This sermon emphasizes the importance of inviting Jesus into our lives, acknowledging our unworthiness, and the need for collective obedience to fulfill the Great Commission. It calls for a return to the simplicity of abiding in Jesus, advancing together to plant churches where the gospel is not yet preached, and embracing suffering and persecution for Jesus' sake as a normal reality.

I'd like to invite Jesus into this place. It seems a little grand for a wretch to invite him. Unless we understand that we are these unworthy wretches that Jesus comes and visits, we miss the point. Would you just join me and audibly, verbally invite Jesus to be with us right now? Would you just lift your voice and invite Jesus to come? Jesus, thank you. Jesus, please come because we desperately need you. Jesus, please help us. Our collective obedience to Jesus, our yes Lord, leads us now in only one flint-faced direction. There is hope for the assemblies of God only if we again unite in taking the gospel at immense cost to the peoples and places where the gospel has not yet gone. I believe that we can do this. I believe that we must do this or perish. Tonight, I therefore have three very simple exhortations to abide, to apostle, and to abandon. We will obey the Lord Jesus and his commission if we return to the simplicity of just having him, of abiding. We will obey the Lord Jesus and complete his commission if we advance together to be plant the church where the church does not exist. We will obey Jesus and his commission if we embrace suffering and persecution for Jesus' sake as our normal reality if we abandon. But first, we must abide. We must return and maintain the simplicity of just having Jesus. In John's missionary gospel, chapter 15, verse 6, John simply states the heart of mission. If you abide in me and I in you, you will bear fruits and your fruit will remain. An exegesis of the text reveals that Jesus is directly promising if you abide in me and I in you, you will make disciples and your disciples will abide. Paul puts it in this perspective. I determined not to know anything among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. And he worried that his disciples would drift away from the simplicity that is in Christ. I was 22 years old. I left the United States after graduating from North Central University and landed in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania. Mauritania is a West African nation, 99% Islamic. Civil war had just ended. It was 1992. Arab Moors had been killing African Pulars, and the team that I was going to join was not happy to have me. It was a multinational team, and in that tense war-torn nation, they thought that this young American would jeopardize them and endanger the work. I walked out of the modest airport to be met by the acting team leader, a big, strong, rugby-playing British man. He was wearing the Mauritanian robe, and he had a settled frown on his face. His arms were folded across his chest, and he greeted me with these words, We don't want you. You're not welcome. Get back on the plane and go home. We argued for some moments on the tarmac in that summer evening, and I refused to get on the plane. Coming to an impasse, my new leader said to me, If you will not leave, this is what I'm going to do. I've arranged a one-room rental for you in the middle of the slum. The room shares a courtyard with an old grandmother and her grandchild. There's no water. There's no electricity. There's no furniture. There's no kitchen. There's no supplies. There's only a one-inch foam mattress on the floor, and there is a pit toilet in the courtyard. I will drop you off in the middle of the slum and abandon you for two weeks. If you can survive those two weeks, we will consider allowing you to join the team. And that's just what he did. I was dumped in the slum. I knew no one. I spoke no Arabic. It was just me and Jesus all day long. I would wake up at five o'clock in the morning and pray until the sun came up. I would read my Bible. I would walk the streets watching where the local people bought bread. I would point to the bread and open up my wallet. Allowing the baker to pick out what he wanted. I spent my days praying and crying out to Jesus for help, alone and afraid. And at sunset, I would walk outside the slum to the large fields of garbage that stretched from the city to the Atlantic Ocean. I would walk amongst the garbage and I would begin to sing to Jesus because there was no one else that I could talk to. I had no one. I had nothing. All I had was Jesus. And in those African sunsets, Jesus came down and walked with me. And oh, how sweet his presence was. And oh, how close he felt. I would sing and cry and pour out my heart to him. And Jesus came near. Jesus was very near. And the nearer that Jesus came, the worse I felt about myself. I was praying four hours of every day. I was reading massive amounts of scripture. And yet the closer I came to Jesus and the nearer that he came to me, the more I was ashamed of my sin, the more I was astounded by his grace, the more I was shattered with his