Genesis 1:24-28; Acts 17:24-31
Faith Baptist Church
The Math of God, Bruce Adamson
Well good morning church, it's glad to be together. We're going to start off here to pray for Bob as he's leaving this week to Uganda. Bruce, would you come on up too? Bruce is going to be sharing with us as a missionary and from one missionary to another. Let's get you up here too. So let's pray for Bob church. Lord we just pray for Bob as he goes to Uganda that you would prepare straight the way and protect him on his journey. I pray for success, Lord, that you'd establish the work of his hands. I pray for his stewardship with the resources and trusted, Lord, that he would build the church and help the needs there. And I pray that you'd open the hearts to receive grace in Uganda in Jesus name, amen. Alright, thanks Bob. So next up we have Bruce here. Bruce has been supported by faith baptists for a long time. I won't tell you how long it might reveal his age. But it's been over 30 years that, well I guess, it's in a tone of honor and respect and there's a category I put people. When they've been in ministry longer than I've been alive, they get a very special category. And I've learned with those people it's good to just kind of close this and open these. And so I'm going to do that today. I'm going to get off the stage and open these and I encourage you to do the same, okay? Because Bruce has seen God at work. He's seen opportunities around the world that in all the chaos, God is drawing people to his grace and revealing to them their need for God his King. So with that, let's pray again, I want to pray for you, alright? So Lord, I thank you for Bruce's willingness to be here and to share from your word what I believe is not only on his heart but on your heart. So speak to your church, your servant is listening in Jesus name, amen. Oh, okay, can I pull this over here? Yeah, it's been a long time since I've been here and it's been a long time since you partnered with my wife Julian and I spent over 30 years and got to get myself organized here because I'm going to control the slides. And by the way, my wife sends her greetings and her love. We're up in the Twin Cities, so about a two and a half hour drive down this morning. But she's got elderly parents and typically if we're not gone on a Sunday, we drive them to church, so that's what she's doing this morning. But she sends her greetings and we are so thankful for Faith Baptist Church, I mean just talking to Robbie makes me feel very old but also we're in awe that this community of brothers and sisters have partnered with this for so long. For 10 years in Cote de Blar in West Africa, then 14 in Senegal in West Africa and then the mission called us back in 2018 to help launch a new initiative called from Scattered to Gathered up in the Twin Cities where we're focused on, basically we're doing the same thing we were doing overseas but it's focused on unreached people groups that are living in the Twin Cities, in particular we're focusing on Afghans, kind of a, there was a community of Afghans around 300, some of you know the history of Afghanistan, it's called the graveyard of empires. And back during the Soviet invasion in the 80s, there was the Mujahideen, the Freedom Fighters, the Afghan Freedom Fighters, they were actually in cahoots with our government and they fled, many of them fled for their lives and ended up in different cities across North America including the Twin Cities about 300 and all of you know what happened in August 2021 when we pulled out of Afghanistan, mass exodus, migration of Afghans out of the country and so Fort McCoy in Wisconsin, not too far from the Twin Cities, we helped with some, they were staged there for about three or four months and we, Julie and I and we came back from Africa, we had no idea there were even any Afghans in the Twin Cities and then we met a brother and a lord, an Afghan believer and he introduced us to this reality and a couple years later God called him into the military, this was pre-2021, so he didn't know why exactly but he was stationed down south but when things blew up in August 2021 in Afghanistan, they brought him up to Fort McCoy in Wisconsin with around 13,000 Afghans that were staged before they were resettled in different parts of the country, so we helped with some caravans of, our government was totally unprepared for, I shouldn't say totally but not prepared for the numbers and the needs of women and children and they came in the cold months, of course, Minnesota, Wisconsin, so and then right now there's between four and five thousand Afghans that have been resettled in the Twin Cities, so we're going to be talking about what God is doing in the world through migration, it's a reality but first let me just show you, this is our family now, when we came here we didn't have any kids, Julie wasn't even expecting and so now we have, we've got three kids and they're all married and we have three, this is taken before our third granddaughter was born and then we have two more on the way, all girls, so we feel very blessed and our kids, I mean very blessed, our kids all live within 15 minutes of us, so up in a twin city, so we feel bad because we left for 24 years, lived overseas, what we did to our parents and here all our kids are right next door, so anyway, God is good and that is definitely undeserved merit on his part, so back when we