Our Worship: The Goal of Mission

Romans 15:8-13

By David Strain

Now would you please turn with me in your copies of God's Word to the book of Romans, chapter 15? You'll find it there on page 949 if you're using one of the church Bibles. Romans chapter 15. We're going to be reading from verse 8 through verse 13. Before we do, let me pray first of all and then there will be a brief word by way of preface and then we'll turn to the text, so let's pray.

Our Father, we bow before You pleading with You, O Lord, once again, that we might hear Your voice. Thank You that You have spoken in holy Scripture, that as we read, we read the very word of the God of infinite glory and grace. Yet our attentiveness to it, our understanding of it, our readiness to believe and obey it is so often shattered and distorted and diverted by sin and selfishness, and so as we come now, bowed down before You with Your Word spread in our laps, we plead with You for the ministry of the Spirit of Jesus Christ. Give us ears to hear what Your Spirit would say to the church. Give us receptive hearts to Your Word, and by Your Word kindle in us a passion for the glory and renown of Your name, such that we will delight in nothing so much as to make much of Christ in all the nations, for Jesus' sake. Amen.

Worship generates Mission, sustains Mission, and results from Mission

This morning we were thinking together about God's sovereignty, which we said is the foundation of mission. Well tonight I want to think about our worship - the goal of mission. Our worship - the goal of mission. But I do need to say at the outset that putting it like that may somewhat obscure my point, because if you think that worship is simply the result of mission, the end point, the final target at which evangelism and mission aims, you'll miss the real significance of worship in the great task of bringing the good news of Jesus to Jackson and Mississippi and all around the world. Worship simply isn't the end, the final flourish, the doxological cherry on the missiological cake. Worship is a motive for mission. Worship is fuel for mission as we go. And mission is itself an act of worship. Worship generates mission, sustains mission, and results from mission. And to help us see some of that, I want to direct your attention to the portion of Scripture we announced a moment ago - Romans 15 verses 8 to 13. Let's give careful attention now to the Word of Almighty God:

For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised to show God's truthfulness, in order to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles, and sing to your name." And again it is said, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people." And again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the people extol him." And again Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles; in him will the Gentiles hope." May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that by the power of the Holy Spirit you may abound in hope.

Amen, and we praise God that He has spoken in His holy and inerrant Word. May He write its truth on all our hearts.

Evangelism and Compassion in the Life of John Harper

You may know the story of John Harper. Harper was a pastor in my hometown of Glasgow and later in the city of London. He had devoted his life to the work of evangelism and had been invited twice to the Moody Church in Chicago and he came to Southampton, the port, and boarded ship to cross the Atlantic on his second visit with his six year old daughter, Nana. And what happened on that crossing we know from Nana and one other source. The ship was, as you may have guessed, you may know - it was the Titanic. And Nana recalls being woken urgently at midnight by her father, placed onto a lifeboat after the ship struck that iceberg, and Harper, for his part, clung to whatever flotsam he could have after the ship went down, floating there in the dark in the icy seas, waiting to be rescued. And we know the details of Harper's final moments because several months later after the Titanic sank, a young man stood up at a prayer meeting in Ontario, Canada and in tears recounted the tale:

"Suddenly," he said, "a wave brought a man near - John Harper, he too holding a piece of wreckage. And he called out to me, 'Man, are you saved?' 'No, I'm not,' I replied. Harper shouted back, 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved!' The waves bore him away but a little later he was washed back beside me again. 'Are you saved now?' he called out. 'No,' I answered. 'Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved,' and then losing his hold on the wood, John Harper sank. And there alone in the night with two miles of water under me," this young man said, "I turned to Christ as my Savior. I am John Harper's last convert."

