Keeping the Missions Flame Alive

It's Monday, the day after our National Conference on Finish the Mission, and my heart is full, and I was thinking this morning about the hundreds of you who stood up at the end to declare that you are engaged or you sense a deep stirring in your heart that God is calling you to be engaged in cross-cultural missions for the sake of His glory. And the question that I have that I want to try to answer for you in these few minutes is, how can you maintain the kind of flame that God lit for many of you and us in that conference? And here's my answer. It's from Psalm 96.

I'll give you the first four verses, and then we'll go backward through the psalm with four pieces of kindling from the psalm that you can continually toss onto the flame of your fire for missions so that it doesn't go out. So here we go. The psalm goes like this.

Psalm 96. Sing to the Lord a new song. Sing to the Lord all the earth.

Sing to the Lord and bless His name. Tell of His salvation from day to day. Declare His glory among the nations, His marvelous works among all peoples, for great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.

So now let's go backward through those four verses. And here are my four pieces. You could call them this.

Big God, Mission as Spreading the Glory, Center on His Salvation, and Sing. So let's go backwards. Big God.

One of the reasons we lose our heart for missions is because our God is just not big enough. So focus mainly on getting a big view of God. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised.

So He is great. That's number one. Focus on the greatness of God.

Number two. Declare His glory among the nations. So think of missions first, not only, but first as a way of declaring the greatness, the bigness of this God to the nations.

They don't know the true God. They need to know God through Jesus Christ. So think of missions in terms of magnifying the greatness of God among the nations so that your concept of missions is big enough to accord with the bigness of the God that He is showing you.

And third, the center of that glory, the essence of that glory, the apex of that glory of God is the work of salvation. Make known His salvation, His saving power among all the people. Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners.

This is what the world needs to hear. The glory of God is displayed most magnificently in the greatness and the lowness of His magnificence through the cross of Jesus Christ. Jesus came so that the righteousness could be provided and so that the punishment could be endured.

The righteousness that I don't have and need, the punishment that I deserve and don't want to endure, and nobody in the world wants to endure it. And so we have a message. We have the best news in all the world.

So don't just focus on bigness. Focus on the core of that bigness, the salvation that God has provided gloriously through Jesus Christ. And then fourth and finally sing.

Sing to the Lord. We have a message to be sung about. And so labor to know Him and to delight in Him and to savor His salvation in such a way that your heart sings.

So those things. May God grant you to see His bigness. Focus on the bigness and the greatness of God.

Second, missions is the declaration of that greatness and that glory. Third, the essence and heart and apex of that glory is the work of salvation through Jesus Christ. We have great news for the world.

And fourth, sing. Don't rest until you have seen God and seen His mission and seen His salvation so clearly that it makes your heart sing.