were first getting ready to go overseas, back in 1990, mission strategies came up with this window you see, it's called the 1040 window, 10 degrees, 40 degrees north latitude and that's where the most unreached people groups exist in the world, what's kind of cool is we're all started in Jerusalem, smack dab in the middle of the 1040 window, but that's kind of where we got our inspiration when Julie and I were first feeling called to the mission field was this whole idea of there's thousands of unreached people groups, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, animist, all living, many of them, most of them living within this window and we were also really motivated by what Jesus said in Matthew 24, 14, this gospel of the Kingdom will preach in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, to all ethnic groups and then the end will come, so we just sense God saying we could do something about this fact that there are so many ethnic communities have no idea who Jesus is and never heard the gospel, so here you see when we came on our mission invited us to which is converge international ministry is formerly Bapsional Conference, this is a converged church, so when we came back in 2018, you know, initially we went to the world, you know, we went with the gospel to people groups in West Africa, Muslim people groups that were there was no church, very few people sharing the gospel, well we came back to the Twin Cities and we went to the ends of the earth when we left the Twin Cities to go to West Africa and we came back, we found at the ends of the earth had come to us and so Minneapolis St. Paul is considered what they call a gateway city, so where they have, they've had a very open and welcoming desire for immigrants and refugees, asylum seekers to come and resettle in the Twin Cities, so lots of unreached people groups, I would say dozens living in the Twin Cities, so amazing opportunities for the church to engage. So about the same time we came back to the states, our mission came up with a new mission statement, we were asking God for a gospel movement among every least reached people group in our generation, so least reached people group that means 4% or less following Jesus among ethnic communities, so of course we have many of those living in the Twin Cities and we felt this is a very compelling vision, it's really God dependent, we're asking God, we can't do this in and of ourselves, so we're asking God to pour out his spirit on these communities, even as we invite the church and encourage the church and mobilize the church to engage. So from scatter to gathered is a brand new initiative, well, and this whole idea of diaspora, which is how many of you heard of that term diaspora or some people say diaspora, I don't know how it's pronounced, I say diaspora, but it comes from Greek and it means to scatter, to sow, so most people have heard of the Jewish diaspora or the African diaspora, but it simply means that in God's economy God is about scattering the nations, so you know, we, either he's scattering the nations to places where they can have access to the gospel or he's scattering us into places where our people live who don't have access to the gospel, so it's both a coming and a going of a migration, this diaspora, so diaspora missions is sort of, I don't know if you call it the next wave of missions, so it's no longer saltwater missions where you cross a body of saltwater to go and share the gospel, the nations have come to us. In fact, if I have my phone, so migration, obviously you're well aware here in Hampton about migration because you have, I think, a significant Hispanic community that lives here, so that's very familiar to you. Let me just pull up the latest statistics, if you allow me to, this is from the United Nations HCR, High Commission for Refugees, sorry, there it is, so every year we break a world record in terms of the number of peoples that are displaced from their homelands, so as of the end of last year, 117 million people were living either outside their homelands or what they call internally displaced, so for example in Syria, you have thousands and thousands of people that are no longer living in the place where they were born and they grew up. They're living within Syria, but either the UN or other organizations have gone and they built refugee camps, they're living in those refugee camps, so 117 million people, we hadn't broken a million until like two, or a hundred million until like two years ago, two or three years ago, so it just, the sheer numbers of people that are migrating, and most of it is involuntary, it's because of war, famine, persecution, but then you have voluntary migration for education, for jobs, so the numbers are really, really staggering, and again, we, one of the challenges for us, there we go, let's go to the next slide, so one of the challenges for us as we engage with local churches and we're faced with the reality of migrating peoples who are now being resettled in our case in the Twin Cities is the kind of the false narratives, the misconceptions, so we, as we engage with local churches in the Twin Cities, we're kind of focused on three things, the first one is deconstruction, so you know, what does it mean to be a refugee or an asylum seeker, you know, this is a hot topic, I know, I'm not going to get into it, because it's one of the main platforms for both