Love for the Lost fueled by a Love for God

The burden of the message this evening is that nothing can fill a human heart with a passion for reaching the lost with the good news about Jesus so that with our dying breath we long for nothing so much as to see sinners saved, nothing can do that like worship. Or to put it a little differently - it was delight in and a heart captivated by the glory and excellence and worthiness of Christ that made John Harper use his last gasps not to call for rescue but to breathe out the name of Jesus in the hope that someone around him facing eternity might join him in facing eternity clinging to Jesus Christ for salvation. It is only if our lives are oriented toward the glory of God, devoted to the praise of God, thrilled with the display of the majesty of God that we are ever going to use the last drops of our energy to hold out the mercy of God in the Gospel of His Son to a dying world.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? John Piper, quoting John Dawson, who is a leader with Youth for a Mission - Have you ever wondered what it feels like to have a love for the lost? "This is a term we use as part of our Christian jargon," says Dawson. "Many believers search their hearts in condemnation looking for the arrival of some feeling of benevolence that will propel them into bold evangelism. It will never happen! It is impossible to love the lost. You can't feel deeply about an abstraction or a concept. You would find it impossible," says Dawson, "to love deeply an unfamiliar individual portrayed in a photograph, let alone a nation or a race or something as vague as all lost people." Instead, listen to Dawson's advice. I think it makes our point this evening very well. He says, "Don't wait for a feeling of love in order to share Christ with a stranger. You already love your Heavenly Father. And you know this stranger is created by Him but separated from Him, so take the first steps in evangelism because you love God. It is not primarily out of a compassion for humanity that we share our faith or pray for the lost; it is first of all love for God."

That's the point that I want all of us to grasp together this evening. God is worth devoting ourselves to, singing about, praying to, trusting in, speaking about, preaching about, living for, all the time, every day, everywhere, and He will stay worthy, infinitely worthy, for eternity. It is love to God, delight in God. It is worship, in other words, that will make us evangelists and missionaries and global Christians. There are many barriers to effective evangelism. We are afraid of rejection, right? "If I speak up, maybe they won't want to know me anymore." We feel we don't know the Gospel message well enough. We get tongue-tied whenever we try. We fear reprisals. But let me say, if your heart is enthralled by the loveliness and excellency of Jesus Christ, His worthiness to be displayed before all the nations for all to see, if your heart is gripped by the worthiness of Jesus for yourself, your fears notwithstanding, the barriers to effective evangelism notwithstanding, you will open your mouth and do it anyway. You will stumble and stutter your way through. You will do it scared. You will do it imperfectly in weakness and trembling, but you will speak for Jesus because you know that He is worth displaying and worthy to be shared.

Worship: The Reason for the Mission of Jesus

One of the places where Paul makes the connection for us between worship and mission is our passage, Romans 15:8-13. Paul has been urging the Romans to live together in unity within the fellowship of the local church. If you turn over to chapter 16, you'll see in the first six verses very obviously, just simply casting your eye over these opening sixteen verses rather, this is an ethnically, socially, economically diverse congregation. So unity was an issue and in verses 5 and 6 of chapter 15 Paul explains that the goal, the end point, the result and fruit of Christian unity in their midst is the glory of God in worship. "May the God of endurance and encouragement grant you to live in such harmony with one another, in accord with Christ Jesus, that together you may with one voice," literally with one mouth, "glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ." Worship is the fruit, the end product of Christian unity in a growing congregation like this one. Division hinders worship. One-mouthed praise is the fruit of deep, lasting Christian harmony and unity.

But no sooner has he made that point than in verses 8 to 13 he goes on to explain that this harmonious, one-mouthed worship that he wants to see among them is rooted in something much deeper. A lack of unity can destroy worship, but worship is not generated by unity. Worship, Paul explains, is rooted in something much deeper. It is rooted, he says, in the mission of God in sending Jesus Christ into the world. The reason the church should explode in worship and praise and glory to God is because worship is the reason Jesus came. Worship is the reason Jesus came. Look at the text. Verse 8 - "For I tell you that Christ became a servant to the circumcised in order to show God's truthfulness, to confirm the promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy."

I. Mission fueled by Compassion and Mercy

Now notice there first of all that Jesus was in fact moved with compassion and servant-hearted concern for the lost. That's there on the surface. He became a servant to the circumcised. He lavished God's mercy on the Gentiles. Mercy and compassion were very much part of the motives for Jesus' mission. "He came not to be served but to serve and to give His life a ransom for many." He was Isaiah's, "servant of the Lord," whom Isaiah tells us was the one who "bore our griefs and carried our sorrows, was pierced for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement that brought us peace was upon him and by his stripes we have been healed." He is the one who "did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but who made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, born in the likeness of men and found in human form. He humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even the death of a cross."

Jesus has the archetypal servant heart - full of mercy, driven by compassion, He came to seek and save sinners. Jesus' mission was a mission motivated by mercy. He makes that point, or Matthew's gospel makes that point in Matthew 9:36-38. Matthew says, "When Jesus saw the crowds he had compassion for them because they were harassed and helpless like sheep without a shepherd. Then he said to the disciples, 'The harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. Therefore pray earnestly to the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into his harvest.'" He's pleading for prayer that God would send more workers out on mission to the ends of the earth because He's full of compassion for the people. So the first thing to see here is that Jesus is in fact moved with compassion and mercy. That is a valid motive for mission. That was part of Jesus' mission; it should be part of our motives for mission. We should love our neighbors and our friends and our colleagues and be filled with compassion and mercy toward them. We should long that they should be saved.

