Generous Mind: Generous With Our Children

Generous Mind: Generous With Our Children: “These commandments that I give you today are to be on your hearts. Impress them on your children. Talk about them when you sit at home and ...

LSLRL Session 3: The Great Commandment

In our second session, we talked about the Great Commandment (Matthew 22:36-40) and God's passion.

We first watched Monty Python and the Holy Grail, the scene above, and then when we finished laughing, we talked about what is our quest. Based on Jesus' prime directive expressed in the Great Commission, our quest is to make disciples, we concluded.

But then we looked at the Great Commandment and asked ourselves, what would it look like if we worked to fulfill the Great Commission but forgot the Great Commandment to love God and love people? Our conclusion was that we'd be a bunch of works-oriented, heartless, Jesus freaks whose only interest would be in the numbers of people in our pews or the notches in our Bible. The Great Commandment is the driving engine behind the Great Commission.

Then we looked at John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 and asked ourselves, What is God most passionate about? The answer, of course, is us. People. All people. If he died for us, the saved, while were yet sinners, then he died for everyone, even if at this moment they happen to still be sinners. The Romans 5 passage talks about how someone might die for a good man. Let's say, Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Gates. If some terrorists came along and kidnapped Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Gates and held them in a cave in Afghanistan, we'd send Seal Team 6 in to get them back. But if some kidnapped Casey Anthony, the woman who killed her daughter, who would go to rescue her. But God demonstrated his love for us in that while we were like Casey Anthony, Christ died for us to rescue us.

To help illustrate how much passion God has for us, we played the waterfall scene from “The Last of the Mohicans.” God will find us. He will never grow weary because of his great passion for us.

LSLRL Outline

Here's the outline for the LSLRL discussion group and the topics we aim to cover. We have lots of flexibility so we'll take as long or as little time as we need to discuss these things. I don't want to be out in front of the Lord. I want to be like Jesus, who did only what he saw the Father doing. (John 5:19) I'll be relying a lot on the Verge Network and making use of videos and movies. So the outline is:

• The Great Commission
• The Great Commandment and God's Passion
• Living and Praying Missionally -- Defining terms
• Being Missional at Work
• Being Missional in our Neighborhoods and Communities
• Being Missional in our Families: Dads, Moms, Couples, Hospitality
• The Poor
• Discipling Not-Yet Believers

LSLRL Session 1: The Great Commission

So we finally had our first "Living Sent Lives in Real Life" discussion group session. It was attended by me, my wife, two married couples and a married man without his wife.

We discussed what words, thoughts or images come to mind when we hear the word evangelism.  People said the word makes them think of Billy Graham, passing out tracts, knocking on doors. One guy said, "Jesus Freaks." One of the women said it makes her think of our responsibility as believers to share the Gospel with others.

Then we watched the video "Evangelism Linebacker" to show what we're not going to talk about. It got a good laugh. And I shared our testimony, essentially repeating what I wrote in the first post of this blog.

We talked about how we know the Great Commission is important. It's mainly because that's all that Jesus apparently talked about -- or at least it's the only thing recorded that he said -- in the 40 days he was on Earth following his resurrection from the dead. It's recorded in each of the four Gospels and in Acts. They are:

• Matthew 28:19-20
• Mark 16:15
• Luke 24:45-48
• John 20-21
• Acts 1:8                                                       

This is Jesus's Prime Directive. His last will and testament. We talked about how the emphasis in Matthew 28 is on making disciples and that the words "go, baptizing and teaching" are in support of that imperative command.

Then we watched the video "Simon Says" by Francis Chan. The point here is that we're not to just teach, but to teach so that we will obey the command to make disciples. This video also got a good laugh. We also talked about at whom the teaching of the Great Commission is aimed. The answer is us.

For homework, we handed out a list of Bible passages that show that God's mission from the beginning of the Bible to its end is to save people. The list is adapted from a post on Ed Stetzer's blog.

Conclusion: The discussion was kind of basic, I think for many of us, and so the discussion wasn't the deepest or most inspiring. Everyone liked the videos, which helped make the time together entertaining. I'll be relying on videos quite a bit in the course of this group.

Next discussion: The Great Commandment and God's Passion

I’m cutting up my Bible

I’m cutting up my Bible

The link above is to an article on what happens to your Bible when you cut out all the verses that have to do with caring for the poor and social justice. Your Bible basically falls apart. The issue of the "poor" and justice will be taken up in the LSLRL group, if we ever get that far. Another topic for those interested in obeying God's Word instead of just studying it.

First day? Not so good.

So today was the first day of our new discussion group on Living Sent Lives. Nobody showed up. There was some confusion as to whether the group was starting this Sunday or next Sunday. But some other groups got started OK I guess, like a group starting to study the book of Titus led by a woman in our IC and another on the life of Joseph tied to the pastor's sermon and led by him. People attended those. Can't compete I suppose. So... we'll see next week. Not sure the group was promoted well enough and not sure people got the concept. My darker side also wants to believer that people are more interested in gathering knowledge about Scripture than obeying it. Oh well, this may be a short-lived experiment. I'll work harder on promotion this week and see what happens.

Maybe we need new wineskins.

How Must I Then Live?

A story of my journey in evangelism.


In college, not long after I first understood the Gospel and prayed "the prayer," I was introduced, thankfully, to the Great Commission. I was part of a campus ministry that took the GC seriously. "Every nation in our generation" was one of our slogans.A college student at the time, I quickly grasped the thought that I wasn't just saved from going to hell but also for the purpose of helping rescue others from that fate. If God only saved me so I could be with him, I asked myself, then why am I still here? There must be something he wants me to do. That purpose is the Great Commission. I especially remember a retreat in northern Iowa where I heard a speaker talk about God's will for my life. The question that most challenged me from that retreat was something like, "If every Christian lived like me, would the world be reached with the Gospel?" No chance, I thought. I was cut to the heart. I remember walking by myself in the woods that day weeping, contemplating the challenge I just heard and answering the question, ala Francis Schaeffer, how then must I live? One of the ideas that captured my imagination was that responsibility for fulfilling the Great Commission was everyone's, not just for the professional clergy. The way I understood it is to come along side someone and help that person become a follower of Jesus Christ. I didn't have to be a great speaker or the most outgoing personality or have the "gift" of evangelism. God was a genius in his counterintuitive approach to reaching the world with the Gospel. Nobody would plan it this way. He wanted me to be a part of it. All I had to do was be somebody's friend. I could do that, I thought.

But I forgot that part and here I am many years later and, as John Mellencamp might say, "those crazy dreams kinda came and went." That may be an overstatement, but what happened is that I worked pretty hard at evangelism. I passed out tracts, I did "cold turkey" evangelism on central campus. I went door to door in the dorms and in neighborhoods. I even preached in public. I spent the majority of my time doing it, thinking about it, talking about it. And then when I graduated from college and started