love for the lost. And I would sing songs like, I was sinking deep in sin, very deeply staying within. And songs like, I stand amazed in the presence of Jesus, the Nazarene, and wonder how he could love me, a sinner condemned, unclean. And I would sing songs like, I need thee. Oh, I need thee. Every hour, I need thee. And I would cry and I would rejoice that Jesus had saved me. And I felt like my heart would burst with his presence. And I would cry and mourn that every stinking person around me was going to hell. And I felt like I would explode with his passion. And Jesus was all that I had. And he is all that I wanted. And he's all that I needed. And it was so incomparably sweet to have nothing but simply Jesus. And from that simplicity of having nothing but Jesus, and from the sweetness of abiding with him, from the nothingness of being unable to help anyone came incredible power and favor. Friends, we won't change the world because we are strong. We won't reach the nations because we are many. We will not evangelize the lost because we are rich. Our power is not in our numbers. Our power is not in ourselves. Our power is in the precious presence of Jesus in abiding in him. The power of the Pentecostal is not ultimately in signs and wonders, for they will deceive even the elect if they are not helped, and then one day cease. The strength of the Pentecostal is not found in ecstatic utterances, for they too have a temporal role. The cardinal doctrine of Pentecost is more, but not just more impersonal power, more of Jesus. Pentecostal power is rooted in the person of Jesus. The Spirit, John 16, 14, glorifies Christ. Spirit baptisms are further steps into the knowledge of God, whereby Jesus becomes more real to the soul. And when men and women linger in the presence of Jesus, when we hunger, when we thirst, when we ache for more of Jesus, Jesus comes to us. Jesus abides with us. Jesus baptizes us with his precious Holy Spirit. And the power that we are clothed with by the Spirit is not mechanical energy, for power alone ironically tends to take us away from Jesus. Pentecost is the power of divine life imparted to us by the Spirit through intimacy with the divine Son. And when Jesus is all that thrills the soul, he cannot be contained in the heart. He swells in our spirits. He bursts forth from our tongues. When Jesus is all that we want, we find in him we have all that we need. And being full of him, we stand in front of men and women with faces shining and eyes piercing and tongues praising. It is the ongoing experience and reality of Jesus that empowers our witness. We don't seek signs. We don't seek wisdom. We don't seek tongues. We seek the unbroken wonder of being lost in the presence of Jesus. Jesus is our power. Jesus is our sign. Jesus is our wisdom. Jesus is our tongue. Jesus is our distinctive. Jesus is our focus. Jesus is our wonder. Jesus is our life. Jesus is our all. And if we as a movement will return to the simplicity of just having Jesus, we will obey the Great Commission. Secondly, we believe we can complete the Great Commission if we will, Apostle, if we will advance together in planting the church where it does not exist. The Apostle Paul spoke in Romans 15 about what God had accomplished. God has made the Gentiles obedient through me, he says in verse 18, in mighty signs and wonders by the power of the Spirit of God from Jerusalem and roundabout to Lycraeum. I have fully preached the gospel of Christ. Oh, praise and glory to Jesus for the honor of his name. The assemblies of God has preached the gospel fully from Los Angeles to Boston, from Boston to Nigeria, from Nigeria to Mauritius, from Mauritius to southern India, from southern India to the Philippines, from the Philippines up to China, from China over to Fiji, from Fiji to Argentina, from Argentina north to Mexico, from Mexico back to the Bible Belt. Praise and honor and glory to Jesus that the full gospel has been fully preached. Praise Jesus that in these 100 years, frontiers have been penetrated, indigenous churches have been planted. This is marvelous in our eyes, and we rejoice in what God has done. And so, Paul continues in Romans chapter 15, verse 20, in light of the fact that the gospel has been fully preached in some of the places of the earth, I have made it my aim to preach the gospel where Christ has not been named, lest I build on another man's foundation. I have made it my aim, he tells the Corinthian church he pioneered, to preach the gospel in the regions beyond you. I was born in Kenya. Nze Jomo Kenyatta was Kenya's beloved first president, and Kenyatta famously said this, when the white man came to Africa, we Africans had the land, and the white man had the Bible. They asked us to close our eyes to pray, and when we opened our eyes, we had the Bible, and the white man had our land. It is my plea, unfair as it may be, that our African, and Latino, and Arab, and Asian brothers will not do to us what we have done to them. We who have broken the golden rule do now invoke it. For the spiritual power center of the global church is no longer in