Well, sometimes it takes time. I talked to a pastor once who told me, I've gotta
get my church growing. I tried Willow Creek strategy a couple of years ago.

I tried Salaback methods last year and I'm going to use Healthy Church this year.
Well, nothing can work in one year. I actually felt for that pastor because I
knew that he was under pressure from his congregation to get the church growing
fast.

And he didn't have the time to get the right strategy for that church and that
community and build on it. You don't sacrifice sustainability for speed. You see
strategic drift when a church moves from one model to another to another.

You also see it when a church or an individual moves from one emphasis on a
purpose of God to another emphasis to another. So one year they focus only on
evangelism as the key to growing the church. But the people they reach, they're
not growing, they're not staying in the church.

So they focus on discipleship only and they see that there's no ministry in the
community. So they focus on ministry but then they see that the worship
experience has grown stale from lack of attention. So then they focus on worship
and they have this wonderful singing but they aren't reaching any new people for
Jesus.

So then they go back and they focus only on evangelism again and around and
around and around. Focusing on one purpose at a time is like having a child eat
only vegetables and no protein for a year as if you could get that to happen.
And then only protein and no vegetables the next year.

Growth requires balance, balance in all five purposes. Now if all this talk
about strategy and strategic drift makes you feel a little bit uncomfortable
when it comes to the work of God, I understand your concern. It's all too easy
to begin to rely upon our strategies in which case they truly do become ours and
not God's.

That's where tradition becomes our enemy. I do however believe in Holy
Spirit-inspired strategies. This is the strategy we see in the Bible with the
Apostle Paul for instance, starting in the major cities by preaching in the
synagogue and when he got kicked out he worked with those who continued to show
interest.

The Spirit inspired him to strategically start at the crossroads cities, to
begin by giving the Jewish people an opportunity and to continue with those who
were receptive if he didn't get chased out of town first. In history, we see one
example among thousands of a Holy Spirit-inspired strategy in the work of St.
Patrick in Ireland.

God used him to change a country by strategically gaining an understanding of
the so-called barbarians, they called them, living in Ireland and God did it in
a very unusual way. It was through being kidnapped and working in slavery under
them for six years. And he was called back to these people through a vision.

He worked in teams instead of alone and then he also started with the
gatekeepers, the heads of the tribes and he led them to Christ so that then they
would allow their people to hear the message. This was all part of a
Spirit-inspired strategy. Going out effectively on mission requires not only
seeking a Spirit-inspired strategy but then you also have to stick with that
strategy once you find it and you can't get distracted.

Jesus also told his disciples in Luke in this parallel passage not to greet
anyone on the road as they went out. Now he wasn't telling them to be
unfriendly. He was telling them not to get sidetracked on the way.

Greetings in Eastern culture were more than just a mere hi, how are you as you
passed by. They were these long, drawn-out affairs and sometimes we miss God's
strategy for missions in a church or in our lives because we're moving from one
strategy to another. We're not sticking with any one direction but at other
times it's because we get sidetracked.

We lose our momentum because of other things, even important things, but we lose
our momentum. One of the key questions in your mission and the mission of a
church is not what you will do but what you have to stop doing in order to do
what God has called you to do. You can't do everything but you'll find that over
time you have in your life what a church would call mission creep even as
businesses have what's called scope creep.

Scope creep is seeing so many little things added to the project that are not
central to accomplishing its goals that eventually they sink the project. If
we're not careful we find ourselves drowning in opportunities and missing out on
the main opportunity we should be accomplishing. Now, for those of us who are
followers of Jesus, sometimes we find ourselves at church so much, we've added
doing so many things at church, we don't have any time left to share with people
who are not in church.

We're never with them. What night would we be with them? We're at church every
night of the week.

What will you stop doing in order that you could have time to be with those who
are not believers? Personally, it's easy to get so busy doing important things
that you never have time to share your faith with those who are around you. And
that can be an easy excuse for procrastination.

