Introduction

Matthew 28:19-20 ESV  Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit,  (20)  teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

John 3:16 ESV  “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

Acts 1:8 ESV  But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Revelation 7:9 ESV  After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, 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,

• Go therefore and make disciples of ALL NATIONS.
  • For God so loved the WORLD.
  • You will be My witness in Jerusalem, and in Judea, and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.
  • In heaven, a great multitude that no one could number, from EVERY NATION, FROM ALL TRIBES AND PEOPLES AND LANGUAGES.
• You cannot simultaneously say that you believe in the Bible, that you follow Christ, that you honor God… you can not say these things and at the same time actively ignore missions.
  • You can’t say you love God, while ignoring the call we have to preach the Gospel to other nations.
    • Today is Mission Sunday, where we talk about missions, give to missions, and pray for the nations.
      • If you don’t know what “missions” mean, it is just a Christian term that we use to mean “Going into other nations, other people groups, people who speak other languages, have different cultures, and different understandings… it means we go out to the world to such people and we teach them about Jesus, we lead them to salvation, we baptize them, and we disciple them.
    • Missions is the act of bringing Christ to the nations.
      • And at CLC, Missions is a part of our DNA, it is an integral part of who we are… of what makes us, us.
• So today is Missions Sunday and I am going to preach about “Feeding the Back Rows”.

• Feeding the back rows… if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, I am going to explain it…
  • It comes from something I learned 10 years ago when I was training with my wife in Singapore.
  • If you did not know, CLC is a mission church plant, we were planted by Victory Family Centre, in Singapore.
    • Singapore is a wealthy South Asian nation, and Victory Family Centre, one of the largest churches there, has a passion for missions.
    • When God said “Go int all nations to make disciples” Victory Family Centre took that seriously… and since the United States is a part of ALL NATIONS, they knew they had to send missionaries here.
    • So they trained Pastor Amanda and I up for about a year, and sent us from Singapore here to Cedar Rapids to start CLC.
      • And I can’t stress this enough… everyone who has been saved in Baptized in CLC owes a great deal of gratitude to the thousands of Singaporean Christians who cared enough about Cedar Rapids to send a church planting team here.
        • Singaporeans you will never meet, sacrificed time, energy, and a whole lot of money, to make disciples in Iowa!
        • THANK YOU JESUS!
    • But back to Feeding the back rows… while Amanda and I were in Singapore part of our training was to read this book called “The Challenge of Missions” by Oswald J. Smith
      • This book changed EVERYTHING for me when it came to thinking about missions.
      • I used to think “But there are people in our own back yard who need Jesus”
      • And “My city is my mission field”
      • But then I read this example about feeding the back rows, and I was horribly convicted… I want to read for you directly from the Challenge of Missions about the back rows… maybe it will convict you like it convicted me.

Don’t put all on one slide, break it up as much as needed to be easy to read.

Do you remember when the Lord Jesus Christ fed the five-thousand? Do you recall how He made them sit down row-upon-row on the green grass? Then do you remember how he took the loaves and fishes and blessed them and then broke them and gave them to His disciples? And then do you remember how the disciples started at one end of the front row and then went right along that front row giving everyone a helping? And then do you recall how they turned right around and started back along that front row again, asking everyone to take a second helping? Do you remember?

No! A thousand times no! Had they done that, those in the back rows would have been rising up and protesting most vigorously! “Here” they would have been saying “Come back here to us! Give us a helping. We have not had any yet. We are starving. It isn’t right. It isn’t fair. Why should those in the front row have a second helping before we have had our first?”

And they would have been right. We talk about the second blessing. They haven’t had the first blessing yet. We talk about the second coming of Christ. They haven’t heard about the first coming yet. It just isn’t fair. Why should anyone hear the Gospel twice before everyone has had a chance to hear it once? You know as well as I do that not one individual in that whole company of five-thousand men (plus woman and children) got a second helping before everyone had a first helping.

There was an absolute equal distribution of the food. With but few exceptions there has not been such an equal distribution since. Some churches do not even go fifty-fifty. They do not even send as much to the foreign mission field as they spend on themselves.

