Welcome to the Redeemer Presbyterian Church podcast. Please enjoy our feature presentation. I want to take you back a few years. We showed up at a place, and as soon as we got there, we stacked up our suitcases. Make sure that I'm paying attention to the time. My father's a U.S. Congressman. He likes to tell stories, and I can start telling stories and lose a little bit of track of time here. We showed up at this new place, stacked up our suitcases, and a man came out of the crowd immediately with a one cut-off finger, and he stuck his finger up in my face, and breathed a vodka-soaked breath onto me and said, za, za, za, over and over again. And I said in very clear English, I don't speak Russian and I don't know what you're saying. And he leaned and pushed me even more, za, za, za, sticking his stubby finger up in my face. And so I looked around and a policeman was walking by. There were hundreds of people walking by on the sidewalk. I motioned the policeman to come help me with this guy. I've been in this new country for about, well, I've been on my own with the students that are with me for about two minutes, and already I was having a little conflict here. So I looked at the policeman to help me. No, no, he just waved his hand in disgust at me. Then an army man, you know, an army man, I thought a brother army man will help me. No, no, he waves in disgust at me. So I figured out I was on a new moral planet, and I was going to have to deal with Mr. Stubby Fingers myself. So he was still pushing me, and here I am, you know, trying to share the love of Jesus, and he's pushing me back into the suitcases, so I start shoving him a little bit. He's still, zah, zah, zah, leaning on me. I push him a little more, push him. Finally, I had to shove him about 10 feet, and then raise my fist like I was going to hit him, and he understood international sign language. And he, you know, disappeared into the maddening crowd. Wow. You can imagine already where this was. This was 1989, and the place was the Leningrad train station in Moscow, USSR, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. It was still a communist nation back then. And that set off a number of events. That whole trip we were taking to win people to cry, or to just make connections with people. in the Soviet Union and try to find people that wanted to grow in Christ. Actually, the trip ended up being relationally very fruitful. Every other aspect of it was absolute misery. There was no food in the stores and a number of other things. How did we end up there? Well, a few A few weeks later, earlier, we had received a postcard in the mail that said, would you like to take students to the Soviet Union to do evangelism? I read it out loud. The two students that were with me, I was in ministry at Texas A&M at the time, were David Tong and Peter Collins. We read this little article. They were training to fight the Russians, the Soviet Union, the Soviet troops. I had trained to fight the troops. But we had prayed for persecuted believers behind the Iron Curtain for years at that point in time. And so when we got this invitation, You couldn't live there. The Berlin Wall had not fallen. So we got the invitation, and all of our eyes got big. I said, do you want to go? And they immediately said yes. So then I said, no, no, we've got to be spiritual. We've got to pray about it. We prayed about 30 seconds and then said, it is the will of the Lord. And God opened the door. We had to go raise money real quick. And we ended up in that situation that I just shared with you. I told the cadets as we left Moscow on that trip, you wouldn't believe this, but there are actually people, navigators, who want to move to the Soviet Union to live there as missionaries. My famous words were, I could never do that. And I meant it. Now, maybe you don't know, but we've now lived there 22 years. So that was a little bit ironic that I said I could never do that. And I absolutely did mean it. From May of 1989 until Christmas Day of 89, I carried on what amounted to a soliloquy by Hamlet. You know how he talked to himself in that Shakespeare play. I never felt as though I was fighting with God for those few months. I knew that I could not endure the exquisite misery of that 10-day trip for any length of time. And again, I knew that God was not the kind of God that forced you to do things you just knew you couldn't do, right? God just doesn't do that, right? You know you can't do it. It's agony. He doesn't do that. So this is more or less what I was saying to myself. To be or not to be a missionary in a place that scares and degrades you. That is the question. Whether it is nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous Soviet fortune or take up arms against the sea of troubles. and by opposing in them by staying home in Texas. To stay was not to die nor sleep, just facing reality that others were more fit to face that awful place than I. To stay in America was to say we end the heartache and a thousand natural shocks that life in the Soviet Union is heir to. It is a consummation