How many of us have procrastinated when it comes to sharing the good news with
someone? We never feel it's the right time or we intend to talk to someone but
we never get around to it. It takes a clarity of decision and tension, a
strategy of what I'm going to do, what I'm not going to do in order to tell someone
the good news.

In order for this to happen you have to be faithful over time to what God has
called you to do. Now there's a 10th principle that Jesus gives us here when it
comes to the strategic way that we work. Principle number 10 is you don't work
where you're not welcomed.

In verses 14 and 15, if anyone will not welcome you or listen to your words,
shake the dust off your feet when you leave that home or town. I tell you the
truth, it will be more bearable for Sodom and Gomorrah on the day of judgment
than for that town. This is the obvious other side to that principle of working
with the receptive.

You don't work with those who are not receptive. As we noted earlier, when we
become insistent with those who are not welcoming the message, we find ourselves
in a personal battle of wills with them that can cloud the message of the gospel
with relational and with power struggles. Jesus says leave them in God's hand.

If judgment is to come, it is to come to them. Leave them in God's hands.
There's an 11th principle here that we see and that principle is to eat what is
set before you.

This is from Luke. I want to bring this one out of Luke. It's an important
principle because it is the principle that you and I are to be willing to adapt
to local customs as long as they don't violate the gospel.

Rick Warren writes about this in the Purpose Driven Church. So let me read you
the paragraphs that he wrote about this. Jesus told the disciples, when you
enter a town and are welcomed, eat what is set before you, Luke 10, eight.

In saying this, Jesus was giving more than dietary advice. He was commanding
them to be sensitive to local culture. He was telling them to fit in with those
that they wanted to reach.

They were to adapt to local customs and culture when it didn't violate a
biblical principle. Rick writes, when I served as a student missionary to Japan,
I had to learn to eat what was set before me. I didn't like everything I tasted,
but I loved the Japanese and I wanted to win them to Christ.

So I adapted to their ways. Too often we let cultural differences between
believers and unbelievers become barriers to getting the message out. For some
Christians, any talk of adapting to their culture sounds like theological
liberalism.

That is not a new fear. In fact, it was the reason the apostles held the
Jerusalem Conference in Acts 15. In those days, the issue was, do Gentile
believers have to follow Jewish customs and culture to be considered true
Christians?

The apostles and elders answered with a clear no way. From that point on,
Christianity began to adapt to each new culture as it spread the gospel around
the world. The gospel is always communicated in the terms of some culture.

The only question is, which one? No church can be culturally neutral. It will
express some culture because it is composed of human beings.

For 2,000 years, Rick writes, Christianity has adapted itself to one culture
after another. If it hadn't adapted, we'd still be a sect within Judaism. We are
ignoring 2,000 years of church history.

We insist that our own cultural expressions of the faith is better or more
biblical than any other. End of that quote. What we're talking about is the fact
that God loves differences in one sense.

God loves differences, and so he's made us all different. And we join God in his
love for our differences when we refuse to press everyone into the same mold as
we share the faith. We adapt to their needs.

We never change the message. The message must never change. But we do change our
methods.

That's what it means to be strategic. That's what it means to reach out to those
who need to hear the good news. Now, if we walk through this today, what does
this mean for you personally?

Let me just remind you. In order to share the good news, four things. First, you
must listen.

You must listen. Second, you must be faithful over time to the strategy that God
has given. Third, you must be sometimes faithful and move on to the person who
is not listening yet, but maybe they'll listen someday.

And finally, you have to adjust your methods without changing the message
sometimes in order to reach people. We need God's wisdom for this, so let's ask
for it. Our Father, we ask for your wisdom in our churches and our individual
lives.

Lord, sometimes we feel like people are resistant to the message of the gospel
when the truth is they're just resistant to the way that we're sharing it or the
fact that we haven't communicated in ways that they can understand. Help us to
understand and love the people that are around us, just like you did, Jesus. And
then give us the wisdom to share the good news in a way that they can hear it,
just like you've shared it with us in a way that we can hear it.

We ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Tomorrow we're going to talk about what to do
when we face opposition or criticism or persecution.