Seven Reasons Why You Should Go - Part 4

Number six, this is gonna help some of you. Some of you are gonna look a little tense. They all know, Lord, career missionary, I just came for a summer.

You know, some people get the idea that missionary work is sort of a purgatory. They've been really living for self, and they've been making a real mess of their life, and they make a little rededication in a meeting, and they feel that somehow I gotta pay for what I've done. I need to find a little bit of an evangelical purgatory, and pay and make up for all my fooling around.

And so they look through the missionary lists, and they discover one that seems to be the toughest and the worst, and they enroll. Operation Mobilization. I wanna tell you, I believe most of you, forgive me, are gonna enjoy this summer.

I believe most of you are gonna find this a mega fulfilling experience. Sure, there'll be the hard parts. I remember this one American girl, she got to Europe.

I mean, this girl, she had hair that looked like it came right out of a magazine. And she had taken care of her hair, you know, she had all these various glues and different things for her hair. And she discovered where she was in some campsite, there was no hot water.

She had never washed her hair in her lifetime. I don't know, she was probably superstitious, thought it was all gonna fall out or something. And she was in a crisis, because she had to wash her hair with cold water.

Oh, but later on she thought of the joy of suffering for Christ. There may be some of these hard experiences, but I believe there's gonna be many wonderful experiences. And God has given this life for us, this life in Christ for us to enjoy.

We are not called to some kind of asceticism. We're not gonna set you up on a flagpole in the middle of Italy to throw tracks at passers-by during the summer. We don't forbid you to take a picture of the Eiffel Tower as you walk by.

You know, like in the old days, thou shalt not look at scenery, you know. No cameras. We never actually had a no camera policy.

We had a policy that each team would have an official camera, just to keep the numbers down. But it just didn't work. Now you can bring your camera and probably get it stolen.

Forgive me for my negativeness. But here's the thing that's gonna relax some of you that are a little tense. Number six.

God can easily stop us. God can easily stop us. Providence, maybe in the area of health, maybe in the area of family.

Some people won't allow us to go into their church and give a message like this. They're afraid all their young people are gonna jump up and run off to the mission field. They don't know what to do.

It'll decrease the numbers in the church. What an embarrassment. Plus, where's the money gonna come from? Do you know of any really big stampede to the mission field? I mean, is this a big thing going on in the States since I was last here? Whole churches rushing off? Now there are some churches that are sending quite a few people on summer campaigns and praise the Lord for some of them.

But I'm talking now about longer term biblical apostolic missionary work. God can easily stop us. And so, maybe more of you, maybe more of you should just begin to move.

Maybe more of you should just say, Lord, you've spoken to me this week. I'm gonna start to move toward the ends of the earth where they've not heard, where the church doesn't exist. Or I'm gonna get in the stream of the people who are doing that, so that everything I do counts toward that.

And you'll find that God can easily stop you. It's hard to guide something that isn't moving. We learned that with the ship.

Incredibly difficult to steer it without moving it forward. You ever seen a ship without moving forward, just turn around? Tell you, get a picture. And until some of you start moving a little more, in many ways, until you start moving more, it's gonna be difficult for the Holy Spirit or even your leaders to help direct you.

Will you take some steps of faith? Will you listen more carefully to see if the man of Galilee is saying to you, even tonight, follow me and I will make you a fisher of men.