sides, rather the Democrats and the Republicans, this whole idea of open borders or closed borders, and but it's a reality for us, and we're trying to get above the fray, and what is, how does God see the world, how does God, how is God operating the world in the world through migration, because one of the things that we've become convinced of as we read scripture from Genesis through Revelation, God is a God of migration, the way that he's moved his own, he's beginning with, I mean, you can start with Adam and Eve, he kicked him out of the garden, I mean, they migrated out of the garden because of their rebellion, and then Cain, Cain killed his brother, and the scriptures say that he left the presence of the Lord and went to the land of Nod, in Hebrew, Nod means want to wander, and then you look at Abraham, left Er the Chaldis and went to Huram and then to the promised land, so, and then you have the people of Israel with Moses and the Exodus, there's this, and the deportations, the scriptures is full of stories of migration, and God is working through migration to fulfill his redemptive purposes, and that discontinues in the New Testament with Pentecost, and what happened there, we read the book of Acts, it's just amazing, and we'll be getting into that a little later on, but, so, begin with deconstruction, kind of helping the church understand, okay, what's the reality of migration, what does that have to do with us as a body of Christ, and then we, we, demonstration, how do we play the music of the gospel through Acts of Service, through blessing these communities, and creating access for actually declaring the good news of the gospel, we, we don't want to stop with, you know, doing five day clubs, and those are great, or having a basketball camp, or, you know, anything that is blessing in the community, we definitely want to get to the place where we're expressing verbally who Jesus is, and why He came, and why He's their only hope, now that they're here among us. So, that's deconstruction, demonstration, declaration, kind of, we're trying to work through those things with, with the local church. So, this morning, we're going to be talking about, you know, one of the things, again, that I mentioned earlier, for Julie and I, when we came back to the states, we saw the reality of the nation's next door, that the ends of the earth had come to us, and that this is an amazing opportunity for us, and for the church to engage, and to fulfill the great commission right here on our own neighborhoods. And so, the other reality, as I was looking through scripture, is that, and this comes out really in, kind of, the mission statement of, of, of convergent international ministries, we're asking God for a gospel movement, so that idea of movement is, the idea of multiplication, we want to see a multiplication of disciples. And when, when I started looking at the scriptures, I just realized, boy, God is, God is really about, about multiplication, from the very beginning, so we're just going to look at some texts, and this is going to, I'm just going to blow through this, I hope you don't get frustrated, the scriptures will be on the screen, but I want to help convince all of us of the, the, the reality of, of God's passion for children, his passion to, to grow the family of God, not by addition, but by multiplication. And again, we can look at the book of, of, of Acts and see, you know, some, some people say, oh, you can't take a historical book and see that as prescriptive. I don't, I don't know who came up with that, but I think, I think we can take it as, boy, what happened in the book of Acts, you know, with the, the gospel going viral, thousands of people coming to faith, you know, we see this happening actually in different parts of the world. These incredible movements of the gospel are taking place, not so much in the West, but in the, the global South, in the developing world, and, and we're like, why not us? Why can't it happen that happened today among us? So, um, but let's just start at the beginning, so, uh, in Genesis chapter one, and I'll just read this quickly, then God said, let us make human beings in our image to be like us. They will reign over the fish and to see the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the wild animals on the earth, and the small animals have scurry along the ground. So, God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God, he created them, male and female, he created them, boy, we could really get into that, couldn't we today. Then God blessed them and said, be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and govern it. So just a couple of things, this, the, the word in, in, um, for image, God created us in his image, that word image. So, I'm not trying to, um, show how smart I am, but you know, in the, in the Greek text of the Old Testament, called the Septuagint, that word is icon. So most of us, when we think of icons, we think, oh, you go into, uh, you know, a Byzantine or Catholic church, and they have these icons, these idols, well, that's actually what, what God is saying. That you are, I've created you in my image and you are like little gods, um, you should be reflecting my presence and my glory. So, um, the, um, so there's this idea that, that God, um, typically an idol is a physical thing represent, um, a spiritual reality, um, otherwise it's like a conduit through which