the north or west. I trust if you are an international delegate that you have not come to us seeking Pentecostal power. I trust you have not come to these shores to seek among our churches the power to live a crucified life. I trust that you are not fooled by our large buildings, and our performing musicians, and our arrogant postures, for the wind of Pentecost now blows, and the fires of mission now rage, not from us to thee, but from thee to us. And so my brothers and sisters from around the world, when western spiritual power is in decline, and yours ascends to batter the gates of hell, do not, we beg you, ask us to close our eyes in prayer, only for us to open them and find that in your hands alone is the work of global mission, and in ours only the deadening weight of wealth. Do not, we implore you, condemn us to be only the funders and donors of the gospel as you suffer and die for its advance, for if we are regulated only to supporting your sacrifice, we of all men will be the most pitiful. And brothers and sisters from the north and from the west, do not think that we can be fully obedient by resourcing the martyrdom of our friends from the comfort of our ivory palaces. We too must have our Calvary before we have our Pentecost. And brothers and sisters from all nations, in these last days before Jesus comes, can we march to battle, neither in our lands nor yours? Can we not commit ourselves to live and die together, far from either one of our homes? Cannot the American join the Kenyan in dying for Jesus in Mogadishu? Cannot the Filipina lead the German into Afghanistan? Cannot the Guatemalan and the Canadian plant the church together in Libya? Cannot the locusts of our partnership be among the people groups who have no church, hear no gospel, see no hope, receive no witness? Cannot African, Asian, Arab, and American blood be mingled together in Yemen for the cross of Christ? Christians of all varied races have died together in Damascus before. What stops us from doing it again? And cannot Europeans and Latinos and oceanic praise flow and mingle together from a prison in Saudi Arabia? Yes, beloved, we must apostle, but we must do it together. And this apostleship is not to be rendered in the shadow of a thousand steeples. Our partnership must take us arm in arm, bend in knee to bend in knee, into the shadowlands, to the Libyas, into the Iraqs, into the Syrias and the Somalias of the world. And we must witness and suffer and live and die in the most unstable of locations together. Our centennial celebration must be laced with mourning. As Lauren Triplett rightly said, we must measure ourselves by what is left undone. Jesus is coming for a beautiful bride, and yet as long as there are unreached peoples, the bride is still defigured. The Rashida are unreached, and the bride has no eye. The Pashtun are unreached, and the bride has no teeth. The Somali are unreached, and the bride has no hair. 1.6 billion Muslims are unreached, and the bride has no ear. Hundreds of peoples across Central Eurasia are unreached, and the bride has no nose. This is a vital aspect of missions so little understood. Not only do absent peoples mar the church, absent peoples mar the image of Jesus. For the church doesn't have the fullness of Jesus until the fullness of the nations have him. And look at this image of a marred, incomplete bride. And yet, every time an unreached people group joins the fold, a new perspective of God is released into Christian corpus. Think of it. Turkmen of Central Asia are saved. We get our nose back. Muslims redeemed, and we gain an ear. God is glorified by the Somali, and our head is adorned with hair. The gospel progresses across the Pashtun, and we get our teeth. The Rashida respond to the glory of God, and we gain an eye. The church is beautified by the spread of the gospel. If that is true, however, the end of our missionary task cannot be the supporting of existing national churches. It cannot be the staffing of indigenous institutions. It cannot be that we swap workers amongst fraternal fellowships. These are means, but they're not ends. The culmination of mission, therefore, is not Christians traveling across land and sea to minister in one another's churches. Missions cannot biblically nor logically be Christians blessing other Christians. The biblical presentation of mission demands a focused intensity, a directed apostolic function that compels us as a unified body towards the regions and the peoples beyond. J. Philip Hogan, in the early 1960s, bluntly said this, and I quote, The missionary that is needed now, they say, is really a worker in some technical or pedagogical skills and really a helper to the indigenous church. This emphasis would put the Great Commission in storage while the church adopts a kind of buddy system. And the real heroes of the cross are not men who confront heathen religions with the message of Calvary, but specialists who teach contour farming. The Assemblies of God does not believe this, end quote. What then does the Assemblies of God believe? The Assemblies of God believes that mission