The People Jesus Sent You To

Listen to the sermon here. 

In week 5 of our series Disciple-Making Mission we talked about what it looks like to live missionally. We said living missionally means learning to see the everyday rhythms of your life, and the people in them, as the people Jesus has sent you to. So as we see the clear and compelling of Scripture to make disciples, we aren’t necessarily talking about adding activity to your life. A major part of making disciples and living missionally is learning to see the routines you keep and the people you see every week through a different lens.

We walked through a story from Acts 8.26-35. In this story, the Spirit miraculously sends a man named Philip to a lightly traveled area to encounter an Ethiopian official. In this encounter we see several very practical principles that show us what it looks like to live missionally. A few of the things we saw:

God is at work long before we come into the picture. (Praise God for that!)
A main way to approach life missionally is to watch and listen to the people around you purposefully.
Another key tool is asking good questions, and when people seem receptive to the gospel or to spiritual conversation, ask them to take another step, maybe even to study the Bible together.
And one key piece we have to remember: if we are going to make disciples of Jesus, we have to talk about Jesus.

A few of the key tools we talked about are having a Top 5, Invest & Invite, and telling your personal story of how Jesus changed your life and is still changing your life. If you aren’t familiar with these ideas or tools, they are explained in the sermon.

One more tool we gave you is the 3 Circles gospel explanation (click the link and scroll to the bottom of the page). It’s a video on our site and in our app that you can use to share the simple gospel with people.

Some encouraging numbers we also talked about:

  • If 80 of our people have a gospel conversation just once a month between now and the end of the year, that would be 240 gospel conversations.
  • If those same 80 people prayed for a lost person every day for the rest of the year, that would be 7,360 prayers for lost people.
  • How incredible would it be to stand together at our Christmas service and say we’ve prayed 7,360 prayers and had 240 gospel conversations? How would that change us and the people around us?

Questions for discussion:

  1. As you read through Acts 8.26-35 and listen to the sermon, what do you sense the Lord saying to you? What about to our church?
  2. What things from the passage encourage you? What things challenge you?
  3. If making disciples intimidates you and/or feels like something you don’t have enough time or extra energy for in your week, how does the idea of living missionally, the way we defined it, affect the way you see disciple-making?
  4. Who are some of the people in your everyday rhythms that you believe Jesus has sent you to?
  5. What are some ways you can watch & listen purposefully, invest and invite, and look for opportunities to talk about Jesus?
  6. What do you think God wants you to do in response to all of this?

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