a spiritual presence is made known. So when God created us, God made a physical idol into which to place his presence. So obviously we all know what happened, um, Genesis 1 and 2 is beautiful, what's, what's going on though in those two, in those two chapters. But when we get to Genesis chapter 3, we see that, you know, um, I, that's such a beautiful text where it talks about God, uh, and going into the garden and, and the idea that he, he was walking in the garden was habitual. He was constantly in, in, um, in the presence of Adam and Eve, uh, in communion with this man and this woman that he had created. There's, so there's this, this idea of, uh, a depth to relationship. So depth of relationships meant that the product of that should be multiplication because God said, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. That was his, that was his mandate to, to Adam and Eve. So but unfortunately we know what happened, um, man fell. There was a rebellion in the garden and, um, but then immediately after that, we have Genesis 3 15 where, where, um, where God said, he, he, he, uh, he, uh, um, brings condemnation to, to the serpent and to the woman. But then in, uh, but then he gives this promise that, um, the seat of the woman would come and, um, crush the head of the serpent. So they, they call that the proto-evangelion. It's like the first mention of the coming of the gospel, of the coming of the deliverer, the Messiah. So again, we have this God's passion for children who wants us to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with image bearers, with little icons, with the people that reflect His glory and His presence. If we jump forward to Genesis 22, well, let's look at just this is not the right text actually so. But Noah, we know all know what's happened, the flood happens and so there's like a reboot. And the interesting thing is God gives the very same promise to Noah, the same mandate rather. He says, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth." That's the promise. So God destroys mankind, but then with no one, His family gives the same exact mandate. So that it hasn't changed. Even though the image in us has been marred and corrupted because of our sin, His mandate to man has not changed. His desires that we be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth with image bearers. That the craziest thing is though, is that what's being multiplied is not the original design that God had, right? We're just multiplying more corrupt image bearers. So something needs to happen. And that's why God gave us Genesis 3.15 to say, "There's someone coming. There's a deliverer coming and you'll be recreated in His image." And then, and then game on, okay, and then we see the coming of Christ and the giving of the great commission. Just a couple more passages from the Old Testament, we have God's promise to Abraham after he had attempted to sacrifice his son Isaac. He says, "I will multiply to your descendants beyond number like the stars in the sky and the sand in the seashore, and through your descendants all the nations of the earth will be blessed, all because you have obeyed me." So obviously, He's talking about, you know, Abraham was this man that God had set him, he had set him apart for himself, and through Abraham, the Hebrew nation was created. So that blessing was for the Hebrew nation, but we know that from the Hebrew nation, we have been grafted in. The Gentile nations have been grafted in to the Hebrew nation. We are blessed because of our Hebrew, you know, our, Abraham is our father, just as much as he's the father of the, of the Hebrew nation. This is an amazing text from Deuteronomy, they call it the Shema where God says, "Oh Israel, here therefore Israel, and be careful to do them that it may go well with you, and that you may multiply greatly as the Lord the God of your fathers has promised you, and a land flowing with milk and honey. Here oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might, and these words that I command you today shall be on your heart. You shall teach them diligently to your children, you shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, when you rise, you shall bind them as a sign on your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes. You shall write them on the doorpost of your house and on your, on your gates." So again, this is God, God speaking through Moses to the people of Israel, they're on the verge of crossing into the promised land, and he says, "I will, you will be blessed, and you will multiply if you obey this command." And it's just, it's an amazing text about how to live your faith out loud, beginning in your home. But it's not just in your home, he says, "Okay, while you're sitting in your home, you should be sharing these things with your children, with all everybody, everybody's president in your home, with your guests, but put them on your door." So visitors come, they see that, "Okay, this is a house that is committed to the Lord." Put it on your gates, pass just by, walk by. So the idea is that it starts in the home, but then it extends outward, and people should see that this idea of living our faith out loud and multiplying image bears, that's totally a part of this whole plan that God has. Let's jump to the New Testament, and this is actually sort of the theme verse for, from scattered together, from Acts chapter 17, and I