Missional Ambitions

Sermon Summary:

What if we’ve been thinking about missions all wrong? This powerful message challenges us to move beyond ‘just doing good’ to truly ‘doing God.’ Drawing from Philippians 3:10-14, we encounter Paul’s athletic imagery of pressing forward—using the Greek word ‘dioko,’ meaning hot pursuit, like a hunter chasing prey. Paul, who once used this same fervor to persecute Christians, redirects his passion toward knowing Christ and participating in His mission. The sermon reveals a profound truth: God doesn’t just call us to random acts of goodness, but to specific, Spirit-led assignments in our unique time and place. Through stories of encountering a Chinese businessman struggling to share faith, a Sudanese widow stranded on an Arlington street, and indigenous missionaries reaching their own people, we see how God is expanding our vision of missions. He’s calling us to be ‘polycentric’ in our sending—not just sending out across oceans, but sending in, sending within, and sending near. The greatest prize isn’t gold medals or heavenly mansions, but knowing Christ deeply and joining the multitude from every tribe and nation standing before His throne. We’re invited to lean toward Christ and simultaneously lean toward the world He loves, becoming students of cultures, neighbors to the marginalized, and empowerers of influencers in spheres we’ll never access ourselves.

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Sermon Points:

• Needs/Perceived Needs​
• Culture(s)​
• Worldviews
• People
• Opportunities​

Key Takeaways:

• Paul’s transformation from persecutor to pursuer of Christ demonstrates the power of redirected passion and Holy Spirit-led mission
• “Just doing it” is not the same as doing God’s will – we must be attuned to the Holy Spirit’s specific direction
• God places people strategically in time and place so that others might seek Him, reach out to Him, and find Him
• The church must move beyond traditional sending models to embrace polycentric sending – sending out, sending in, sending within, and sending near
• True missional living requires understanding people’s cultures, worldviews, and perceived needs, not just imposing our own cultural framework
• We are called to be empowerers of influencers – equipping believers in their unique spheres of influence
• The greatest prize is knowing Christ and participating in His resurrection power and His sufferings
• Kingdom citizenship transcends national identity and political positions, especially regarding how we treat foreigners and aliens
• The finish line includes joining a multitude from every nation worshiping before the Lamb

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Scripture References:

• Philippians 3:10-14 (focal verse: Philippians 3:14 – “I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus”)
• Acts 15-16 (Paul’s journey to Philippi and encounters with Lydia, the slave girl, and the Philippian jailer)
• John 15:26-27 (The Spirit testifying about Jesus)
• Acts 17 (Paul at the Areopagus in Athens)
• 1 Corinthians (running the race)
• Hebrews 12 (race marked out for us)
• Leviticus 19:34 (treatment of foreigners)
• Revelation 7 (multitude from every nation before the throne)

Stories:

• The preacher’s personal story of being invited to preach after 44 years of her husband’s ministry, including humorous reflections on being a pastor’s wife
• Family confession about fierce competitiveness and SEC football loyalties, including the houndstooth jacket incident referencing Bear Bryant
• The weekly Sunday morning banter with Russell McCaskill about SEC vs. Texas Aggies football
• Story from 2005 about a wealthy inventor and entrepreneur in their Sunday school class who traveled to China and Taiwan, employing 500 people, who asked for prayer about sharing his faith with Chinese businessmen – this led to a Holy Spirit conviction about forming influencers
• Story from Ramadan 2024 when the preacher prayed for God to reveal a Muslim person to bless, and within 24 hours encountered Fatia, a widowed asylum seeker from Sudan whose car broke down – this encounter revealed the invisible communities living nearby
• The ongoing story of First Baptist Church Arlington’s 20-year journey of sending out more than 20 missionary units to serve in 12 nations, and the current evolution toward polycentric sending models
• Reference to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, Olympic gold medalist and world record holder in 400-meter hurdles, whose book “Far Beyond Gold” chronicles her journey from fear to faith

Sermon Transcript

Good morning FBCA. It’s so nice to be back. It’s so nice to be back with my FBCA family. I’ve been on the road a lot over the last couple of months, and there’s no place like home. It’s so great to be with you. So we’re going to be turning this morning to Philippians chapter three. So you might go ahead and begin finding your way there.

