The Road After (Part 2).

All right, everybody, we're going to get started. I'm going to invite you all to take your seats. We have finally finished the book of Luke, our nine-week sermon series that turned into eleven weeks with an epilogue. We're doing today what Pastor Abbie started last week, a two-part sermon really on Jesus' last moments on earth, what he did and what he said after the crucifixion, after the resurrection, before the ascension, before he goes back up into heaven. I'm going to wrap that up today. The road after is our title.

I'm going to jump right into the Word. Before I do, I'm going to be reading two passages. One is in Luke and one is in Matthew, from the same account. Two perspectives at the same moment in time. We're going to start in Luke chapter 24, verses 45 through 53.

He blessed them. While he blessed them, he parted from them and was carried up into heaven. And they worshipped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy and were continually in the temple, blessing God.

Luke 24:45-53

And then Matthew tells us when Luke says he gave them a blessing, Matthew tells us what he said. Matthew chapter 28, verses 19 through 20.

Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.

Matthew 28:19-20

I'm going to write up front for you our story and our why for today's message. Our story is Jesus' death and resurrection made being in relationship with him available for everyone. And now what? Go tell everyone. Go tell everyone.

One of the discipleship classes that we offer here at New Culture is called Alpha. The very core of Alpha is having a safe space to ask questions about God and Scripture. Every week focuses on a different big question. We talk about who is God, what is Scripture, how do I pray, who is Jesus, all sorts of things. But the very first week of Alpha, every single time I ask everyone in the room this question: if you could ask God anything in the world right now and know he would answer you, what would you ask God?

Without fail, at least three people say, what is my purpose? What is my calling? Am I fulfilling my calling? Or some variation of that. Well, here's the answer. We do have a purpose. What I love about Scripture is that if we really look at it and read it well, we discover this truth: who we are guides what we do. God is who we are, and what we do flows from that. This means that if we desire to live out our God-given purpose, first we must live out of our God-given identity. One precedes the other. If I want to live out a God-given purpose, then I have to be living out of my God-given identity.

You have a primary calling and a secondary calling. The primary calling is who you are. The secondary calling is the what and the how.

Your primary calling is unchanging

Your primary calling is who you are. It's your identity. Your secondary calling is the what and the how. Your primary calling is constant. It's unchanging. It was your calling before you knew it was your calling. Your secondary calling is fluid. It changes and moves and manifests itself in different ways.

Confusing these two things is detrimental to both. When we confuse what we do with who we are, we are on the fast track for burnout and bitterness. Why? Because our worth becomes what we have to offer. It becomes our ability to perform. We can't slow down, we can't take a break, and we definitely can't mess up, because what we do has become who we are.

Your primary calling is this: you are a disciple of Jesus. That is your primary calling. Your most innate purpose is to be in relationship with Jesus. It's actually really simple. What is my calling? To be a disciple of Jesus. And in my opinion, this takes the pressure off.

We very much exist in a grind culture. Do this, do that, get to this point by the time I'm 25, and this by the time I'm 30. When I'm 40 I need to be here. We have this set grind culture of what it looks like to exist. What's the first thing we say in small talk? What do you do? Oh, I'm a teacher. Oh, I'm a student. I'm a nurse. I'm a social worker. Whatever it is. But what you do is not who you are.

When you make what we do who we are, we run the risk of losing the job and spiraling because our whole identity was in our career. We run the risk of the marriage failing and spiraling because our whole identity was wrapped up in our marriage. We run the risk of the kids moving out and not knowing who we are anymore.

If I change my nature, I don't know who I am. What you do does not change who you are, as long as you have your feet firmly rooted in your identity. You are a disciple of Jesus.

We just spent all this time in the book of Luke. If you look at it, the disciples are always described the same way by all the onlookers: those guys who were always with Jesus. You're one of the people that was always with Jesus. You're one of Jesus' followers. That's literally how they're always described throughout this entire gospel.

They're always identified as the ones who were with Jesus of Nazareth. Surely these men have been with the Lord. That's how they're always known and described. Who they are is people who are in relationship with Jesus. Their primary calling, their most innate purpose, is being a disciple of the Lord. This matters because you can teach what you know, but you will reproduce who you are.

Scripture talks about righteous judgment, right? How to judge rightly. It describes this concept by saying that to judge something or a person, you should judge them by their fruit. You can teach what you know, but you'll reproduce who you are. Bitter people tend to reproduce bitter people. I've never seen someone with multiplicative influence who is mad and just bitter. It goes from one person being upset to now they're fifteen. Because you reproduce who you are.