think it's worth reading the whole thing. So Paul is, that's a picture of the Acropolis in Athens. So Paul was right up there, speaking to, on Mars Hill, and speaking to the leading men and women of the city. And of course, his first time in Athens, if you've read Acts 17, he's walking around, he sees all these idols, which is, I love this text because it's in contradiction to what God's design is for us. We should be the only image bears. God is, we are made in his image, we are his little idols, icons, if you understand. So John Kelvin said, "Men, inherently, are idol-maker factories," that's a paraphrase, I'm sure, because he's spoken French. But that's not the kind of idols we're talking about. When God created man, he said, "I'm creating you in my image," it meant that. We should be, again, reflecting his glory, his presence, his goodness. But we are all prone to creating idols of our own making, right? All of us, I can name five off the top of my head, five idols that I have. So that's, but here Paul was walking through Athens and he was seeing these physical idols, these icons that the Greeks had made because they believed in so many, so many different gods and deities. So Paul here is standing before these men and women in Athens and he says, "The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands as though he needed anything since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind," okay, who's that? That's Adam. To live on the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods in the boundaries of the drawing place that they should seek God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him, yet he is actually not far from each one of us. For in him we live and move and have our being, as even some of your own poets have said. For we are indeed his offspring. Again, Paul's referring back to Genesis 1, this idea that we've been made in God's image. Being then God's offspring, we ought not to think that the divine being is like gold or silver stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of man. The times of ignorance got overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent because he has fixed a day on which he will judge the world in righteousness by a man whom he has appointed, and of this he has given assurance to all by raising him from the dead. Of course, that's the second Adam, that's Jesus. And we chose this as our kind of our theme verse because it talks about how God has allotted periods of time and he's moving people according to his sovereign purposes. So even when we see 117 million people that are migrating today, living in places where they were not born, it's so easy for us to be overwhelmed by those numbers. But the scriptures teach us that God is sovereign over all the migration that he sees happening. And it feels very uncomfortable. We're in the Twin Cities, we're dealing with a lot of rhetoric up there about migration. But we need to get, again, get above the fray and see what God is saying in his word about what he is doing through migration. He is drawing people to himself through migration, as he says here. And people are being introduced to this man who was appointed by God. He's the deliverer that was promised in Genesis 3.15. And he's come and his appointment, his place was confirmed by his resurrection. So we've got a few minutes here and I'm going to just choose a couple of passages from the Gospels. Well, maybe I'll choose one from the Gospels, one from Paul that, again, refer to this idea of multiplication that God is, he's not a God of addition, he's a God of multiplication. He's passionate about reproducing children who are his image-bearers recreated in Christ. So this is such a great passage from John chapter 12, where Jesus is just, I think it's his last encounter before his famous, his upper room discourse. So John 13 through 17, last year I went, this is an aside, but I went to a presentation, a guy, it was right before Easter, and it's actually the church where one of my sons goes to church. A guy had memorized John 13 through 17, and it was, I don't know what they call it, a monologue, he was just up there by himself and he was acting like he was, you know, he's washing his disciples at the disciples' feet, and he had this discord, it was so powerful. But right before that upper room discourse where Jesus was with his disciples before he was arrested, he has this to say, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies or remains alone. But if it dies, it bears much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, whoever hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life. If anyone serves me, he must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. If anyone serves me, the father will honor him. Now is the judgment of this world, now will the ruler of this world be cast out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself." He said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. So I know we don't grow a lot of wheat around here, corn, soybeans, oats. But probably if I asked one of you farmers, how many grains of corn does one kernel of corn produce, you could probably tell me. So I'd look this up on Google about how many grains of wheat one seed of grain produces. So one grain of wheat can produce eight or more heads with over 40 seeds per head. So if I have the math correct, that means one grain produces at least 