is restless and urgent. We believe mission has a singular purpose. We believe mission has a priceless vision. We believe mission has a narrow priority, a ceaseless moving and searching for lost souls. We believe mission takes the gospel to the peoples that have no church. We believe mission makes disciples, plants the church in the valley of the shadow of death. We believe mission launches to the lands and peoples devoid of gospel light. We believe mission takes up the fundamental human rights. Now, it is critical that we understand when we say the human rights, we do not mean moral entitlement. We don't mean that the sovereign Lord owes us anything. We don't mean that any human deserves or merits a gospel hearing. What we deserve by nature is the wrath of God. The right to be called children of God, John 1, 12, is derived from grace after we believe and after we call on His name. The human wrong is that due to laziness and fear and disobedience, no assemblies of God missionary was sent to the Arabian Peninsula for almost 100 years after Azusa Street. How dare we boast in being spirit empowered when this disobedience mars our record. The human wrong is that we are willing to send our children as soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan, but unwilling to send them there as missionaries. The right thing to do is to preach the gospel. The humane thing to do is to focus on eternal souls, hateful the one enamored with treating only immediate systems, loving the one who concentrates on God's long-range cure for sin. We don't believe in man's intrinsic right to hear the gospel. We believe the right thing for humans who know Jesus to do is to proclaim Christ where He's not known. And we believe the right response to the grace of Jesus is to spend our lives and deaths in obeying Jesus' call to make disciples of all nations. And we believe with all our hearts that the worldwide assemblies of God must render disobedience together. And upon this prioritized purpose, discipling every people together depends not only the advance of the gospel, but the very life of the assemblies of God. If you are here tonight or listening to this sermon, and you pastor an Assemblies of God church, but do not support boots-on-the-ground missionaries around the world, you may carry our name, but you have no part in our spirit. You may have the AG shingle over your church. You might have that AG sign over your church, but you live in defiant disobedience to the Holy Ghost. Dollars for one-time sexy projects can seduce us that we slide from the greatest impact of missions giving monthly support for boots-on-the-ground missionaries. And if your church is not regularly, sacrificially giving to support missionaries around the world, you are not in spirit assemblies of God. Call yourself whatever you want, but you cannot in truth be part of this fellowship if your budget does not prioritize the mission of God in the uttermost places of the earth. If you are here tonight as a Christian, a pastor, a missionary, or a leader, and you personally do not sacrificially give and pray and fast that unreached peoples might be reached with the gospel, you might carry an Assemblies of God credential in your wallet, but that card is closer to your stomach than it is to the heart of God. Do you want to be quintessentially Assemblies of God? Resign your position of security and a guaranteed salary and step out in faith to the regions beyond and go plant a church in Mecca or Mogadishu or the Maldives or Moldova or Malaysia. Go live and die where Christ has not been named and then we'll call you Assemblies of God. If we don't recommit ourselves now at this centennial to apostle, to the intentional and sacrificial partnership of church planting amongst unreached people groups, then we might as well disband our fellowship and write Ichabod over the doors of our churches and conventions for the glory and blessing of God will have passed us by and we shall be relegated to the dustbin of church history. Thirdly, we believe that we can obey the Great Commission if we will abandon, if we will embrace suffering for Jesus' sake as our normal reality. Because this point is so critical globally and for many in the West so obtuse, allow me to spend some moments to hammer away at the biblical base. Ananias was told to rise and go to a street called Straight to tell Paul, God's chosen vessel, God's apostle, how many things he and those that would follow him as he followed Christ must suffer for Christ's sake. I will work through these quickly. You will see the references on the screens. Labors, stripes, prison, deaths, lashes, rods, stone, shipwrecked, perils of waters, robbers, city in the wilderness, perils in the sea, false brethren, weariness, toil, sleeplessness, cold, naked, goes on in other passages, tribulations, needs, distresses, stripes, imprisonments, tumults, labors, sleeplessness, fasting, dishonor, unknown, dying, chastened, sorrowful, poor, having nothing, hard pressed on every side, perplexed, persecuted, struck down, caring about in the body, the dying of the Lord