You can be intelligent, you can be gifted, you can know the right things to say and the right way to say them. But if you're bitter, you reproduce bitter. That's why we say things like hurt people hurt people, and heal people heal people. Insecure people make everyone around them more insecure. But the flip of that is secure people tend to make the people around them more confident.

Disciples of Jesus will reproduce disciples of Jesus. We don't need more people with the title of worship leader or pastor or evangelist or missionary. Whatever the title is, we need more disciples of Jesus. Jesus didn't say go and make located ministers. He said go and make disciples of the nations.

Your primary calling is to be a disciple of Jesus. This is our core mission and vision as a church. Our goal here is to be with Jesus, become like Jesus, and do what Jesus did. That starts with being with Jesus, because everything flows out of that place.

Secondary calling: go and make disciples

Your primary calling is to be a disciple of Jesus. And your secondary calling, you guessed it, is to go and make disciples. My degree was in practical ministry. But that's not what I wanted to get my degree in. I wanted to get a Greek studies degree. I'll tell you why I decided not to do that. Because I would have had to take Greek 1 and Greek 2. I didn't want to do that.

Here's the thing. Greek has no punctuation marks. None. There are no periods. There are no question marks. There are no commas. It's just words all over the place. The way that in Greek you distinguish if it's a question, a statement, or a suggestion, is one word has different variations of itself. And those variations will tell you if it's passive, if it's a question, if it's a command. What is that word?

Go and make disciples. Right here when Jesus says this, is it a suggestion? Is it passive? No. It is not a passive statement. It is an instruction and it's loaded with the expectation of obedience. Jesus' last word to his disciples is a command to go and make disciples.

Where are my personality test people at? Yes, yes, yes. I am a personality test person. The Enneagram, Myers-Briggs, all those things. I'm an Enneagram 2 and 3. You're either really excited or really annoyed at someone in the theater. I'm an introvert. I don't remember what my Myers-Briggs is, but I'm an introvert.

I'm telling you this to say I get the infatuation with personality tests. I'm all for self-knowledge. What I'm not for, and what we are all guilty of, is using our personality type as a crutch.

I can't evangelize and I can't go tell people about Jesus because I'm a type 7 and I don't like conflict. I don't like confrontation, so I just can't do it. I'm a typical introvert by myself. I can't go talk to someone about Jesus because as a two I'm a people-pleaser. If they go upset, what am I going to do? I'm an introvert and I don't want to talk to you. And we use our personality type as a crutch.

But I just want to tell you, this isn't about your personality type. You're just being disobedient. Yeah. The last thing Jesus tells the disciples is go and make disciples. It wasn't a suggestion. It wasn't if you feel like it, if it's comfortable, if you're an extrovert, type story. It was go and make disciples. If we are not making disciples, we are being disobedient. It's that simple. If we're not making disciples, we are being disobedient. And your personality type isn't a valid excuse.

How you accomplish your secondary calling, how you make disciples, is unique and it changes. I am, most of all, a disciple of Jesus. And whether I'm in a consult room with a patient who's telling me why they're in the office or I'm standing here with a microphone literally preaching, I have the same calling: make Jesus known. And that can manifest itself differently. It looks different when I'm at the chiropractic office. It looks different when I'm here. It looked different when I worked at a preschool. It looked different when I worked at a fitness studio in college. It looks different in whatever scenario you're in. It's fluid. It changes. But the actual calling doesn't change. Go and make disciples.

Go tell everyone

Jesus' death and resurrection made being in relationship with him available for everyone. Now go tell everyone. There are two things I want to point out that we need to do if we're going to go make disciples.

The first one is this: you need to move beyond your comfort and into your convictions. You need to move beyond your comfort and into your convictions. It needs to be your greatest conviction that the world needs to know Jesus and that it is your purpose to make him known. That needs to be your deepest conviction.

The world needs to know Jesus, and it is your purpose to make him known. Because when that's your deepest conviction, even when it's uncomfortable, you know, I am here to make Jesus known. I know it does get uncomfortable. I know sometimes it feels completely useless, because you hear more nos than yes's and you get rejected more often than you get accepted. But it needs to be your core conviction. The world needs to know Jesus exists, and it is my purpose to make it known. We need to move out of our comfort and into our convictions.

The next thing we need to do, we need to talk about the lost with God before we talk about God to the lost. We need to pray for people before we talk to them. Sometimes I do not hold the belief that there's a magic formula to evangelism where if you fill in the blanks of a statement, everyone you talk to will say yes and become a follower of Jesus.

