Creating a Movement of Joy

The mission of the church doesn’t stop at our front doors.

This week, we’ll see how God calls His people to multiply joy by sending, supporting, and investing beyond themselves into new places and new people. From the early church to today, the gospel moves forward when God’s people live with open hands—releasing resources, raising up leaders, and trusting the Lord to work beyond what they can see.

Church planting is one of the clearest ways we live this out. As we invest in the future of gospel work throughout our city, we participate in something bigger than ourselves—seeing neighborhoods reached, lives transformed, and more people come to know the joy of salvation.

This is how the church multiplies joy: not by holding tightly, but by faithfully sending and celebrating all that God does.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Here we are, Book of Acts, chapter 14. Let's dive into the text. We've talked about generosity from a lot of different angles and the effects of generosity as well, and how that produces a joy in us as God's people. This morning we're looking at creating a movement of joy when we look at the nature of sending, producing joy in the life of God's people. So Acts 14, gonna walk us through that together. Let's start. I want you to imagine something with me for just a moment. Entertain me for a bit, right? Imagine that five years from now, there's a small church plant meeting in a school in a neighborhood across the city. 40 or 50 people gathered there on a Sunday morning. Some of them are brand new to the faith. Some of them are there willing to trust, even though they had experienced hurt or harm from churches that have failed them, others walking through the door of a gathering for the very first time in their life. And the pastor who stands up to preach that sermon used to sit in these seats. Right? The team that's leading the music. They once led us from this very platform. Or what about the mission group that formed the core of that congregation? How it began in the living room of a family who were members here. The resources that got that church off the ground were given by people right here in this room. That church, it only exists because sacred mission had learned to send. They had learned to release and to let go. And here's what I pray that you feel from that imaginary church, that scene before us. And I pray you feel the joy in that school on that Sunday morning. Because it's not just their joy, it's ours too. We get to share in it. We get to receive the report of what God did in a neighborhood that we could have never reached from this building through a church that we were willing to send out into the culture. This is the joy that Acts 14 is describing for us. And here's the thing: it's a joy that you can only discover by releasing the very people and things that would have produced it. So let's set the scene together. In this passage, Acts 14, Paul and Barnabas, they're in the closing section of their first missionary journey to take the gospel to the Gentiles. And it's easy to read through this passage like some type of travel itinerary, right? They went here, they left there, they come back to here. And here's the reality. Beneath that geography is one of the most instructive portraits of what ascending church looks like in the entire New Testament. Because it doesn't actually start with Antioch, but it starts with the very work that Paul and Barnabas have been doing. Let's read again through verses 21 to 23. It says this. Because we're not planting a service, we're not planting a program, we're not planting an event, we're planting a church. And that has to begin with us being willing to be in the culture with the people, sharing the gospel, making disciples. That's how church plants start with deep roots. And now, rather than pressing forward into new territory, Paul and Barnabas, they actually turn around. They go back to Lystra and Iconium and Antioch, the cities where they had already begun the good gospel work. Cities where, in some cases, these very men almost experienced their death for preaching the gospel. Now we might ask the question, right? Why go back? Why go back to the places of which you had already been? Because simply planting isn't enough. We have to strengthen churches. We have to do the hard, slow, faithful work of turning church plants into established churches that are a healthy, vibrant gospel presence in the cities of which they are. When the first sermon is preached, or the first believer is baptized, or the first members are brought into covenant. No, Paul and Barnabas understood that new communities of faith need to be strengthened, encouraged, and established, led by appointed elders, committed to the Lord through prayer and fasting. This is what faithful sending looks like. Not just planting, but establishing. Not a parachute drop-in and a quick exit out. We're not just trying to do evangelistic crusades and make people raise their hand and say certain prayers and then celebrate all that God has done. No, we're trying to build community of faith tangibly known by the local church where people are brought into this visible expression of the body of Christ. It's an investment in what gets planted. The kind of investment that requires doing work to establish the church. Now then, verses 24 through 26, right, show us that after this work, they actually sent themselves or they sailed home back to Antioch. And here's where the passage gets its joy-filled center, right? If we look at verse 27, it says this When they arrived and gathered the church together, they declared all that God had done with them, and how he had opened a door of faith to the Gentiles. So, so they're back. Antioch gathers the whole church, right? The people who stayed rooted in the city, the people who prayed for this church plant to flourish, the people who gave to provide viability and sustainability, they all come together to hear this report, and Paul and Barnabas stand up and say, Here, here is what God has done. Here is what God has done. Here's the door that he opened for the gospel and the faith that he produced in people who had never heard it before. Right? The grammar of verse 27 is so essential for our