How can we make our families more missions-minded? It begins with a broader understanding of what missions-mindedness actually is. It isn't enough to just give mental assent to the need of missions, but instead begins with genuine excitement and joy about missions. Parents need to cultivate a love for missions and the missionaries in the home and orient life around the mission of taking the gospel of Jesus Christ to the nations.

Well, it's great to be back here after a little bit of a time away and to be at this conference and hearing all these blessed teachings and opening of the Word of God. It's a real inspiration just to hear the working of the Lord all the way through. If you look at the Old Testament, all the way down to the book of Revelation, how he is so mighty to save and so kind-hearted and good towards his people. So before I get started, I'm going to be talking about the mission-minded family. Why don't we pray?

Heavenly Father, we come before you now and thank you for all of the families that are represented here, O God. We thank you for the singles that are here as well and just pray, Father, that you would work in our midst, Lord, that our homes would be such bastions of activity, of motivation, Lord, that you would use us as fathers and as mothers and our children and siblings, one with another, to advance your kingdom in the earth, oh God. We just commit this time to you now, these next few minutes, and pray that you would be in them and receive all the glory. Amen. Well, as I mentioned, the topic that I'm gonna be discussing here is the missions-minded family.

And the question is, well, what do we mean when we say the missions-minded family? What are we really discussing and trying to convey in these words. And I think it was covered off last night really well in Matthew chapter 16, but one of the verses that was read I thought was really applicable to what I wanna communicate here this afternoon. And it's in the point where the Lord Jesus was there, and he was telling the disciples how he was going to die, how he was going to be resurrected. And Peter pulls him aside, and it says that Peter rebuked the Lord.

And of course, the Lord turned to Peter, and he says these words, get behind me Satan, you are an offense to me for you are not mindful of the things of God but the things of men. And you say, well what does that have to do with a missions-minded family? Well, that word mindful that's covered off here, where he says, Peter, you are not mindful. It really means to relish or to desire or to savor, to make it your great obsession, or to be disposed in a certain direction, or to take a strong interest in, or to set your affection on. So what the Lord is saying to Peter is what you're setting your eyes on are not the things that I've set my eyes on.

And so being missions minded is really just a matter of setting our minds and our affections on the things that God has set his heart on as well and being motivated in a certain direction. And so when we talk about a missions-minded family, what we're trying to communicate is a place where there's a culture of the Great Commission in the home. It's not something that's just tacked on or discussed once in a while, but it's actually a part of the home and part of the environment. And it's really an encouragement to us to be more aligned with the great mission of God in the earth, which is the redemption and the saving of sinners for the glory and honor of his great name. And So when we talk about a missions-minded family, it's a place, a family where children in the home know the history of missions and they also know what's going on in missions today.

They might know missionaries by name and hopefully are praying for them in the home as well. And so it's not just, as I mentioned, a tack-on, but it's a part of the family culture. And this is not a call for everyone to sell out and move overseas. That's not what it means to be missions-minded, to just sell everything out and go. But it is a call for some of us to do that, and it's a call for all of us to have this missionary spirit that you see all the way kind of coursing through the entire New Testament when you look at church history where you see all of this happening.

And so, I'm just gonna be breaking things down into four categories. One is the foundation, what's important to God, and then the role of the father and the mother, and then some of the obstacles to becoming a missions-minded family, and then some helps as well. So hopefully that'll give us something to go from here with. But I want to start off with a verse that was read earlier today actually in Matthew chapter nine. And there was the Lord himself, he was in a setting, a country setting, and he was looking out upon all of the people and this is what happened, it says this, then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, preaching the gospel of the kingdom and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.

But when he saw the multitudes, He was moved with compassion for them, because they were weary and scattered like sheep having no shepherd. Then he said to his disciples, "'The harvest truly is plentiful, "'but the laborers are few. "'Therefore pray the Lord of the harvest "'to send out laborers into his harvest.'" And you can imagine the Lord Jesus here looking out upon these masses. It's just this whole crowd just teeming with souls. And you could imagine that as he was looking at all of these people, he wasn't just seeing this crowd, but he was likely seeing all of humanity, everyone that would ever be born and anyone that would ever live.