II. Mission in order to Magnify God

But then notice secondly in our text that Jesus' servant-hearted mercy and compassion serve a deeper agenda. Paul says Jesus came as a servant to the circumcised to accomplish three things. First, He came to show God's truthfulness. Second, He came in order to confirm the promises to the patriarchs. And thirdly, He came in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for His mercy. In other words, He came to die for sinners and rise for sinners, to display the truthfulness of God, the reliability of God, and the mercy of God to Jews and Gentiles, to all the nations. Full of compassion, shouting God's mercy on the lost, giving Himself for us, Jesus came not first of all to make much of us but to make much of God, to display God, to show us God is true, God is faithful, God is merciful. That's why He came. He came to magnify God.

Jesus Himself makes that point rather strikingly in His conversation with the Samaritan woman in John chapter 4 in verse 23. Remember the woman at the well? Jesus told her, "The Father is seeking true worshipers." We believe in seeker-sensitive worship so long as the seeker is God the Father. God seeks worship. That's the agenda that sent Jesus to the cross - the pursuit of God for worship in the hearts of all people everywhere. So now we see that Jesus came full of mercy and compassion for sinners on a mission that does not terminate on us, as though we were the center of God's universe. Jesus came to save us in order that we might join Him in making much of God. He came to show God's truthfulness, God's reliability, God's mercy, so that we might say, "Isn't God glorious and worthy to be adored?" He came to make us worship.

The Worship and Mission of God from the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings

And in case there was any doubt about that point, Paul drives it home, he pounds it home with a string of Old Testament quotations drawn from each of the three divisions of the Hebrew Bible. Like a lawyer making his case, Paul calls to the stand Scriptural witnesses from each section of the Old Testament Scriptures - the Law and the Prophets and the Writings. The Law, verse 10, quotes Deuteronomy 32:34 - "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people." The Prophets, verse 12, cites Isaiah 11:10 - "The root of Jesse will come." That's a reference to Messiah Jesus. "The root of Jesse will come, even he who arises to rule the Gentiles. In him the Gentiles will hope." He quotes twice from the Writings, verse 9, Psalm 18 verse 49 - "Therefore I will praise you among the Gentiles and sing to your name." And in verse 11, Psalm 117 verse 1 - "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, let all peoples extol him." Paul's point is now, or should now be beyond all doubt. The whole Bible, such as it then was, testified to the purpose of God to make the ends of the earth sing His glory. That's His agenda. Do you get the message? God's agenda is to fill the world with churches reverberating in adoration of His glory and greatness and grace, and with Christians whose whole lives are given up to magnifying the infinite worthiness of His name to be praised.

III. Application

Well, so what? What do we do with that truth? God's agenda is to fill the world with churches reverberating in adoration with Christians whose whole lives are given up to magnifying His infinite worthiness and worthiness to be praised. That's why Jesus came. Alright, I see that from this text. Now what? What am I going to do with that? What should it do to me and in my life? Turn over the page with me for a moment to look at verse 16, Romans 15 verse 16, because here you'll see how Paul himself responds to these great themes. Here is Paul, modeling for us how this truth should impact our thinking. It's a section of the letter in which the apostle gives us a glimpse into his own understanding of his work as an apostle and church planter and evangelist. He has, he says, preached Christ from Jerusalem all the way around to Illyricum, and now he is ambitious to bring the Gospel to places where Christ has never before been proclaimed. But in verse 16 he tells us how he thinks about that great pioneering missionary activity. He is, he says, "a minister of Christ Jesus to the Gentiles, to the nations, in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit." Paul's using the image, the metaphor, of a priest in the Old Testament temple offering up sacrifices of worship.

But what kind of offerings does Paul bring in praise to God? Paul's priestly offerings are Gentile lives brought to Christ through the gospel he preaches, made acceptable by the Holy Spirit. For Paul, his missionary work is an act of worship. It is doxological. It aims to bring people to a saving knowledge of Jesus by preaching the Gospel of grace so that God may have all the glory and the honor and the praise. They become - their lives, their persons - devoted now, turned towards, captured by Jesus Christ. They become his offerings of worship; seeing people converted is his act of priestly service. Paul's missionary work is an act of adoration. Evangelism is worship. Missiology is doxology. Speaking for Jesus glorifies Jesus. Paul has made the link, hasn't he, between the mission of Christ in the world and his own mission.