And while you’re doing that, I’ll tell you a little story. Did you hear the one about the pastor who, after 44 years in ministry, thought it was finally time to ask his wife if she would like to preach on a Sunday?

And after, after 44 years of sitting on the front row with her squirming children and her grandchildren, and frequently being used as a sermon illustration, she was surprised.

She was surprised by the occurrence of this unusual request, wondering what had prompted him to issue this timely invitation, she said. And is there anything in particular you would like for me to preach on? He paused for a moment and thoughtfully replied, you can say anything you want, honey. And she said, that is a good answer. And so here I am.

But the truth is that in the same way that God has gifted pastors with the gift of preaching, he’s also endowed pastors wives with special gifts, the gift of tongues. But in contrast to our Pentecostal sisters who may have exercised the gift of speaking in tongues, Baptist pastor spouses have typically, exercised that in the way of biting our tongues.

I’m just joking, but truly grateful that my predecessor, sweet Rosemary Wade, didn’t feel obligated to exercise all her spiritual gifts and I love Rosemary for that. Thank you for not always biting your tongue. Today we’re going to be talking about our missional ambitions as a church. We’re going to be reading from the text Philippians chapter three, verses ten through 14.

And I’ll do what my husband doesn’t do. I gonna give you time to actually find it. Okay. Let me say this in all honesty, that it is, it’s a it’s a terrifying thing to stand in the pulpit and to proclaim the word of God before his people. I just I feel a lot of accountability in that. But it’s also the greatest honor of my life to stand in the pulpit of the preacher, my favorite preacher in the world, who is anointed by God and does such a great job of leading this church.

Let us read from Philippians chapter three. I want to know Christ. Yes. To know the power of his resurrection and participation in his sufferings, becoming like him in his death, and so somehow attaining to the resurrection from the dead. Not that I have already obtained all this, Paul says, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.

Brothers and sisters, I do not consider myself to have taken, to have yet taken hold of it. But one thing I do, forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus. I want us to look at as our focal verse out of that passage.

I want us to look at verse 14, and if you don’t mind thus, just read it together. I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus, as he often does. Paul uses athletic analogy to explain the realities of living out our Christian faith in this particular, passage.

In this particular verse, he uses a Greek word that I’ve really grown to love this fall. I’ve been concentrating on this word a lot this fall, and it may be my new mission’s rallying cry, but the Greek word is the διώκω​. Can you say that with me? The διώκω​, which means press on. It means in meaning. It means hot pursuit.

Pursue to pursue with intent. Like a hunter chasing his prey, or like a soldier pursuing an enemy. Paul was really familiar with this word, because it’s the same word used in Scripture to describe Paul’s hot pursuit of Christians to persecute them. He uses this word to describe a determined fervor, which was transformed to pursue Christ. And he uses this word in this athletic analogy to help the Philippian church understand the determination and the perseverance with which they should be striving toward the goal.

Now, you know you don’t. I haven’t had the pulpit in 44 years, so I am going to take time to have a little fun while I’m up here. So I’m going to begin with a little bit of Wile’s family confessional this morning. Now, something that you may, some of you may or may not know about our family, is that we are a fiercely competitive group in everything.

Most of our family members don’t even allow our grandchildren to win at games. And so. But after spending 24 years with you, I’m sure you’re aware that, like, like your pastor, I’m a southerner, and, but we’re a little different. There’s some clear distinctions between us when it comes to our views on sports, on athletics. Me and my brother Charles Barkley both boast the same hometown of Leeds, Alabama, and Charles Barkley and I also have the same favorite college team, which I’m sure the pastor’s proud.

I can say War Eagle, but not like my husband. My father, due to our many job transfers, took us to many, other prominent cities in the south. We moved away from, Leeds, Alabama to the more prominent city of Pearl, Mississippi, and from there to Douglasville, Georgia. And but unlike my husband, who bleeds auburn, blue and orange.

Let me take a little aside just for a minute, I almost forgot. So. So last week I was preaching at the Baptist General Convention of Virginia and they were predicting snow. So I thought I felt obligated to go buy a jacket. You women understand that, don’t you? So I went out and I bought this jacket to preach in.