devoutly to be wished to stay, to sleep in peace in a normal bed, to sleep for chance to go on a short-term mission trip that is more short-term mission trips that are more palatable or move to a Spanish-speaking country because I was fluent in Spanish. Aye, there's the rub. For who would bear the whips and scorns of that brutal communist place? The oppressor's wrong, the proud Russian policemen's contumacy, the law's delay. The insolence of even post office workers and store clerks and spurns of taxi drivers. God calls no one I know to grunt and sweat under a weary life voluntarily. Ah, but then there is the dread of feeling that we have missed God's best for our lives when we face him after death or even in old age. Thus the desire for comfort doth make cowards of us all. Is that famous to you? Hopefully now it'll be famous. But again, I never felt as if I was fighting with God, because as we know, God does not call us to do things that are agonizingly painful, if someone else is better equipped to do it. You know, those people that are called to do things that are agonizingly painful. That special calling. You know, that calling. That anybody other than, you know, you have. Four months after our return from the Soviet Union, the Berlin Wall fell. That Christmas, on the day the last communist government fell, was Christmas Day, when Romania fell. And that very day, when that final revolution took place, I felt a very clear call of God for us to move there. We moved less than a year later, in October 1990, and became one of the first Westerners to live in the Soviet Union without government sponsorship since 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power. Because we were the first Westerners in Leningrad that anyone knew about, I was asked to share my religion at one of the USSR's last Communist Party meetings. You can imagine this, where they asked me to preach the Bible or whatever my religion was. They didn't care. They were kind of having some hard knocks. They were open to anything. And so I preached Revelation 320 to the Communist Party. Behold, I stand at the door and knock. It was as if Christ was saying, you thought a little atheism would scare me off, eh? I'm back. You're from California, you should understand that accent. Okay? By 1996, ten former Soviet college students had come to Christ in a Bible study in our living room, and four of them had married each other and had children. In 1997, God glad Kathy and me to the Presbyterian Church in America where I was ordained as a teaching elder in the Mississippi Valley Presbytery in 1998. In 1999, we came to St. Petersburg and turned that Navigator Fellowship into one of the former Soviet Union's first Presbyterian churches. In September of 99, we opened up the Reformed Seminary of St. Petersburg, now called the Biblical Theological Seminary. Since that time, through training of church planters, men that were already in the ministry but really had never been trained, we have 10 churches in a movement of reformed family integrated churches that span nine time zones in four countries. Every year we have more pastors of more churches amongst the 250 million Russian speakers in the world that want training with us. Some are church planting now in closed Muslim countries. One of the students just wrote us that he'd been arrested twice recently for preaching the gospel. And because this is being taped, I won't even say what country it is or what his name is. Right now, we're working on raising the money to train four new pastors. And it looks like in the next 10 years, we could easily have 10 to 30 churches throughout the former Soviet Union. I share all of this to say that looking back, Though things always seemed chaotic as we went, I see now that what has happened is a natural growth of the original kingdom DNA, I'll call it, that the navigators in Campus Crusade and Young Life bequeathed to me and Kathy from 1974 to 1989. The nature of the kingdom DNA is vividly displayed in Luke 13 that we just read. It explains why we have the ministry tree, I think, that we have now growing in the former USSR. Why do I use the term DNA? Maybe some of you all don't know how to say the actual word DNA stands for, so I'm gonna thrill your souls by saying deoxyribonucleic acid. That's what DNA is. Now you've learned something, you can go home and say you learned something today. You probably cannot repeat that. I can't repeat it without reading it. Why do I talk about kingdom DNA? Because DNA in general carries the genetic information of all chromosomes, and whatever that DNA is, is what that organism is going to be, right? And in biology, as far as I know, you still cannot implant it if it's not there at birth, right? You cannot implant DNA into an organism, well, into a living animal. Maybe you can in a plant, I don't know. I'm not a plant man. I majored in English literature. I know very little about plants. I learned something on the way here, though, from Jesse. So it's important because how every church and every individual is acting out, we're all