Measuring our Zeal by the Passion and Persistence of our Evangelism

Jesus came to make much of God so that the Gentiles, so that the nations might worship, and that's exactly what motivates Paul and that is exactly what ought to motivate us, which means at least two things as we close. It means first, we can measure our zeal for God's glory and the depths and vibrancy of our worship by the passion and persistence of our evangelism. We can measure our zeal for God's glory and the depths and vibrancy of our worship by the passion and persistence of our evangelism. I have friends who are passionate about Reformed worship. I'm passionate about Reformed worship. But I think Paul would assess the health and vitality and faithfulness of our Lord's Day worship not just by its orthodoxy and its historicity, but whether we are engaged evangelistically, whether we are opening our mouths not merely to speak to Jesus in praise but for Jesus in mission. If your heart is really captured by delight in the majesty of God, which is what you are saying when you are singing His praises, it will show not just in your hymnody but in your mission, in your evangelism, in the way that you live among your neighbors and friends and colleagues and in your workplace. If we're really gripped by a delight in the praise of God, it's going to show up, not just in the liturgy of the church but in the witness of its members, not just in the songs we sing but in the Gospel we share. Measure your devotion to the glory of Christ, your commitment to the praise of His name, by your devotion to speaking for Him and making Him known.

Sustaining Mission by an Abiding Delight in the Infinite Glory of God

And it means secondly, if you try to fuel mission and evangelism and church planting and witnessing with anything other than zeal for the glory of God, your zeal will eventually burn out. Only love for God, zeal for His glory, delight in making much of Him can propel mission and sustain mission. Listen to John Cheeseman. "Love of God," he said, "is the only sufficient motive for evangelism. Self-love will give way to self-centeredness. Love for the lost will fail with those whom we cannot love. And when difficulties seem insurmountable, only a deep love for God will keep us following His way, declaring His Gospel, when human resources fail. When the desire for popularity with men or for success in human terms tempts us to water down the Gospel, to make it palatable, then only if we love God will we stand fast by its truth and His ways."

Not only may we measure our grasp of God's glory and worthiness to be displayed by our dedication to the evangelistic task, but we need to say too that we will never sustain the work of evangelism unless we're driven on by an abiding delight in the infinite glory of God. You simply will not keep going unless God is supremely worth it in your heart. All other loves will burn themselves out. They will fall short. They will twist our motives. But love for God, zeal for the honor of God, delight in God, is an inexhaustible motive that can fuel missionary faithfulness and Christian obedience until Jesus comes, and the need for mission will at last be over and the great task of calling others to worship will be obsolete. In its place - think about this - in its place there will be gathered a great congregation beyond number, thousands upon thousands from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes with palm branches in their hands, crying out in a loud voice, "Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!" And the angels and living creatures before the throne will fall on their faces and worship saying, "Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen!" One day, the warnings and the pleadings of the evangelists will cease. One day, the voice of preachers - you might be wondering or hoping that day might show up sooner rather than later - one day the voice of preachers will never again be heard calling sinners to repent and believe the Gospel. But the sound of singing will never, never stop. The sound of praise will never cease to echo in the courts of heaven. The voice of ransomed, believing sinners, captivated by the beauty and grace of God, will never stop being heard. Worship will last forever. Worship is the chief end of mission, just like worship is the chief end of the cross, just like worship is the chief end of your life. You exist to glorify God and enjoy Him forever. That's why Jesus came; that's why He died - to make you sing and then make you work that others might join you in saying, "Isn't our God glorious?"

So let me ask you as we close, if Jesus died to gather worshipers from all the nations, how can you not devote your life to the same great pursuit? If Jesus died to make the nations sing, how can you not devote your life to the same great pursuit? Worship is why He came. Worship is what you're for. Worship is what mission is all about. May God make us true worshipers and bold and urgent evangelists. Let us pray.

O Lord our God, we praise You for the Gospel in which You display Your infinite worthiness to be adored. Forgive us for turning our delight in other directions and fixing our affections on empty idols. O, help us to tear them from Your throne in our hearts and there to set apart Christ alone as Lord, the pearl of great price. And as we are freshly captivated by His greatness, move us so to make much of Him that we gladly share Him with the world, in Jesus' name we pray. Amen.

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