320 grains. So I may be wrong, but that doesn't sound like addition. That sounds like multiplication. And when John has this little comment after Jesus, he quotes Jesus, he says, he said this to show by what kind of death he was going to die. How do you translate that? I think what John was saying is that kind of death that Jesus was going to die, that he did die, was a death that would multiply. It would multiply image bearers. It was a death, and we see that confirmed actually when we go to John 15. Jesus says, "Yes, I am the vine, you are the branches, those who remain in me, and I and them will produce much fruit. For apart from me, you can do nothing. But if you remain in me and my words remain in you, you may ask for anything you want and it will be granted. When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples." So not only is Jesus asking to produce much fruit, again, the idea of multiplication, Jesus was just on the cusp of being arrested, and then his disciples would be scattered, and then, of course, we know what happens. Let's look at Acts, chapter 1, 8, Jesus is risen from the dead, the women see him at the tomb, they go and tell the disciples, "Me being Galilee," so Jesus meets his disciples and Galilee on a mountain, and that's where we have the great commission is given from Matthew 28, 18-20, and then Acts 1, 8 was also some of his final words before he ascended, and he says, "But you will see power when the Holy Spirit comes on you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." So this is a promise that Jesus makes to his disciples. Is it only for the 11, there are only 11 there at the time? No, it was for, obviously, to see the gospel propagated would take a long time. To the ends of the earth, Jesus says. So this is a command to mandate a promise for all of us to be fruitful in multiplying disciples. So even the word gospel means good news, and when someone shares good news with you, what do you do? You broadcast it, right? Good news is meant to be broadcast and to spread. So that's what Christ is calling us to do. So I'm going to draw this to a close this morning, just with, I think I mentioned at the beginning that Julian and I are focusing our efforts in engaging with the growing Afghan community in the Twin Cities. So around 4,000 to 5,000, and by God's grace, He's given us a handful of Afghans who were formerly part of the underground church in Afghanistan. You've all heard probably reports of what's happening in Iran, the church is exploding. Much like what happened in China, the church went underground, and then, you know, I don't know how many years later, after the Chinese, the revolution, they went in and they found out there were literally millions of Christians. That has not happened in Afghanistan. The church is very small and very persecuted, very oppressed, and we just feel so blessed to have, there's three, three friends, we're at the airport there, three brothers, all living in the Twin Cities, all were led to faith, and then we have this single mother who's still in Islamabad, Pakistan, we hope that very soon she'll be coming to the Twin Cities. They were all part of the same underground church. That was started by, it was like the Afghan version of the Apostle Paul. He had a, he was born into a Muslim family, had a vision of Jesus from a very devout Muslim family, a vision of Jesus, and just started, he got the word of God, just started sharing, going all over Afghanistan and sharing the gospel. So little groups of believers started popping up, and this is one of those communities, and I mean, there are only a few of, I think they said there were around 500 believers in that community, but we'd ask you to pray for our work among Afghans. As you can imagine, there's a high level of suspicion between Afghans because of the depressive nature in which they lived while they were in Afghanistan, and now that the Taliban are in power, most of them have left family behind, they are very suspicious about, even interacting with one another as believers. We have yet to bring the believers together to fellowship, and because they're so suspicious about, I do not want word to get back to my, you know, to bad actors in Afghanistan who would cause problems for my family. So anyway, just show this image of, to you, and we're very encouraged with what God is doing, but we just realize that it's going to be a slow, slow go. So, Robbie, I'll invite you to come up and, or I'm sorry, you have two songs, right? Okay. I think we should pray though here, okay, Lord, we do hear from your word. We hear not just a mandate, not just a command, but we hear your heart, the same heart that reached out of hand and stirred something in our soul to be able to know you. We pray that we would have that same heart for those around us, even in our own backyard. Lord, a heart to care about the immigrants among us, a heart to know and a heart to love. Lord, may we share in your heart as you are calling us, and I think at times begging us to do. And so we pray for Bruce's work that you would continue to strengthen, Lord, I pray for the church that goes underground, Lord, for when the church goes underground, it develops roots. It becomes unstoppable, because your kingdom is unstoppable. So teach us as a church how to have roots, like these believers that have undergone so much. I pray this in Jesus name, amen. Thanks, Bruce.