understanding because God is the subject of every verb. Here's what Paul and Barnabas understood. They had to be faithful to the call of mission. They had to work and till the soil. They had to plant the seed. But at the end of the day, they had to pray like crazy that God would cause rain to fall and fruitfulness to be born. They knew that at the end of the day, even though their own lives were threatened for the sake of the gospel, anything to boast in was that of a work of God. Paul and Barnabas are witnesses of God's faithful work. Joyful, overwhelmed, grateful witnesses to a work that was never theirs to begin with. And what does Antioch get to do? I mean, they get to share in that joy. They get to hear the report and they get to share in that joy of what God has done. Not because they were the ones who were sent out and went with them to be a part of this church plan, not because they did outreach events in Lystra and Iconium, not because of the things that they had done, but because of the people they sent and the work that God did that was reported back to them. And so here's the claim at the heart of this passage. The church that sins discovers a joy that it could never have kept. The church that sins discovers a joy it never could have kept. Antioch could have held on to Paul and Barnabas. They were core leaders of the church. Listen, Paul and Barnabas are the dudes every church praise walks through their door. And every church would do whatever it took to keep them. They were phenomenal leaders. They weren't just some people on the peripheral, right? That was deemed as some sort of expendable person within the community, right? Like that, oh, hey, you know, they don't really connect here well. I think we could probably send them and not feel any loss if they kind of just went on their way. No, these were the kind of men that the church would die to keep. And the early church in Antioch could have made every reasonable argument and case for keeping these men close. Well, what we need leadership here. What will happen if they go? We won't have the leaders we once have. We have work to do in this city. What do you mean this other city needs work? The time just it's not right yet for sending our best people away. But they didn't make that case. What did they do? They prayed and fasted and laid hands on them and sent them. And when Paul and Barnabas came home, man, Antioch received no shortage of joy, of delight and celebration and boasting in what God had done. Ultimately, Antioch received something that they could have not if they would have kept. They received the joy of verse 27. The grateful, overflowing joy of a church that had released what it loved and watched God multiply it into something no one could have contained. In church, that joy is the exclusive possession of ascending church. That joy is the exclusive possession of a sending church. Because what? The church that holds on, the church that keeps, it never gets to hear the good report. It never gets to gather and marvel at the doors that God had opened. It never gets to share in the joy of a gospel that multiplied to reach a people they never could have. You can only have that joy by sending. And sending always costs us something we hesitate to let go of. Right? For us in this room, we embrace the idea of sending, but we resist the cost of it. We embrace the idea of sending, but we resist the cost of it. I want to include myself in this statement before I offer it to you for your own personal reflection. I have preached about church planting with genuine passion. I believe in it theologically. I'm committed to it missionally, and I want to define, I want it to define whose sacred mission is as a church. All of that is true. And yet I also know that when sending has gotten specific, when it means releasing a leader that we've developed and poured ourselves into, or a family that we've discipled and seen their children be baptized, or a mission group that took years to build and get off the ground, something in me pulls back. Something in me starts doing the math on what we'd lose rather than what God might multiply. Because that's how we treat things. Not just within the church, but within our personal life. We see generosity as a loss rather than a gain in the hands of a multiplying God. And so sending feels like loss. And it feels empty on the other side of it. And church, that's not leading from vision. I have to repent of that. I have to repent for the times that I've allowed it to cause me to retreat in self-preservation and protection. And I would make a good assumption that I'm not alone in this room when we feel that. Because Sacred Mission, we're a church that talks about sending a lot more than we practice it. And this isn't a head-down thing. This is a thing that is permeating through our culture. And I don't mean culture on the outside, I mean it on the inside. Church, we love comfort. But the gospel doesn't call us to comfort, it calls us to a cross. It calls us to crucifixion. It calls us to die to ourself. There's a reality where we hate the thought of releasing what we love, of sending away what we treasure. We celebrate the idea of multiplication more than we bear the cost of it. And the gap between what we say we believe about the Great Commission and what we're actually willing to release for its sake needs to be confronted. Not by me, but by the gospel itself. Hear these sharp words that speak to this reality that meets us here where we're at from Charles Spurgeon. He said, Every Christian is either a missionary or an imposter. Let's see how this often works itself out in the church. I think for many of us, we we struggle to invest in what we can't yet see. We struggle to invest in what we can't yet see. We have no problem giving directly to what's in front of us. The things that are tangible, the things that bring us comfort or joy or delight, ministry that we experience, community that we're in relationship with, maybe even a building expansion that makes sense. We'll give to that because it's in front of us. But church planting, sending people and resources that feels different because it asks something different in its very nature. It asks us to fund and support what doesn't exist yet. For people that