And you ask the question, well, how important is missions to God? It's important enough that he sent his only begotten son. And this is what David Livington said. He says, God had only one son, and he was a missionary. And so you see this idea of a missionary God who sends a missionary son who then calls 12 men who are then to go and make disciples.

And Paul says it so well when he's talking to Timothy, that the things that you've learned of me teach other men, that they may be able to teach others also. So you see this constant chain going down the line from God. It's like this waterfall to the sun to the apostles and it just floods out from there into all the world. And this is what's so critical for us to understand, to every nation, to every kindred, and to every tongue. And so One of the things I do want to assert is that one of the marks of Christian growth is that the things that are important to God become increasingly important to us.

This alignment, this mindful, when Jesus said, you're not mindful of the things that are of God. Your mind's here, mine's here. But over time, as we grow in the faith, hopefully there's an overlap of what's important to God and what's important to us as well. That should hopefully be the case as we grow and we mature. And one thing I just want to head off at the pass is make sure that we're not just becoming mission-minded, just like some people can become pro-life.

If I ask, is everyone in here pro-life? I don't think one hand would stay down, right? Everyone would say, well, of course I'm pro-life. I mean, you know, that's just par for the course as a Christian. And in the same way a person could be pro-missions, well, I guess, you know, it'd be great, just like it'd be wonderful if we defunded Planned Parenthood, sure it'd be great if missionaries went out or, you know, if we had a missionary discussion every so often, that's not what we're talking about when we're talking about being missionary minded or missions minded.

What we're doing is we're moving from a proposition that you can agree with and say, sure, I'm pro-life, I'm pro-missions, to one that you're actually excited about, one that's a part of the DNA of your family and a part of the culture of your home. And so we want to move away from just being pro-life, pro-missions, to being rabid, excited, desirous of the glory of God in places perhaps you may never even see, people you may never meet but you know that they have something in common with you which is that they're human and they have a soul that will spend eternity in one of two places. And so as we see what is important to God, we can't help hopefully from becoming a rope holding family, someone, a family who does wanna get behind what God is doing in the earth. When we begin to contemplate the King of Kings, the Lord of Lords, who Jesus Christ is, It breathes into us a desire for His glory and His fame. And so, hopefully we move from this idea of grasping and understanding what's important to God and that now becomes important to us.

Well, what is the role of the father and the mother in cultivating a mission's mindedness within the home. Well, I think it's impossible to calculate or overestimate the importance of a mother and a father in the home that are cultivating this vision of aligning with God's will. Because here's the situation, right, we're talking about churches, but churches are made up of families and a rope-holding church is going to be made up of families that are holding the rope and desiring for the glory of God and the advancing of his kingdom. And so, while you may never go to a foreign land yourself, you should have that heart for missions. I was talking to a brother the other day, and he gave me this beautiful analogy.

This was before we went on our trip. My wife and myself were talking to him and his wife, and he gave me this analogy of like a... If you think of an arrow or a spear, now a spear is a great weapon or an arrow can be a great weapon at the end of a bow, but if you just take the arrow head, I hunt, if you get a broadhead and if you're sitting in a tree stand and a deer walks by and you just take the broadhead and you throw it at the deer, what's gonna happen? Not all that much, right? It'll just look up at you and probably keep walking along on its way.

But the shaft, the shaft, the wood behind the arrow is what gives power to the actual broadhead at the end of the day. And so the point he was making is that it's one thing for people to be at the tip of the spear going into a foreign land, but if people are not behind that endeavour, it's just like a hunter throwing a broadhead at an animal hoping to bring home dinner. It just will not work. And so everyone has a role to play. Just as important, the level of commitment and being poured out for the one on the field, that should also be replicated in the church that's sending the family or sending the people that are going.

And so, one of the things we wanna do is not see family and missions as competing priorities, that I'm just going to focus only on my family, but that we see much more broadly beyond that. And so we want to be equally invested. And in terms of the roles, if you look at a dad, the role of a father, It's so beautiful. There's so many examples. But as a dad, you don't want to just leave this cultivating of a missionary spirit to mom alone.