So I came home. I came home, and as I was packing my suitcase, Dennis says, you can’t preach in a houndstooth jacket to which to which I responded.

Oh yes, I can.

If you don’t understand that joke, if you haven’t been here long enough to understand that joke, you might google who was Bear Bryant. That might help you. So. But like, unlike my husband, I’m not committed to just one team. And I’m SEC generalist and loyalists. I’ve spent segments of my life cheering for multiple teams, in the SEC family at large.

I’ve been an old miss. You know what? We were an Auburn Tiger, a Georgia bulldog. And I will even cheer for the Alabama Crimson Tide as long as they’re not playing Auburn OU. In my view, the SEC is just one big dysfunctional football family who may squabble among ourselves, but we are pretty united in our wariness of outsiders, which makes this a very interesting era.

For most of my 24 years of being here and serving in this church at FBC, one of the first people I usually encounter on a Sunday morning on my way to teach is Russell McCaskill. Now, you may or may not know Russell McCaskill, but he is one of our more pronounced Texas Aggies. We have sort of a standard grading.

Me and Russell. Good morning. How are you? How’s your family? And then we usually resort to some form, a banner about football during which I as as a general SEC loyalist, could choose from a broad palette of old SEC teams that were playing against the Texas Aggies. And historically, we’ve laughed together. I’ve left a lot of smile politely, and then I usually walked off to the holy task of teaching Bible study, muttering something under my breath about big 12 SEC wannabes.

However, I’m flexible. I realize that times have changed, and in the current climate, the current climate, the the Aggies are flexing their muscles and Auburn spends a lot of its time reflecting and remembering the days of cam a lot. Kamelot. I mean, if you didn’t get that when you might Google who is Cam Newton? They think of cam a lot and I’ve lost my SEC bragging rights, but all of this is just in fun, isn’t it?

Throughout the world, athletic endeavors are a huge draw and a huge motivator. The global sports industry is projected to generate about $500 billion in 2025 alone. Paul’s first century Roman context was not much different from ours. It was also captivated by sports athletic competitions like the Olympic Games, the Panhellenic Games. It captivated the populace of the Greco-Roman world running, wrestling, boxing, chariot racing and even the integration of the arts.

Was a part of, of this, athletic of these athletic endeavors. And there was typically even a sacred truce that was declared across the Empire during the games to ensure safe travel for passengers and for spectators and for athletes. Paul understood the draw and the motivation of athletics. That’s why he would frequently refer to sports imagery in his text, which he did today.

In First Corinthians, he says, do you not know that in the race that in a race all runners run, but only one gets the prize run in such a way as to get the prize? It compares living out our faith to races or the endeavors of boxing, athletic feats that require determination, discipline and focus. In Hebrews chapter 12, he talks.

He describes the life, our life of faith, in our life, of obedience as a as a track, a race marked out for us by God and observed by a great cloud of witnesses. And to run this race with perseverance, we have to throw off every hindrance and fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and the perfecter of our faith.

And so Paul knew what we know. He knows that the spirit and the imagery of athletics is a great motivator. No one in modern history has captured that. Like the company Nike, nothing compares to the marketing and the motivational genius of graphic designer Carolyn Davidson, who in 1971, while still a student at Portland State University, was originally paid a whopping $35 for the design of the Nike swoosh, which was inspired by the wings of the Greek goddess the goddess of victory Nike.

Nike, The company Nike has motivated the full spectrum of people toward athletic endeavors and toward being generally just being in shape, motivating everyone from the couch potato to the Olympians to the highest paid professional players with their byline just do it. Just say it. Just do it. And we do. We just do it. You know, Paul by nature was kind of a Nike guy.

His natural tendency was to just do it. That’s why he says to Silas in Acts chapter 15, let us go back and visit the brothers in all the towns where we preach the word of the Lord, and let’s see how they’re doing. But the Spirit of God interrupts Paul’s plan by way of a vision, telling him not to just do it, but to take a sharp left and to head toward Macedonia.

Paul’s Nike spirit is transformed by the Holy Spirit, and he came to realize that just doing good is not doing God. God had a more specific plan for Paul, and he was not going to allow Paul to squander his life by just doing good. In acts chapter 16, we hear the Philippi story as Paul and his band of travelers.