we haven't met yet in a part of the city we haven't even visited yet. And generosity toward the invisible is harder than generosity toward the tangible. It's not because we don't believe in it, it's because faith inherently demands risk. And man, we planted this church in gospel risk. We didn't know what the Lord was gonna do. We just were kind of childlike in nature to trust him. And we took big risks. When COVID hit, we took big risks on when we would gather back together and how we would worship as a congregation gathered together again as a people. We've taken risks when we planted a church in the east side of Cincinnati. We've taken risks when we've multiplied mission groups, we've taken risks when we've raised up leaders, we've taken gospel risk. But that's fueled by faith in a God who is sovereign and provident and is able to know the outcome even though we can't see it yet. We're not done taking gospel risk. We're not done putting our faith in God when we cannot see what's before us. What we haven't yet grasped is that this is precisely the nature of the sending church. Antioch, man, they couldn't assess and analyze the report of verse that was gonna produce the joy of verse 27. They didn't do demographics reports and data collection and field research and make sure that everything they did was gonna produce some type of ROI in the work that was ahead of them. No, they just listened to the voice of God, they believed him, they were faithful to submit to him, and they trusted that he was going to do what he said he was going to do. They couldn't see the churches that would be planted, the elders who would be appointed, the door that God would open to the Gentile world. So they gave themselves to a mission whose fruitfulness was entirely beyond their field of vision. And they trusted that the God who called them to send would be faithful to produce the fruit. And they took gospel risk because faith informed their seeing and their sending. Some of us, though, we resist being sent away from what we love. We resist being sent away from what we love. Others of us, we aren't struggling with the giving. We struggle with the going. And I understand this one. I want to be with you in this moment because I love what God has built here too. Man, if we were to imagine seven years ago that this is where we would be, I wouldn't have believed you. We have a phenomenal mission kids discipleship team that just knocks it out of the park every single week to share the gospel with our children and teach them the word of God. We have music teams, not one, multiple, that lead us in just phenomenal worship to God. We have um Brit and Krista over Mission Youth who are trying to train and teach our children to be ready for the world they're about to encounter once they graduate high school. We've got elders who who are just brilliantly minded, love God, serve Him, faithful to Him, submit to Him, keep me in check. We've got something phenomenal here. I love what we have here. But here's what I've had to sit with. When the sending call gets specific, when it means releasing someone we've developed, or family we've baptized, seen them come to faith, or multiple groups that took years to multiply and build, my first instinct isn't joyful release, it's protective calculation. What's this gonna cost? And am I ready for what it demands? Suddenly, all I'm thinking about stability, timing, whether we can really afford to send people away right now. And if I can just be, again, with you in this moment underneath all of that very reasonable sounding wisdom, is something much simpler. I don't want to let go of what I love. I don't want to let go of what I love. And here's the truth, the uncomfortable truth that I've had to face about this heart posture. And I'm offering this to you not as a rebuke by any stretch of the imagination, but as something I'm still working through myself and wrestling with. Church, hear me say this with all clarity our reluctance to go is part of what the building expansion deems necessary. Here's what I mean. If more of us were actually willing to be sent, to plant mission groups in new neighborhoods, to form the core of a new congregation across the city, we wouldn't need as many seats here because some of the people filling them would be filling seats in a new and exciting gospel work in a different part of the city. I want to be honest with the places that I have failed in leading us in this way. But I also want us to be sober-minded that this isn't fundamentally only a top-down reality. We talk about, well, why are we building a bigger building if we just planted churches? Can I ask you an honest question? If we were planting a church and we looked you in the eye and we asked you to go, would you? Many of you wouldn't. It's not shame. It's just something we got to be honest about. You wouldn't go. Because you love it here. You're comfortable here. And so the idea of sending is really nice. But these seats keep filling up, not because really we have a desire to grow bigger and better and more impressive, but because at the end of the day, we can't multiply a mission group because you so love the relationships that you have there. You think we're gonna be able to plant a church? And 50 of you go. I love you to death. But you've got to hear that. The sending church and the building church, they're not separate conversations. Actually, they're the exact same one. Because the building expansion that we're investing in is partly a response to growth that God has produced through the faithful mission of this church, but it's also a response to the fact that we keep adding without releasing. And I will take ownership of the failures of which I've led in that. And I want to call us all to take ownership in the places that we've contributed to that culture. We keep gathering without sending. On paper, written on the wall, said from the pulpit. But it's also in part because if we did send, as I said, many of us would never go. So church planting sounds great. I agree wholeheartedly. It definitely sounds great until it invites you to leave the people and things you've grown to love. And then it's not so great anymore. But our hope church is actually discovered in two words. God sent. God sent. Everything