Jesus, delivered to death for Jesus' sake, trials of mocking, scourging, chains, imprisonment, stoned, sawn in two, tempted, slain with a sword, wandered destitute, afflicted, tormented, crucified with Christ, crucifying the flesh, the world crucified to me, strengthened for all suffering with joy, bound in the spirit, not knowing, chains and tribulations await, chains in Christ, to die is gain, granted on behalf of Christ, not only to believe in him, but also to suffer for his name, bound with his chain, spoken against everywhere, many adversaries, in our hearts to die together, exceedingly joyful in our tribulation, trouble on every side, outside conflicts, inside fears, live or die, we are the Lord's, jeopardy every hour, dying daily, much affliction with joy of the Holy Spirit, hardship, trouble, even the point of chains, share in the sufferings of the gospel, worthy of the kingdom for which we also suffer, join heirs with Christ, if indeed we suffer with him, that we may also be glorified together, and that's just Paul, Jesus himself, made perfect through suffering, learned obedience by the things he suffered, no reputation, humbled himself, obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross, poured out as a drink offering, this Jesus promises, trouble and persecution will arise because of the word, a grain of wheat will die, it will produce much grain, the world will hate you, if they persecuted me, they will persecute you, you will be betrayed, put to death, hated by all for my name's sake, children will cause parents to be put to death, I did not come to bring peace but a sword, he who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me, he who finds his life will lose it, famines, pestilence, earthquakes, sorrows, tribulation, hated by all nations for my name's sake, many offended, betray one another, hate one another, but he who endures to the end shall be saved and the gospel shall be preached, woe to the church that is rich, Jesus says in my paraphrase, woe to the church that is full, woe to the church who laughs now, woe to the church when all men speak well of it, blessed are you poor, blessed are you who hunger, blessed are you who weep, blessed are you when men hate you and revile you and cast out the name of the assemblies of God as evil for the son of man's sake, rejoice in that day, leap for joy, for this is what happens to prophetic spirit-filled churches. Peter adds, rejoice to the extent that you partake in Christ's sufferings, let those who suffer according to the will of God commit their souls to him in doing good as to a faithful creator, and then Jesus again in paraphrase, when you have suffered all these things, say, we have only suffered what was our duty to suffer, for whoever loses his life will preserve it. A young Sudanese man that I discipled in Khartoum, Sudan, ended up discipling me. Full of vision, he stood before our team and exhorted them with fire in his eyes, we must charge the mountains and stand in the rivers with scorpions in our pockets. My team echoed back an amen, not sure at all what he meant, but somehow understanding that challenge and scorpions were in our mutual future. Bashir now recovers from the trauma and the torture of prison and watching men slaughtered before his eyes. Bashir now knows that it is through many tribulations we enter the kingdom of God. It would be less than honest, Tozer said, to promise every believer continual jubilee and less than realistic to expect it. As a child may cry out in pain even when sheltered in its mother's arms, so a Christian may sometimes know what it is to suffer even in the conscious presence of God. Those who joyfully suffered before us, they know what Bashir and Tozer are talking about. In 1869, Robert Bruce went to modern day Iran. He wrote of his efforts, I'm not reaping, I'm not sowing, I can hardly be said to be planting, but I am gathering stones from the field. The Bliss family came along and plowed, buried their children in Iran. The Haik family came along and sowed their own literal blood shed for Jesus. And today the fastest growing church per capita is amongst Iranians because the biblical and Christological precedent is not unmitigated growth and progress from victory to victory to victory. Thanks be to God who always leads us in his triumph from victory to cross to victory to cross to victory to cross to victory to cross. Jesus was favored and anointed and protected and blessed that he might march with flinted face to Golgotha. And servants are not greater than their masters. Why should our trajectory be any different? The Renaissance and the renewal of the assemblies of God lies only on the other side of Calvary. We must have our cross before we have our resurrection. And where do we get the audacity to think that any church experience unbroken success or peace until the return of our Lord? The glorious church is a suffering crucified church because something about suffering for Jesus' sake defeats demonic powers. When Jesus is so precious to us that his people willingly embrace trial and loss for him some force