This band of missionaries head to the city of Philippi by following the Spirit of God. Paul finds himself there, where he led them to three significant people. You probably remember them. The first was an influencer named Lydia, a female, a seller of purple cloth who was praying by the river and whose heart God had already prepared to receive the gospel and to follow Jesus, and to open the doors of her home, to establish the very first church of what we would now call European soil.

Next, Paul encounters, much to his chagrin at the moment, a marginalized slave girl possessed by an evil spirit who was held captive by the devil and by a group of greedy men who used her for financial gain. But through the power of the Holy Spirit, Paul rebuked the evil spirit, and he set a young woman free. Then, again, maybe not.

According to Paul’s plan, he and Silas found themselves in the hands of a gatekeeper who was actually a jail keeper. He was the gatekeeper of a communal group, which in this case happened to be his family. The Philippian jailer, who, after experiencing the proclamation and the power of Christ, the two prisoners, Paul and Silas, and the God ordained earthquake, he asks the most significant of questions.

You remember that question, what must I do to be saved? And Paul learned the beauty of communal conversion. Paul was in a spiritual process of refinement, in which he came to understand that to be in harmony with God’s will, his strategies, and his actions could not be driven by his untamed Dakota spirit, but that he must be attuned to God’s strategy.

If he was going to play his unique role in God’s salvation plan for this world, this submission to God’s Spirit would clearly define his call. Not only had he come to understand that he was to be a light to the Gentiles, which Jesus revealed to him very early on, but then he also learned what he articulates later when he states, it has always been my ambition to preach the gospel where Christ was not known.

Paul was not called to do good call. He was called to do God. What Paul also learned was that he was not alone. As Jesus explained, so clearly in John chapter 15, verses 26 and 27, which we just studied in our Bible studies. Thank you. Ryan. This last month, the spirit of truth who goes out from the father will testify about me.

Jesus is the spirit of truth who goes out from the father, will testify about me. And you must also testify, says Jesus to his disciples. In all of this, Paul had not only his call clarified, but he also had his views about winning transformed. By the time Paul writes this letter, he’s lived a lot of life, and he’s learned really what it means to endure and to persevere through some very difficult circumstances.

Right now, being held captive in a house arrest in Philippians 310 through 11, which we just read, Paul describes the truth about the prize, the true prize. Is it a championship trophy? Is it a crown? Is it a Garland? Is it more gold trim in his mansion in heaven? No. What Paul describes as the prize is something much more profound.

If you go back to verses ten and 11, he talks about knowing Christ. This is the prize that begins in the here and now and goes forward for all eternity. Knowing Christ, experiencing the power of Christ’s resurrection, the fellowship of suffering with Christ, becoming like him and his death which he will do and not suffer in the future.

Attaining to the resurrection of the dead, and then ultimately achieving Christ’s purposes in the world, in knowing Christ and experiencing his power and participating in his sufferings. Paul really comes to understand the true significance of his own person, place, and time. Time. What time is it? You’re probably good. You’re right. Saints about ten feet. Wrap this up. But, what time is it?

You know, Paul was chosen by God for a particular place in time. And God’s also very deliberate about your time and your place. As Americans, we tend to be focused on chronos time. Your pastor’s preached about that multiple times, and I think I have to explain to you, but it’s the it is. The Greek word chronos is used in the Scripture to explain.

We use it to, we translate it into words like chronology or, it’s about the time, our plans, what we’re going to do, what we did, and it’s really driven by our desire to to have control over our lives. But God is inviting us to engage with him in another kind of time in his car time, which is described as his meaningful time.

It’s about time where he would say, in the fullness of time, God sent his son. We’re invited into his meaningful time in our Chronos only has true value as we connect it to God’s kairos time. Paul understood this well, this idea of time and place, and it helps him as he views his missionary task within the world.

He clearly articulates that too, the meeting of the area while he’s in Athens. From the book of acts, when he says this during his sermon from one man, God made all the nations that they should inhabit the whole earth, and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out to him and find him.

You and this church have been chosen for this Kara’s time, and he’s chosen you for the place where he has called you. That place may change according to his will, but have you ever considered the fact that not only has he placed you where you are for this time and place, but that he has placed other people, all the people within our community and our region and places of access for this car.