-The Challenge of Missions, Oswald J. Smith

• Think about it… how many times have you heard the gospel preached?
  • We preach it EVERY WEEK at CLC… the good news… that though man deserves hell, we can have our sins forgiven by the sacrifice Jesus made on the cross.
    • Think about how many times you have heard that gospel… and now think of the billions of people who have never head that Gospel one time.
    • NOT ONE TIME.
      • We sit in our fancy air conditioned churches while some guy in pink shoes preaches at us… week after week, month after month, year after year… all the while people are dying and going to hell all around the world who have maybe never heard the Gospel even one time!
  • You know some people have left our church because I talk about hell too much.
    • Because I talk about hell in my sermons
    • Because I talk about hell when I share the gospel…
      • Then they leave our church and do NOTHING about it.
      • IF you don’t like the concept of hell… GOOD!
      • DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT.
        • Go out and plunder hell!
        • Go out and populate heaven.
          • If you don’t like the idea of hell then you should be the most mission minded individual in your family, in your church, in your city!
          • YOU SHOULD BE CRYING OUT FOR MORE AND MORE MISSIONARIES TO GO.
          • YOU SHOULD BE FORSAKING ALL FOR THE CAUSE OF CHRIST.
          • YOU SHOULD BE SELLING ALL YOU HAVE AND MOVING TO THE MISSION FIELD.
          • AND IF YOU ARE NOT GOING THEN YOU DARN WELL BETTER BE SENDING.
        • IF YOU DON’T LIKE HELL THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT AND STOP PEOPLE FROM GOING!
        • And don’t force the gospel down the throat of people who have heard it 8 thousand times… go find someone who has never heard it and preach it there!
      • THIS IS THE CALL OF MISSIONS!

Romans 10:13-15 ESV  For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”  (14)  How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?  (15)  And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

• This is why we are sending Rebecca to Japan, because the vast majority of the Japanese population has never heard the Gospel.
  • And even if they have, they have no church to go to to worship in and be baptized in and be discipled in.
  • We have talked about it before, Japan is one of the most unreached and unchurched nations in the world.
    • It shouldn’t be so! It shouldn’t be that the people of Christian Life Church get the gospel every single week, while the people in Japan get nothing!
    • So we are going to do something about it.
      • It doesn’t mean that we are going to stop sharing the Gospel here… NO! There is plenty of Gospel to go around… we are not going to stop sharing the gospel here, we are simply going to start sharing the gospel there!
    • It has always been our heart as a church that we would plant churches in other nations…
    • Places that preach the gospel, that make disciples, that send out missionaries of their own.
      • Disciples that make disciples, missionaries that make missionaries, churches that plant churches…
        • This has always been God’s plan for spreading the gospel to the world.
        • Yes sometimes He comes in dreams and visions to people who have never heard of Him…
          • But even in those rare instances, He always sends them to a local Christian or missionary to be disciples.
      • This is our call… to GO AND MAKE DISIPLES OF ALL NATIONS.
      • To go out to ALL THE WORLD.
      • To go out to the End of the earth!
• And as such I am thrilled that we are growing as a church.
  • As many of you know we are going to start having two services starting Easter Sunday.
    • And some people may think “Is CLC changing, are we going to be different?”
    • And the answer is “No, because we have always been from the beginning a church that wants to plant mission churches… so more people here means more missionaries to send, more disciples who make disciples, and frankly, more mission faith pledges to support our missionaries.”
• It wasn’t until recently that we were even able to support full time missionaries…but now we can.
  • And as the church grows we be able to support more… two, three, four… whole teams… whole church planting movements.
• So let’s talk about money for a minute… because not everyone can be Rebecca…
  • Not everyone can go for a year, or more, to the mission field…
  • But we can all SEND.
    • We can all be a part of what Rebecca is doing.
    • This is where the mission’s faith pledge comes in.
      • It is my hearts desire that CLC would give more to missions than it does to tithes and offerings.
        • We are not there yet, but we are doing better than most churches.
        • I have no stones to throw, I am honored to serve at this church!
        • But I want to encourage you this morning, give sacrificially to missions… help feed the back rows… plunder hell, and populate heaven.

Conclusion

Now before we go into talking about and collecting MFP’S, let’s talk about the Gospel, just in case there is someone here who does not know Jesus, maybe you have never heard the Gospel before this moment, maybe this is your first serving… then I urge you to taste and see that the Lord is good!