in this sermon flows from those two words. The church was always meant to reflect the very nature and character of the God who has saved us through his son. Every missionary journey, every church planted, every elder appointed, every door opened for the gospel, it all traces back to the God who is, by his very nature, ascending God. The Father sent the Son, not reluctantly, not after exhausting every other option. The cross was always plan A for the glory of God and the good of his people. He sent freely and lovingly at unfathomable personal cost. He sent into the world the one that he loved most, so that the world he loved might be reached through him. John 3.16, this gospel anchor tells us with all clarity: For God so loved the world that he gave his only son. That word gave its ascending word, reflecting the heart of God and the nature of his character. God didn't keep his love, he didn't restrain it or try to contain it. No, he released it. He sent what he loved most into a world of darkness and despair for people who didn't deserve it because they loved the darkness that they were in. He sent Jesus his love at a cost that no sending church has ever come close to matching. And then the Son sent the Spirit. Jesus told his disciples in John 16, it is to your advantage that I go away, that I might send the helper. And they didn't understand it, right? They're sitting there as his disciples before the Messiah who've been promised to come, God incarnate before them. How could it be better for Jesus to leave? How could his absence be gain? Because they didn't understand that there's gain in sending, not lost in it. Jesus knew what the disciples could not yet see. That his going was the condition for the Spirit's coming, and the Spirit's coming was the condition for the mission to advance. You see, the sending was necessary. And we see that so because then the Spirit sent the church. In Acts 14, here, the Spirit interrupts a worship service in Antioch to send. Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them. The Spirit didn't ask Antioch if they were ready to release their best. No, he told them to. And what did they do? What was their posture? I mean, they prayed and fasted. They laid hands on them to send them out. This is the missional heartbeat of God. Where in our loss there is eternal gain. Sent. For gospel risk. Sending, releasing, giving away what is most precious. Why? So that the circle of redemption can widen beyond any single community could ever contain. That's what he said to his disciples before his ascension. You're going to start here. But that circle, that gospel growth, is going to keep stretching out across the world till all know, till all have heard. And when Paul and Barnabas stood in front of the gathered church in Antioch and told them what God had done, Antioch experienced something that only could be received by a church that had sent. They experienced the joy of verse 27. The joy of watching God take what they released and multiply it into something far beyond what they could have ever produced by holding on to it. Church, this is the joy that God is inviting us into. Each and every single one of us. Not the joy of a church that accumulated enough to feel secure and safe and comfortable. Not the joy of a church that built big enough to feel impressive and boastful in their accomplishments. The joy of a church that released what it loved. People, resources, leaders, comfort. That joy is available to us. But only if we sinned. And only if we're willing to be sent also. So here's my prayer for us on this wonderful Mother's Day. That we would be ascending church that discovers joy in what God multiplies. We would be ascending church that discovers joy in what God multiplies. And I mean ascending church in every facet of who we are. That everyone sees themselves responsible in the joyful participation of sending work. I want you to consider that small church plant image again from the top of the sermon, right? The 40 or 50 people gathered on a Sunday morning in a school across the city. The pastor who used to sit here, the music team who used to lead here, the mission group that started here. That church is real in the sense that it is what faithful sending produces. It's what happens when a community loves the gospel more than it loves its own comfort. Because remember, the gospel's call is not to our personal comfort, it is to our own crucifixion. And here's what I want you to know about that church. Its joy is our joy. When someone in that congregation hears the gospel for the first time and believes, we get to celebrate that. When that church plants another church, and that church plants another, and the gospel multiplies through neighborhoods and generations beyond anything that we can currently see, sacred mission, gets to stand in the very position of Antioch, celebrating the report. We get to be the church that gathered and heard the good news and marveled at what God had done. But we only get there by sending. We don't get there by keeping. And sending is a decision that we make before we can ever see the fruit of it. What if the thing you love most about sacred mission is precisely what God wants to multiply somewhere else? Man, wouldn't that be good? Wouldn't that bring us joy? What if the community that we have here, the theological depth, the gospel culture, the mediocre preaching, the phenomenal worship? All that has been built in this place? What if all of that is meant to be the seed that gets planted in new soil? Do you remember what we said a few weeks ago? Seeds don't multiply by staying in barns. Seeds get multiplied by sowing them into the ground. By dying to one form so that they can emerge as an even better one. Jesus said it himself in John 12. Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Let's be the church that bears much fruit. In this next season of what God has called us to, let's be determined to be that church together. Let's be a church that sends and discovers in the very sending a joy that we could have never kept. Hear these words from a man who lost his very life in his willingness to be sent for the glory of God. Missionary and martyr Jim Elliott says this He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose.