John 3:16 “The Mission is God’s!”

Katrina may be the worst natural disaster that has occurred to date in the history of the United States. We seem to experience late-summer hurricanes every year. But none has been more devastating than this one. Lives by the hundreds that were lost! Flood waters that did not recede for weeks! Thousands who have lost everything they owned! Violence against police and rescue workers! Refugees with no place to go!

In all, 9.7 million people have been affected by Katrina, and 2.1 million of them were folks who were living well below the poverty line. Praise be to God that as a nation and through our church at the synodical, district, and congregational levels, we have endeavored to put our arms around these victims. The rescue phase of the operation is perhaps over. The recovery phase is still going on. And the rebuilding is just getting started. The mission is one that is monumental, and in the days to come, it will require that we “keep at it.”

Katrina, however, seems quite small to me when I look out over the fallen world in which we all live. Because of sin, we and all other human beings are lost. Every day we see the devastating results of our being left as sinful human beings to our own devices. People filled with material things, but spiritually empty, even famished! The sin that is common to us all puts us on the wrong path, and it leads to a future that is not better, but worse. For it condemns us to an eternal death.

Yet totally out of his grace, God has endeavored to come after us and to bring us back home. Back home to himself and to one another in the human family! Already to Abraham and his seed, if not earlier, God spoke his word of promise. He then had his Son, Jesus Christ, take leave of his place in the heavenly realm and sent him into our world to live among us. At the cross, Jesus actually took upon himself all of the punishment we deserve to receive from God for our sins. By rising from the grave in which placed his dead body, Jesus also gave us the hope of new life in every situation, no matter how bad it may look, and on every day of our lives, including the one on which we will die.

That’s God’s mission. St. John in our text features the rescue phase, when he states that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.” St. Paul highlights the recovery features of God’s mission, when in II Corinthians 5 he tells us that “in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself.” (II Cor. 5:18-19) And in Ephesians 1, he sees the rebuilding that is part of God’s plan “to unite all things in (Christ), things in heaven and things on earth.” (Eph. 1:10)

This same mission is not complete. It is still going on and will until Jesus Christ returns to earth to judge the living and the dead. In the meantime, Jesus has enlisted us in his church. “Go and make disciples of all nations,” he says to us, just as he did to the eleven in Matthew 28. It’s he Great Commission. Imagine that word “Commission.” See it in your mind’s eye. Now draw a line down the middle of it between the two m’s. You get “com,” which in the Latin means “with,” and “mission.” I don’t know what that says to you. But it tells me that the Great Commission is in fact an invitation to join forces with God in carrying out the mission of bringing a lost human race back home to himself and each other.

The mission is God’s, and you and I have been enlisted to take part in it. The day of my enlistment, as for many of you, was my Baptism. My parents, as I was growing up, never made a “big deal” out of the actual day of my Baptism. I always knew the year and the month, but not the day. Only later in life did I find out that the day of the month of April that year was Easter Sunday. And as I now look back over the years, I can’t think of a better day for me to have been chosen by God to share the message of hope that the Risen Lord intends not just for me, but for everybody in this world.

It’s why I’m also making such a “big deal” out of the ABLAZE movement in the Southeastern District. You may or may not know that our District includes North and South Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Washington D.C., Delaware, and York County, Pennsylvania. 27 million people live within our boundaries, and that population is growing. What you probably do not know is that 12.7 of those 27 million are in trouble. That’s more than the 9.7 Katrina victims, and the consequences of their plight are much more serious. These 12.7 million people are unchurched, in most cases not connected, as you and I are, with Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior. We care about this, and it’s why we have made it our goal, within the ABLAZE movement, to reach 2.5 million of the 12.7 million with the gospel of Jesus Christ by October 31, 2017.

The mission is God’s. For this reason, discovering our role in the ABLAZE movement had best be a “godly” effort to answer the question, “Why does God on daily basis still give us life and breath?” Millions of people in our country, churched as well as unchurched, apparently do not know. It helps explain the popularity of Rick Warren’s book, The Purpose-Driven Life. “Why am I here? Why are you here?” In the Southeastern District, we believe that one of our own LCMS pastors, Barry Keurulainen, has come up with a much better biblical answer in his program for congregations. It’s called 50 Days Ablaze. If you have not seen it, I commend it to you for consideration.

“We live on earth only so that we should be a help to other people,” said Martin Luther in his commentary on I Peter. “Otherwise, it would be best if God would strangle us and let us die as soon as we were baptized…For this reason, however, he lets us live that we may bring other people also to faith as he has done for us.” C.F.W. Walther, in sermon in 1842, put it this way: “Through holy baptism each Christian has obtained not only the authority, power, and right, but also the high, holy obligation—under pain of losing the divine grace—of rousing himself to care and to help so that others may be brought to Christ.” Easter Sunday was the day of my Baptism, and it’s all I need to know that ABLAZE is for me. How about you? Amen.

Dr. Jon Diefenthaler, President

Southeastern District, LCMS