Acts 16:9-15 * January 23-24, 2010 * World Mission Festival *

Rev. Dan Koelpin, WM Administrator

COME OVER AND HELP US!

Sermon text: Acts 16:9-15 "During the night Paul had a vision of a man of Macedonia standing and begging him, “Come over to Macedonia and help us!” After Paul had seen the vision, we got ready at once to leave for Macedonia, concluding that the Lord had called us to preach the gospel to them. From Troas we put out to sea and sailed straight for Samothrace, and the next day on to Neapolis. From there we traveled to Philippi, a Roman colony and the leading city of that district of Macedonia. And we stayed there several days. On the Sabbath we went outside the city gate to the river, where we expected to find a place of prayer. We sat down and began to speak to the women who had gathered there. One of those listening was a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira, who was a worshipper of God. The Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message. When she and the members of her household were baptized, she invited us into her home. “If you consider me a believer in the Lord,” she said, “come and stay at my house.” And she persuaded us."

In Christ Jesus, dear friends. There are few things in all the world that demand our attention as much as the call for help. When we hear the call, "Help!" we find our bodies immediately springing into action. All of a sudden our legs are running or our hands are moving with lightening speed, trying frantically to give aid to someone who desperately needs it.

Some men and women in responding to the call for help from a family member have been known to perform deeds that required three times their normal strength, ripping car doors off their hinges, boldly facing great pain, lifting seemingly impossible weights.

Whenever a plane or a ship or a child is lost, a call for help is sent out, and immediately a large searching party is organized which will cover vast areas of land and sea with great detail. And what amazing tales have come back to us of men adrift in the ocean for months, of planes in distress, of children half-starved and sun-scorched who were rescued in the nick of time because someone responded to the call for help.

If any one of you has ever had to call out for help and really meant it, then you can appreciate what it means to have someone respond to that call. If any of you have ever worked for an ambulance squad or the fire department, you know what I’m talking about.

Or if any of you have been giving some thought to the heartbreaking and graphic images connected with the recent earthquake in Haiti, than you know the sense of urgency, the frustration of each failure, or the explosive joy of saving one person or child…that says it all.

This Sunday morning, my friends, another urgent call for help is being extended to each and every one of you. It comes from the rice fields of Indonesia, the frozen hamlets of Siberia, the impoverished villages of Africa, and the crowded cities of Tokyo and Hong Kong. It is a call that is carried like the wind over the spans of oceans and continents by the Holy Spirit of God. It is the call for the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

People in pagan lands who are living in ignorance, despair, superstition and witchcraft are calling in many different ways to those who have the light, "Come over and help us, and give us the Gospel." This call for help is the most important call in the whole world, for the eternal destiny of men’s souls hangs in the balance of how this call is responded to.

On the basis of the Scripture before us this morning, we want to examine three things concerning this plea, "Come and help us." First of all, man’s need is God's Mission call to us; secondly, responding to this call requires a sense of urgency and haste; and finally, the wonderful results that come to pass when God’s mission call is answered in faith and love.

Now as this section of Scripture begins in the 16th chapter of Acts, we find Paul and Barnabus at the edge of Asia Minor. Directly across the Aegean Sea lay the continent of Europe which had as yet remained untouched by all the missionaries of the gospel. Paul and Barnabus had just finished visiting all of the churches in Asia Minor that they had helped to establish, but when they had wanted to go into two other towns, the Holy Spirit held them back.

And so they spent a night in a town called Troas, and during the night something very remarkable happened. A vision appeared to the Paul in which there stood a man who cried out to him and said, "Come over into Macedonia and help us.” (v.9) What a cry that was! Behind that one man stood an entire continent of millions of souls who did not know Jesus.

The cry came from a nation that had once tasted of world empire. Only 400 years earlier Alexander the Great had conquered the entire then-known world with the armies of Macedonia and Greece. During that time Macedonia enjoyed the best civilization, culture and art in the entire world known to man.

