On Friday, an advert popped up in my Facebook feed for a company called Mission UK. You may think that’s interesting for a Christian, and especially suspicious for a minister who’s about to preach on the subject of mission, but then I looked at the picture. Mission UK sell … sleep powder. One enthusiastic customer had slept for seven hours straight for the first time in a long time, even sleeping through the loud noise of foxes outside.
They also sell ‘performance-based tea’ – whatever that is.
I just hope you are not going to sleep through this. Because I have an important question.
‘Who was the first missionary in the Bible?’ If I ask people that, I get a variety of answers, all wrong. Some say the Apostle Paul. Others say Philip the Deacon in Acts 8 or the Apostle Peter. Still others say, ‘Well the answer must be Jesus!’ A few might go back to the Old Testament and mention Jonah, who is the poster boy for how not to be a missionary!
No. The answer – and you will have guessed if you have seen the title of this sermon – is God. We find God as the first missionary here in Genesis chapter 3:
8 Then the man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden. 9 But the Lord God called to the man, ‘Where are you?’
God comes looking for Adam and Eve. ‘Where are you?’ This is the missionary God taking the initiative as he comes to look for sinners.
Mission begins with God. He wants to bring fallen people back to himself. He wants people and all creation back under the reign of his kingdom.
That’s why we talk in the church about ‘The mission of God.’ Some people who want to sound clever use the Latin, Missio Dei, but since I never learned Latin at school I’ll stick with ‘The mission of God.’
A great Anglican writer on this subject, Dr Chris Wright, once said:
It is not the church of God that has a mission in the world, but the God of mission who has a church in the world.
Mission is in the very heart of God. It is not raising money to send overseas. It is not simply getting bums on seats. It is certainly not about just waiting for people to come to us. Especially it is not getting people in to do the jobs, otherwise the church will close. Nor is it about hiring our premises to outside organisations.
Mission is God’s heart for the world. Mission is God’s desire to bring everyone and everything under the reign of his kingdom, and it is our calling to participate in that with the help of the Holy Spirit.
So let us understand right from the start of this series that mission is not an optional extra for keen Christians who have an extra dose of enthusiasm. Mission is the church’s calling because it is God’s heart.
I labour this point because it’s so important. Mission is a God thing. That’s why every Christian and every church must take it seriously and make it a priority.
Here are three things from the passage that show the priority of mission for God.
Firstly, God takes the initiative.
God doesn’t come into the Garden of Eden because Adam and Eve have called out to him, telling him they’ve made an absolute pickle of themselves. Far from it: they are hiding (verses 7, 10, 11)! He doesn’t wait for any human initiative. He knows something is wrong, and he comes.
Like everything in the life of faith, God makes the first move. Everything we do in faith is only a response to him.
John Wesley had an expression for this. He referred to ‘prevenient grace.’ If that word ‘prevenient’ sounds a bit complicated, let’s just break it down. ‘Pre-‘ is to come before. ‘Venient’ derives from the French ‘venir’, ‘to come.’ God comes before. Prevenient grace means that God’s grace comes before anything else.
That’s what happens in the picture language of Genesis 3. God takes the initiative when human beings mess up. No wonder I said that mission is in his heart.
Some Christians like to say that mission is about finding out what God is doing and then joining in. Now that can be abused, because some will label anything they particularly like as being something God is doing. But if we look carefully, prayerfully, and biblically at the world we may discern where God is already at work and then we can respond.
So if mission is a God thing, our first response can be to pray, ‘Lord, where are you already at work in restoring people and creation under your kingdom? How can I serve you in that?’
Secondly, God comes to us.
In Genesis 3 God does not summon Adam and Eve to him. He comes to them in the Garden. He goes to where they are.
This is where a lot of our talk about mission is all wrong. We say, how can we be more attractive for people to come to us? But although mission will involve people eventually joining the church, we cannot sit here waiting for people to come to us. It just won’t happen in most cases, unless they already have a church background.
I suspect that a lot of the ‘How can we be more attractive so that people come to us?’ language is more because we are nervous or afraid and don’t want to rise up to the challenge that mission presents us to get out of our comfort zones. But that is our calling if we are to respond to the God of mission as the church.
After all, having recently celebrated Christmas, we should be aware of this principle of God coming to us in the birth of Jesus. My favourite Christmas Bible text is John 1:14:
The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.
Do you see? God came to us. Emmanuel, God with us. These are not just words of comfort, these are words of God’s mission. He came to us.
And John tells us that it’s the pattern we are to copy. For the risen Jesus said to his disciples in John 20:23,
As the Father has sent me, so I am sending you.
God sent Jesus to us. Now Jesus sends us to others. We don’t sit on our backsides and wait for them.
I sometimes tell a story about a funeral I conducted about twenty years ago. An elderly church member died, and I went to visit her family, who were not churchgoers, to plan the funeral.
During that meeting when I asked them about the deceased’s life, they told me that church activities comprised her entire social life.
I think they thought I would be pleased to hear that, but I covered my true feelings. Because I was saddened. How can we spend all our time simply on church activities if we follow the God of mission who comes to us and who calls us also to go to people with his love?
How are some of us going to change our priorities? Because we need to.
Thirdly and finally, God provides the solution.
After God has questioned the man and the woman, he speaks first of all to the snake, secondly to the woman, and thirdly to the man about the consequences of sin being present in creation. The curse affects the relationship between animals and humans. It affects childbearing. It makes women subservient to men. It turns work into drudgery (verses 14-19). These things are not God’s best intentions for his creation.
But in the midst of this depressing description of what a world under the curse of sin is like comes one small but dazzling chink of light when God addresses the snake:
15 And I will put enmity
between you and the woman,
and between your offspring and hers;
he will crush your head,
and you will strike his heel.’
The offspring of the woman will crush the snake. But the snake will strike where this offspring touches the earth – with his heel.
Christians have traditionally seen this as a prophecy about the birth of Jesus from Mary (the offspring of the woman) and the Cross (where Jesus crushes the power of Satan, but evil strikes him and kills him).
God is so passionate about his mission to redeem the human race and heal creation that he sends his only begotten Son to conquer the forces of evil and reconcile people to himself and to one another.
We do not save ourselves. It does not depend on us. It is all down to God taking the initiative, coming to us, and breaking the power of cancelled sin, as Charles Wesley put it.
It is not up to us to devise clever wheezes or flashy programmes. Our rôle is to respond to the God who moves first by proclaiming Christ crucified, even though the world finds that offensive and foolish. It is nevertheless the only remedy for a broken world. And it is all God’s work, not ours.
So as we set out on a New Year with renewed commitment to Christ, let us specifically renew our commitment to co-operate by the Holy Spirit with the God of mission.
Big Circumstance 
What Do You Think?