Time. Why? So that they might hear of Christ, reach out to him and find him. The Spirit of God is testifying of Christ in Arlington, in our broader community, in our state, in our region, and throughout the world. And he is inviting you and this church to join him in his mission. But like Paul, we have to view ourselves and our mission fields through the lens of the Holy Spirit.

I want to tell you three little stories, and I’m going to try to keep them brief, because I could I could go a long time telling stories. Any of you who are in my Sunday school class know that. But, but these three stories are really testimony of my own transformation in some ways, and the transformation of this church over these 24 years while I’ve been here.

But they’ve had a profound impact on my life. First story in 2005, Jeff, Aaron, Dale and I were teaching together and a younger I wouldn’t say we were young adults. Younger adult, class. And within our class came a couple. And this couple were beautiful couple. They were. They were well-dressed. He kind of looked like, if you could imagine, the rich young ruler.

He kind of looked like the rich young ruler, except for he had a very different spirit. And he was good looking. He was an intelligent. He was wealthy. As a matter of fact, he was an inventor. And he, had made his he was an entrepreneur who had made his living inventing, new forms of halogen lighting and patenting those and, and had developed manufacturing business both here in the Arlington area.

The metroplex area, and also manufacturing companies both in China and Taiwan. And during that time when he was in our class, he actually was employing literally hundreds, probably around 500 employees in other nations. He traveled a lot. And one morning, as we were, sharing prayer request at the beginning of class, he came in and you could tell he was tired.

He’d probably rush to get there after throwing his suitcase on the floor, after he walked through the door. And as we were sharing this need or that need, he said to us, I really need you to pray for me. He said, I found myself sitting at the table with lots of, Chinese businessmen who are not believers.

They have no idea who Christ is. He said, I have a I have a place, I have a voice, I have influence, I have, I have those, that are there that respect me, that listen to me. And the honest truth is, I have no idea how I’m supposed to interject my faith in Christ into these into this conversation.

Would you please pray for me? I remember that morning having a huge wave of, I would call it the Holy Spirit shame that swept over me when I felt like the Holy Spirit said to me, who do you think you are? Here sits a guy in your Sunday school class who sits at seats and at tables that you will never be qualified to enter, and he has an audience with people that you will never know.

And how are you going to ensure that he is formed spiritually and skillfully to share his faith with the people in his sphere of influence? It was a huge shift for me when I began asking the question, what does it look like to form the church to live missionary? And how do we become, in powers of influencers?

God’s calling us our church to identify and to form influencers, and this can be achieved as we’re guided by God’s Spirit and His sense of things through his lens. Story number two this happened just last year. This is a true story. And I’d say the moral of the story might be, you get what you pray for. So, in Ramadan of 2024, if you remember, our pastor challenged us in his morning sermon on the first Sunday of Ramadan that we might consider what Muslim person or what Muslim family in our area that we were going to bless for Ramadan.

Now, here’s another family confession and honest confession is that most days for me, most of my conversations are either with or are about people who live in other countries. That’s just the nature of what I do and many times, to be quite honest, it causes me to step over Arlington to go to the world. That’s my honest confession.

And so when he asked that question that morning, it I was felt a little perplexed and quite convicted that I couldn’t off the top of my head, name a particular Muslim neighbor friend, that I was going to list during Ramadan. So I prayed on Sunday. It was Sunday. Then on Monday, several times throughout the day, I prayed and I said, God, if there’s someone that you want me to bless during Ramadan, would you please reveal this person to me?

No joke. Monday I get off work 5:00. Leaving my office, which is right across from Field or Field Road Baptist Church, and turn on to the parkway. And within a block I see a muslim woman fully covered in, standing in the median, weeping as her car is sort of up halfway onto the onto the median. And, and so I pull over in the turn lane and I ask the question, are you all right?

Can I help you? To which she says, my car is broken down and I don’t and I don’t have anyone who can help me. So I said to her, hey, why don’t you just come and sit in my car? Let’s get off the road and, we’ll pull over to the side and we’ll call for a tow truck to come into to get your car.