But its greatest need, after all these years, still had not been fulfilled, and that was its need for the Lord Jesus Christ. And now 400 years later the call came forth, "Come over and help us!" It was an urgent and demanding cry, and it rang in Paul's heart and ears as the voice of Jesus Himself, calling for mission action. To Paul it was only a different form of the Master's own command, "Go into all the world, and preach the Good News to all creation." (Mark 16:15)

The rescue mission, the story of salvation, began when man’s need to be delivered from sin and eternal destruction called out to God’s mercy and love.

The Lord set forth an elaborate rescue plan to save mankind. He sent his one and only son to live the perfect life we could not live and to pay the price for mankind’s sins, a price that no sinful being could pay.

In a certain sense the entire New Testament is a missionary book. Christ came down to seek and to save that which was lost and his last recorded command on this earth was a mission command, "Go into all the world and make disciples of all nations." (Matt. 28: 19) He said to His disciples, "You shall be my witnesses." Every letter that was written to a church in the New Testament was written by a missionary to foreign mission church. We sometimes forget that Ephesus and Colossae and Corinth were foreign missions.

And God's mission call, 'Come over and help us” has echoed down through the centuries and is still ringing out loud and clear today. Are your ears and hearts attuned to it? Man’s need as exemplified by the moral collapse we see on every hand, the loveless and unforgiving attitudes, the drifting of a large share of our nation’s populace away from it Christian roots cries out for mission attention.

Over 2/3 of the world's total population, well over 3.5 billion people, lie under the darkness of witchcraft and superstition. We sometimes think, that idols of wood and stone are things of centuries long gone by. I wish all of us could walk together this very morning down the streets of Tokyo and Calcutta and behold the huge idols that millions are still worshipping.

We who know what it means to fall asleep each night assured that our sins are forgiven, who have the sure hope that our loved ones gone before us are with Jesus in heaven have no idea how precious this can be to others.

In the Amazon river basin in Peru for example, people have an average life expectancy of about 43 years, dying of diseases and insect infections picked up in wet and harsh living conditions, without emergency wards or insurance they spend their days and nights in fear of the spirits that inhabit the jungle, and if they should happen by mistake to take a wrong turn down a jungle path and witness a drug deal going down they are dead.

Has Missionary Terry Schulz, who tells them of a God of love who is more powerful than the evil spirits and has promised a life without end in paradise, found eager listeners to the gospel message – you bet he has. We forget as we live in the dream world that most of the rest of the people in the world are living with hunger, disease and poverty and give what little they have to cruel Gods who offer them no love or hope. When they hear the message of salvation through Jesus their spirits soar.

I keep telling people that there have never been a greater need and more opportunities for gospel outreach than those that exist today. The unique fact that the earth’s population has reached 6.8 billion people, and is steadily growing by 80 million souls each year calls out for a mission awareness of immense fields are white for harvest. Globalization and new modes of communication are making it more possible than ever before to meet those needs.

When I first became involved in World Missions in 1985 the only way that we could communicate with missionaries and national Christian was by letter. It took 14 days for a letter to go from Milwaukee, WI to Jakarta, Indonesia. So naturally we were overjoyed when facsimile machines enabled us to send a 4 page letter to four different countries in 14 minutes.

Today with the technological miracles of the worldwide web and email we can simultaneously communicate with 23 countries and 35 missionaries in 14 seconds. It is now possible to for pastors and former missionaries to teach people over the internet half way around the world from their office in the U.S.

Natural disasters like the Tsunami in the Indian ocean and the earthquake in Haiti are other expressions of man’s need and a wake-up call to pay attention to God’s mission. Never before have so many been faced with the possibility of sudden destruction, perhaps never before so few prepared to face it.