is unleashed in the spirit realm. Something divine is hurled against and splinters the gates of hell. When our missionaries suffer and when our missionaries die we are not unmoved. It wounds and crushes us all but we rejoice because their sacrifice is not in vain and offerings made by fire are sweet aromas to the Lord. We hunger then not for the ongoing unbroken outward success of our movement. Oh no, we want something much better than that. We long for our own demise not because we do not love the assemblies of God but because we love her dearly. We long to decrease that Jesus increase for God has chosen the weak and the foolish things of the world to shame the wise and the mighty that no church should glory in his presence. We hunger for our cross not because we want to die but because we long to live and because decisions that are based on self-preservation are indicators of those already dead and because our hope is in the resurrection and before we can be resurrected it's axiomatic that we suffer and die because death has no terror to a church that believes in resurrection. We as an organization have a collective destiny. It lies on the other side of our calvary. You might not believe me but mark this day. Our immediate future is one of suffering. Jesus bore his cross not ours. The assemblies of God still has a cross to bear and we will only reach our world if we abandon ourselves to this costly call and if we suffer well because suffering itself is not a silver bullet. Suffering makes some people bitter and falter. Only suffering for Jesus' sake, the Jesus way, builds the church. And I want to propose tonight as we come to the end of the centennial celebration that as a movement we have been favored, we have been allowed to grow, we have been protected for one purpose that we go with flinted face to our cross that we suffer for Jesus' sake and that we suffer well, that we lose our lands and our titles, that we lose our prestige, that we lose our wealth, that we lose our earthly influence, that we lose our lives, that we joyfully abandon these comforts, that we become less, that Jesus rise, that Jesus shines, that Jesus be glorified. These 100 blessed years have been years of preparation. His grace has made us strong and these years of favor and grooming and growth and protection have but one logical sequence. First our organizational calvary and only then our resurrection and glorification. We who believe in spirit-led births let us not tremble at spirit-empowered deaths. Christ loved the church enough to die for it. Does this church love Jesus enough to die for him? If the price of world evangelization is our own decline and demise, shall we not willingly, joyfully pay it? If the price of the glory of Jesus amongst all peoples is that we send and resend our children and our loved ones to suffer for his sake, to be crushed and killed by people hostile to the cross, shall we not willingly and joyfully pay it? And this price must be paid by us all. A loving pastor in rural Nebraska must stand with a faithful farmer from his flock and together commission their delicate daughter to go and live and die in the heart of the Arab world. If the price for the lifting of the cross over every ideology and falsehood is that we are crushed and derided and marginalized and abused and scorned and vilified, shall we not willingly, joyfully pay it? This price must be paid by us all. In the days to come, we must be willing to forfeit tax exemption and allowances and privilege and the respect of government and the media and society. We must be willing to risk it all, lose it all, lose our buildings, lose our dignity, lose our assets, lose our reserves. Can we not place ourselves and our churches on the altar for the sake of the world? For it will only be an abandoned declension into suffering and loss for Jesus' sake that realizes the evangelization of the world. Oh, we never can know what the Lord will bestow. Of the blessings for which we have prayed till our body and soul he doth fully control and our all on the altar is laid. Is our church on the altar of sacrifice laid? Our hearts, does the spirit control? We can only be blessed and have peace and sweet rest as we yield him our body. And soul. We will obey the Great Commission if we abide, if we return to the simplicity of just having Jesus. We will obey the Great Commission if we apostle, if we advance together to plant the church where the church doesn't exist. We will obey the Great Commission if we abandon, if we embrace suffering and persecution for Jesus' sake as our normal reality. If you are willing to commit yourself and those you influence to abide, to apostle, to abandon in a quiet, no music, reverent moment, I want you to evidence that before Jesus by coming forward to kneel and pray around these altars. Let us together come to this altar and say yes to Jesus for his mission and passion for all peoples of the world. Yes, Lord, we will abide. Yes, Lord, we will apostle. Yes, Lord, we will abandon. Would you come quietly, reverently, if you want to make this commitment to Jesus?