And so we do, and it’s in the next 30 minutes as we’re waiting on the tow truck. I have the opportunity to hear and to meet Fatima. Fatima was an asylum seeker from Sudan. She and her family had come, to to Arlington seeking safety and, had lived here for several years when, the Covid 19 pandemic hit and her husband died of Covid during the pandemic, leaving her a single woman with limited language capacity.

And two teenage children, one of them struggling, the daughter struggling with depression, alone, and her striving to provide for her family through working in a cleaning job with a very unreliable car. So I said to her, hey, let me let me take you to the and we’ll follow the tow truck and figure out where this garages.

So we dropped the car off at the garage for repair, make our arrangements there. And then I said, let me drive you home. And so we drove just across on the other side of 820 to a place, that I’d never been before. It’s only about 15 minutes from my house, and I’d never driven into this community, which was stunning to me as I just drove the streets.

How many people of diverse ethnicities and languages were just out in the streets and were in their yards? And so we’ve pulled up to her multi lock duplex house and go inside, where she welcomes me in to take me with tea and the same a cake and we become friends. You know through that experience and we went on to, to there were others in our church that came to be involved with her as well.

But through that experience, I had a revelation again, that that sometimes we can exist within our community and have an inability to see who’s even around us. We can’t always see it. And we need to ask God in the same way that he opened my eyes to meet Fatima. What does he see? And who does he see through his lens?

Because regardless of what position we may hold from a political point of view, regardless of what color my passport is, God has called everyone in this room to a higher level of citizenship. We are Kingdom citizens. Amen. And God’s view toward foreigners and aliens has been very clear through His word. From the pages of the books of Moses and the law through the Book of Revelation.

As a matter of fact, he says in Leviticus chapter 19, verse 34, the foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native born. Love them as yourself, for you were once foreigners in Egypt, and I am the Lord. Your God. God’s perspective trumps all other perspectives. We have served as a model church for meeting the needs of the of the marginalized.

As a matter of fact, last week when I was in Virginia, I told the Mission Arlington story and, and how God has used this church to meet so many needs. But let’s not settle in and deceive ourselves into thinking that there’s only one way to respond to the marginalized and to free captives. God is going to continue to reveal to us new and other unique ways that he is working, and is inviting us to join him now, in the same way that Paul would say in verse 12 of our text, he made this comment.

He said, not that I have already obtained all this. And you know, several points in Paul’s writings, he talks about how he’s moving toward, but hasn’t yet obtained all that God has in store for him. Paul has realized that God is still in the business of forming his people, and he was forming him. And I would say the same is true for us as a church.

We haven’t arrived yet. There’s so much more that God would have us do. And he’s asking us to be sensitive to his Spirit as we continue to live out this calling to share Christ with the world. Third story. We’re living it. It’s the story of sending. And we talked about that even this morning, that beginning in 2005, our church, since the call from God to form, train and send out our own missionaries.

And over the last 20 years, we’ve sent out more than 20 missionary units to live and to serve in 12 nations. But in recent days, if you pick up your missions magazine, that that, our engagement staff has so capably put together for you, you can read more about how that story of sending for us is unfolding. Or at one time we might have imagined ourselves sending, only sending out, sending people within our own congregation, commissioning them, forming them, and sending them to fly over salt water to some other place in order that they might proclaim Christ among unreached peoples.

God is reminding us right now that he’s at work in so many unique ways around the world. Some of the most effective work that we’re seeing is not necessarily being performed by Westerners who are flying over salt water, but that is being performed and carried out by indigenous people who are living and serving among their own or near culture people.

And the honest truth is, even in our connections as a church in various places in the world, we are literally seeing thousands and thousands and thousands of people come to faith in Christ through these networks. So I think that what God is challenging us in right now is to is to ask him to help us to see and to strategize and to be as intentional in our support of those who are already within or near to other cultures, and how we might empower them and come alongside them to achieve what God has planned among the people they serve.

So instead of just sending out, we’re embracing a what we would call poly centric sending. We will continue to send out from our body, but we may also send in. What does it look like to bring a same culture or near culture witness to live and serve among unreached people groups in the city of Arlington? God may call us to send within.