The Haiti tragedy shows us the surface need, it should remind us Christians that underneath is the real need. As terrible as it was to learn that there may be as many as 200,000 killed in the earthquake, the news would be more bearable if we know that many or most of them had saving faith and were with the Lord. The time to be concerned about such matters is before these disasters happen rather than after.

What should the response of the Christian to God's mission call be? We notice that when Paul received God's mission call, he did not sit around and debate whether it was worthwhile or not. No, he and his companion reacted with a sense of urgency as though they were in a hurry to save someone from dying. They went “at once” (v.10) to the place where the call was coming from.

Very often if God's mission calls are not heeded, they are lost forever. There have been many instances where the door has only been opened to the gospel in a certain country for a short period of time before it was closed again indefinitely. We just had an example of that in the country of Mozambique. We prepared for 4 years to enter the country and when we experienced financial shortages the missionaries slated to go there had to be recalled. Still our synod continues to get more appeals for help than we can respond to.

The need is urgent and this business requires haste. We don’t know how long the world will endure, so Jesus has told us to “Night is coming when no one can work.” (John 9:4) An African man asked one of our missionaries, "Since it in true that those who die without the Lord are lost forever, why didn't you come and tell us about Jesus before this time? My ancestors are dead and gone, and they knew nothing of what you are telling me now. How Is it?"

It is a difficult questions to answer. When churches are not burning with mission zeal at home, the beams of light are not going to reach the far ends of the earth and in the meantime the precious souls whom Christ had died for are every second slipping into everlasting darkness.

The world may endure for thousands of years yet, but in about 70 years most of the 6.8 billion living today will meet their maker. That’s what makes this work urgent. Mission work is a part of God's plan for the whole earth, for in Matthew we are told that "this gospel of this kingdom will be preached as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come." (Matt. 24:14)

Shall we look, my friends, at the wonderful results that come from a response of faith and an interest in mission work. Paul and his companions were immediately met with^, success.

When they came to a riverside they came upon a group of women, and one of them was Lydia, a seller of purple cloth. Scripture says that "the Lord opened her heart to respond to Paul’s message.” (v. 14) Who would have realized that that little prayer meeting at the riverside would be the beginning of a great missionary effort for an entire continent. Little did Lydia know when she went down to the riverside, that she would hear the preaching of the greatest missionary that the Lord had ever placed on the earth. Who could have foretold that this was the start of the conversion of all of Europe from the superstitious worship of pagan idols to the worship of the true and living God?

Paul and Barnabus were not met with tremendous success at first, but they did have success, and this success quickly snowballed, for as soon as Lydia was converted what do we hear? Verse 15 tells us that she was baptized and her household. She also became a missionary, bringing others to the Lord Jesus.

And God is still working in that same way today in our mission fields. Sometimes they start out with very humble beginnings. Sometimes their first meeting takes place under a thatched roof that leaks or in an open field or in a cellar basement. But the place doesn't matter because God's quick and powerful Word is being preached, and He says that it will not return unto Him empty, but it will accomplish that which He pleases.

At first the tedious foundational work has to be done, the learning of the language, the building of relationships and trust, the translation of the Scripture, the publishing of religious materials and hymns. Yet oftentimes after as little as a year a beautiful house of God is erected where there was once only an open field.

Sometimes our representative to Southeast Asia, meets with only one man in a certain locality, but after a short amount of time, that one man has grown to twenty. What a joy to see people of every color and every race being added to the church triumphant, to see them also enjoying the hope of the resurrection at the grave of a loved one, and the comfort of God's Word when they are troubled and distressed.

That's one of the greatest joys of being a Christian -- to share something as great as salvation through Jesus Christ with others. So may God move your hearts by the Holy Spirit to spread this mission zeal with others.

Do it personally to those around you, do it corporately by sending missionaries where you cannot go. You may not be able to go in person, but you can go through your purse. Every contribution that you make helps that Gospel to spread and enlarges the church militant until that one day when we become the church triumphant. May God enable every one us to hear and answer God’s mission call in our time. Amen.