If your children see it coming from dad, coming from you as the father, it's going to carry substantial weight. And it's going to become a part of the family's DNA. It won't just be something mom teaches in homeschool, but it's gonna be something much, much more significant. And so, it's very important that children see that what's important to God is becoming increasingly important to dad, And then Dad is getting behind God's mission in the earth. On the other side, if your children see that the things that Dad is most impassioned about are the things that are not eternal, you can ask the question, what do you think are gonna be the effects on our children when we're caught up with trinkets or side things or things that really don't matter at the end of the day.

And so I read this quote the other day and I think it's so important. Nobody is changed by anything they don't do daily. And so it's this idea of making small, regular deposits, just daily cultivating and working the soil and making it a part of your family. It's not about a conference, even this conference, or a sermon, or let's spend the next few weeks talking about missions, but what's going on in the home? And then what can you say about mom?

Well, I think it's hard to calculate again, is there anything more powerful on the earth than a praying mother, praying for her children, praying and pouring out. It's one of the most beautiful things and God has used it all throughout history. We see it in the book of Timothy where Paul talks about the faith of his mother, Eunice, and Lois, his grandmother. But there is this idea here with John G. Payton when he was about to go out to the mission field to the New Hebrides.

His parents, when he went back and told him what he was going to do, they actually told him what they did on the very day or couple days after he was born. He didn't know it up until this day. He's in his 20s now and they're going to tell him what they did a couple days after he was born. He didn't know it up until this day. He's in his 20s now and they're going to tell him what they did a couple days after he was born.

This is what it says. They told him that when he was born, they laid him upon the altar to be consecrated if God saw fit as a missionary of the cross, and that it had been their constant prayer that he might be prepared, qualified and led to this very decision, and that God might accept their offering, long spare them, and give him many souls from among the heathen for his hire." Now think about this one minute for a second. His mother, do you know how impactful she was? She was really the vessel and the tool that sent out 11 of their... They had 11 children in their family, but she was the tool that God used primarily for the sending out of 11 of his nieces, nephews, brothers and sisters into foreign lands because of her prayer and zeal.

Where does she live? In a tiny little cottage in nowhere Scotland. She never probably went out more than five miles away from her home, but she had a desire that God would be glorified among the nations. There's another couple named James and Amelia who were a Methodist couple who were fascinated with the Far East and they prayed for their newborn, grant that he may work for you in China." Well, this young man goes by the name of Hudson Taylor. By the way, he had a younger sibling named Amelia, a sister, who got saved before he did and she would be praying constantly for her brother, please save, save my brother, save my brother.

Now she saw the fruit of him being saved, but all the course of his 51 years in ministry in China was probably his greatest support. So think about that as a sibling, not only mom and dad, but as a sibling, praying for your other siblings and the impact that you can have as well. And you want to think about this, what's the alternative to a mission-oriented family, a missionless life? What fruit is that? I mean, it's almost the very definition of poverty, to just be going about cultivating and desiring your own lust, your own desires, doing the things that you want.

But when you align with God's will, there's true riches there. The accumulation of stuff will never satisfy anyone at all. And so when you focus on something bigger than yourself, your family, when they focus on that, your family will thrive and do so much better. I love this proverb, it says, there is one who scatters yet increases more, and there is one who withholds more than is right, but it leads to poverty The generous soul will be made rich and he who waters will himself be watered and so what are some of the obstacles to to emissions mindedness within the family obviously we talked at the beginning about the alignment with God's with God's vision and then the mom and the dad I Think I think we got to think about it like this tomorrow's Sunday right tomorrow's an entirely new day Next week will be a new week. And we've come out of a missions conference.

What are the things that are gonna stay with you and help you to cultivate this spirit within your home? The tendency, The gravitational force of your own life and your own little world as a dad, this pounding surf, you know, if you think about yourself in the waves just trying to pay the bills, dealing with an ornery boss and mom dealing with kids that disobey, before you know it you're just right back into the regular life and things just keep going as they always have been. And so, what I'm trying to say is that unless we recognize that there is a constant battle and that we have to cultivate this, there's an activity behind it, we have to actually start beginning to do things, there's a battle that will just simply fall back into the regular routines that we always have. And so, we've got to think, recognize that there's apathy, there's diversion, there's distraction, there's indifference, there's this constant pursuit of entertainment that we all have, working against cultivating this heart for God and for his kingdom. And it's our own kingdom a lot of the times and we're orbiting, every single one of us is orbiting around something.