We are already doing that. Some in various places in the world where we are empowering witnesses of Christ among their own people who have the ability to go places that we may never go. We also are being called and challenged to sin near, to help those who have more similar cultures to move in and to serve and live in.

Incarnate witness among people of whom they may have more similarity than we do. So as we developing our skills and our approaches to these other forms of sending, God may ask us to make some shifts. We may be asked to shift from our thinkings about individualism and, and, centrism at the seat of, in the driver’s seat of missions to embrace the ways that Christ reveals he’s working in this world where we see things like communal conversion, groups coming to Christ, and where that kind of communal thinking is more the norm.

There are many things that God will ask us to embrace and to change as we continue to follow him and be formed by him. I’m going to throw up a picture of, one of my I love finish line photos. And so, this is not necessarily a finish line photo, but it is one of my favorite athletes that you probably recognize.

This is Sydney McLaughlin of Rome. This is a Yahoo sports photo of hers. As she is, breaking the world record in the 400 meter hurdles. She’s a sister in Christ. She’s a believer and an Olympic gold medalists and a world champion. She holds the world record in the 400 meter hurdles. And she is a person who uses her influence and her position for the kingdom.

She recently published a book entitled Far Beyond Gold. I love that title, Far Beyond Gold. And it’s a story of her running from fear to faith. You know, I love this. I love this image because I think it captures exactly what Paul was describing this, this leaning, this pressing forward, this pressing toward Christ to know him, to experience him, to participate him in his power and in his suffering.

And, and so that leaning toward him but in leaning toward Christ, we also are called to lean toward the world, because that Christ is drawing us to the very people that he died to save. And in that we we need to we need to understand people so much to us as a church. Is this what does it mean to respond to the needs of all of humanity?

We know the greatest need. The greatest need is a spiritual one. And many times God uses more holistic methodologies to lead us to a place of proclamation that I would challenge us, understand the needs and even the perceived needs of the people that God gives to us. Let’s be students of their cultures. Let’s understand it’s not just about helping others in culture, to our culture, which is a good thing to do, but it’s also about learning to value and appreciate their culture and to understand it to to get our minds and gain some understanding about their worldviews, which would cause them to believe what they believe, that worldview that would cause them to make

the choices they make or behave the ways that they do. And in that we might gain more understanding about people. It’s not just about understanding people or reading about people or understanding their culture. It’s about knowing people in the same ways that we know Christ by leaning toward him, by spending time with him, he’s challenging us to lean toward others and to embrace people into our homes or into their homes, or to eat their food, or to speak their language, or to show interest in what interests them, to become their encouragers and their friends.

What does it mean to be a neighbor and being a neighbor and loving our neighbors? God is going to open up opportunities for us that we have not yet imagined. And when we cross the finish line, we will have some unimaginable rewards. There will probably be many rewards that we can’t even get our minds around. But the greatest, greatest of those rewards will be exactly what Paul described.

It will be being with knowing and being fully transformed into Christ’s image. Because what the Scripture tells us, tells us is that when we see him, we will be like him, for we shall see Him as He is. But our second greatest prize will be joining in a multitude that no one can count from every tribe, every nation, every language, and every people standing before the throne and before the lamb.

This God makes all things whole as he recreates this world as he shelters them with his presence. The Scripture promises that never again will they hunger, and never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down upon them, nor any scorching heat for the lamb at the center. This scripture is going to keep.

For the lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd. He will lead them to springs of living water, and he will wipe away every tear from their eyes. So διώκω​. Press on, press on, press on, toward Christ and toward the souls near and far. He’s called us to harvest, remembering that the Spirit of Christ is within us and among us, and leading us and revealing to us and transforming us toward himself and toward this world.

Let’s pray together.

Thank you, God, for choosing us. Thank you for choosing First Baptist Church of Arlington. And thank you, God for bringing my family here. I can’t think of anywhere in the world. I would rather serve a church.

Thank you Lord for the fact that you infuse us with your spirit and that you transform us. God not to be left to ourselves or our own devices or our own ideas. But father, toward who you are and what you would have for us to do. Help us in this leaning father, to trust in you with all of our heart.

To lean not on our own understanding. To acknowledge you in all of our ways, so that you may direct our paths. In Christ’s name we pray, and you