We all communicate differently. We all have different experiences and backgrounds. We all respond to different things. I do, however, believe that we serve a God that is big enough for all of us and personal enough to make himself known to each of us individually and uniquely, the way he made us.

We need to get in the habit of praying for people in our lives that don't know Jesus.

The other discipleship class we have here is called Follow. The first time I went through the Follow book, I did it on my own. I think I was 19, a sophomore in college. The very first chapter, literally on like the third page, tells you to pick a list of people that you know who don't know the Lord, that you're going to commit to pray for every single day for the eight weeks to follow.

So I picked two people. I picked two of my friends from back home. It's like week 7 of 8 weeks and I'm praying and praying every single day for these two girls. And I leave the country for a week for spring break. And mind you, I never actually did anything. I just prayed. I just prayed every single day.

I leave the country, I come back, and my friends are like, hey, come back to town. We want to hang out with you. It's literally an hour away. I drive from home, I sit down for dinner and they're like, oh we just wanted to tell you, while you were away we went to church service and they were like, we want to follow Jesus. And I was like, what?

And immediately I was like, I know. The second they said it, I knew. I've been praying for you every day for seven weeks that you would meet the Lord. Every day. But then there are some times where you're praying and you're praying and he actually makes you do something after that. I was like, this is so cool. I'm going to do that again. I'm going to do that again.

So I committed to pray for my childhood friend. We grew up together in church and so I knew every single reason why she wasn't following Jesus and I had no idea what to do with it. So I just committed to pray for her every day, and I prayed for her for over a year. And again, I didn't actually do anything other than pray and just be a part of her life the way I was always a part of her life.

And one day we were talking and she was telling me something, and if I'm honest, I genuinely think she was telling me that she was scared to change majors because it was her senior year of college already. And I don't know why, in that moment, I knew the following weekend of serving at a retreat two hours away, and I just knew I had to invite her.

I was like, hey, do you want to go on a road trip? She was like, yeah, that sounds fun. I was like, perfect. It's eighty dollars, can we just fill out this form really quick? I was like, it's a retreat I'm working at. She agrees to go. And then this happened. And that was really cool. That was really special.

I had never invited her anything before. I had never even taken a leap to talk to her, because she wasn't open to it. But in that one moment, I just felt the Holy Spirit say, fight for her. Now she serves as a pastor at Church at the Cross in Tampa.

Whether you are the vessel he uses or not, pray for the lost in your life. It's actually part of our daily rule of life to pray every single day. So it's an easy, natural rhythm to incorporate. Lord, here's this person in my life that doesn't know you. Bring them into relationship with you. Surround them with the right people. Give me the right words. Whatever it is, pray for the people in your life that don't know Jesus.

Prayer and commitment

We're going to go into a time of prayer right now. I'm just kind of being sensitive to what the Lord has put on our hearts. We're going to take this time to do two things. The first is to rejoice and find peace and rest in the fact that being a disciple of Jesus is your primary function and your primary purpose, and you should find peace in that. You literally can't fail at just being his. That's your identity. You're his. You can't fail at that.

Then respond to the command of Jesus to go and make disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. By asking this question of the Lord: Who have you given me, and how do I make you known to them? Who have you given me, and how do I make you known to them? And commit to pray for them every single day.

Two seconds, Lord. Remember this person I said I would bring to the Lord. I give them to you. I surrender them to you. Ten minutes. Praying for them every single day.

Jesus has definitely made a relationship with him available for everyone. So now go tell everyone.

Dear Heavenly Father, we thank you because you're a God that wants to make yourself known to us. The word says that when we seek you, we find you. You're not hard to find.

Lord, I pray that in this moment, your Holy Spirit come and speak directly to us. Lord, give us a picture of people that you know are in our sphere of influence, that we're a voice of value in their life. Give us a name that we can pray for them, that we can surrender them to you, that we can come and talk about the lost with you before we go talk about you with them.

Lord, I pray that you would just in this time give us vision and strategy of how to go make disciples and how you want to use us uniquely as who we are to go do that.

Lord, in your name, amen.

I pray that you would continue to put those people on our hearts that are far from you, that you have placed in our proximity, that you have placed us close to them, so that we can show them that you want to draw near to them.

So God, we thank you for speaking to us today. We thank you that you trust us to carry out your mission here on earth. God, with our very last verse, you chose to empower us to go and continue what you came to do. So Lord, we just stand here today knowing that it is an honor that we get to be a part of telling people just how much you love them and desire that relationship. We get to tell them the greatest news.

We thank you for that, Jesus. We love you. We thank you for speaking to us. We ask all this in your name. Amen.