And the whole idea is can we move that orbit from just orbiting around our own lives to orbiting around what's most critical and what's most important to God. It is hard, another obstacle as well, is it's very, very hard to be concerned about people that are far away in places you've never heard, living on streets you can never name, it's difficult to do that, but over the course of time of prayer and really working along the lines of seeking the Lord's will and reading and so on, there's lots of things that we can do to get beyond that. Alistair Begg says it like this, he says, when grace begins to rule, then our preoccupation with ourselves begins to leave. When grace begins to rule, may that grace, may that be a prayer, Lord, as we go home from this conference, be Lord. Please don't let what I heard fall to the ground, but could you work it into the marrow of our families that we would be mindful of God's things?

And so just very briefly, there's about four helps I would say that I found extremely helpful personally that I would encourage you to consider as well. I think probably one of the best things that's worked for me when I got saved, you know, we got saved at the church we were in, there was a little section of a library, just a very small library, but it had biographies of men I had never heard of. And I think one of the first ones I ever picked up was the biography of Hudson Taylor, if I can remember. And reading this and understanding what this man did for the glory of God was something that stuck in my heart. We just heard a biography of another man, William Borden.

And I think what's so important about biographies is not so much the heroics, the... When you actually read the long versions of the biographies, a lot of the romanticism of missions fades away when you begin to see like what these people actually went through and the slowness. Can you imagine seven years for some of them before they even see a convert? You think back seven years ago it was 2011, 2025, seven years from now. That's a long, long road.

But I think what I got most of all from reading missionary biographies was what their lives said on every page. Worthy is the lamb. Worthy is the lamb. Is he worth it? Is he worth it?

Why would somebody do this unless the object of his affection is worthy? And so when you pick up a biography, I would recommend, there's so many I could recommend, but pick one up and read it as a family. If you read two or three this year and come back and say, you know what, I didn't get anything from it, chances are you didn't read it. Because what those biographies, autobiographies can convey is actually theology in action. It's theology in action.

It's God's willingness to use vessels like we are for the glory of his name as weak and as lacking in faith oftentimes as we often can be. Another thing is to develop a worldview, And I don't mean just a worldview like we talk about it in terms of apologetics, but a view of the world in terms of geography and history, what's going on in the world, and perhaps even gathering your family around a map and deciding, hey, let's study a country and let's find out about this country and these people that live there and incorporate it perhaps even into family worship. There's all sorts of one-pagers that you can just incorporate. We have a book at home from Jerusalem to Irian Jaya and they're very, very short little one-page biographies of missionaries or geography overviews of various countries that talks about the gospel in those places. And then also prayer.

We start off by reading Matthew chapter nine, "'Pray the Lord of the harvest, ' that he would send out laborers into his harvest." That might be you, It could be your children or people from your family. And we want to be praying that God would do these things. And then of course, lastly, I mean, we've talked about it quite a bit, but what are you doing locally? If we don't have a heart for anything local, it's going to be impossible to develop a heart for anything overseas. And so this kind of bridge that we're building as we are faithful in the various fears God gives us, that we would labour faithfully, perhaps God would open up a way for us to labour in a foreign field, like Isaiah was after, just like many of us have had our mouths touched with the coals, we've been cleansed.

What was his statement? He says, here I am, Lord, send me. May God work in our homes and our families to raise up mission workers or to raise up that interest of support as we look forward to the future. So let's pray. Father, we just so pray and ask you that you would be glorified in exalting your son in our midst, Lord, and in our homes.

We pray that your heartbeat would become our heartbeat. Lord, that our desires would be put aside and be consumed by what you're most zealous of. And Lord, in that we would find our true joy and our true peace. So Lord, work in our churches, work in our homes, and be glorified, we pray, amen.