living according to our spiritual and moral DNA. Whatever we think is important, that's what we're doing. And it might be wrong or right, but we're living according to our spiritual DNA. So today, what I'm talking about is kingdom DNA. And that kingdom DNA, I believe, is described in Luke 13. And then the description, other aspects of it, are in Luke 14. So we're actually going to go from Luke 13 to Luke 14 today. If you have Bibles, please get them out. And let's start looking at our passage. We're going to look at the nature of kingdom DNA. We're going to look at the carrier of kingdom DNA, and then we're going to look at overcoming the enemies of kingdom DNA. In the writing of Luke and Acts, Luke, of course, wrote both the Gospel of Luke and Acts under Paul's leadership, we see the word, the kingdom of God, used 59 times. The reason I think that the kingdom is an appropriate thing to talk about today is because we're talking about growth. Why, at least we started our conversation, why have things in the Soviet Union grown the way they have? And as I have been there so long, often I didn't have any idea if the thing was growing or not. It's only in the last few years that we see that, yes, indeed, the thing is growing because we had so many problems in two steps forward, three steps back along the way. But the kingdom of God is mentioned 59 times probably under Paul's leadership in the books of all of Paul's writing and Luke's writing. All the other apostles only use it 24 times. So it's a major theme in Paul's writing. The kingdom of God is technically in Luke 7 and Luke 16, the period of time when Christ sat on his throne. after he ascended and rose from the dead. Okay, so technically, if you want a technical determination, definition for what the kingdom of God is, it's the period after Christ arose from the dead, the period after Christ ascended, and this is told to us in Luke 7 and Luke 16, that the prophets were until John the Baptist, the kingdom of God was then and is now. What goes on during the kingdom period in history and why and how is what I'm calling kingdom DNA. The most picturesque portrayal is in Luke 13. And we're going to read again a small portion. Now, he was teaching in the synagogues on the Sabbath, and there was a woman who had a spirit of infirmity for 18 years. She was bent over and could not fully straighten herself. And when Jesus saw her, he called her and said to her, Woman, you are freed from your iniquity. I'm sorry, infirmity. And he laid hands upon her and immediately she was made straight and she praised God. Then we have the account of the pathetic conflict with the local leaders about healing this poor woman. And verse 18 tags the whole event as a kingdom event. And he said, therefore, what is the kingdom of God like? So his interaction with this woman was a kingdom of God interaction. What is the kingdom of God like? It is like Christ sovereignly invading a person, a society, a culture, a family, an institution, and loosing it or her or them from thralldom, slavery, to Satan. Christ, uninvited, infiltrates the synagogue and seeing the woman bent over with a crooked back, commanded her healing into existence and straightened her back by his touch as an act of God and God alone. Here and in the kingdom of God, the desire to save and the act of saving are all God's doing. Kingdom DNA can only be implanted in our lives if, like this woman, Jesus invades our lives with his love and power. In this passage, later on, we're told to repent. Well, we're told to strive to enter the narrow door. But if we do, we have to see in the context, it is all God who came to us in compassion and healed our crooked soul and spoke to us and said, man, woman, child, you're healed from your infirmity. Kingdom DNA Just like all true healing from God is a gift that cannot be earned or deserved. Look back on your life today. Do you feel that Christ invaded your life and that you were a passive recipient as this woman was? If not, then you cannot receive Kingdom DNA. Jesus said, you did not choose me, but I chose you. Why is this point so important? You see, if we do not believe in our own total inability to come to Christ, If we do not remember or cannot imagine the misery of our lives without Christ, then we will soon think God is giving us a raw deal. It's true. You don't think so? It's true. In God's eyes, you and I, without him, are morally and spiritually bent over and in constant pain. OK? We're just like that woman. If we were without Christ right now, we would look like that bent over woman. OK? She had 18 years, right? Wasn't it 18 years? Now try walking, try today, before you go to bed tonight, try to stay in this position, maybe twisted over and bent over for five minutes. You can imagine 18 years of that. So before God, that's what we look like. You know, we're in misery. And without Christ, if you don't remember it, Or if you were raised in a covenant home, you'll have to just sort of slowly experience your own sin, I guess, to know what misery is. But I remember it. I was all of 15, but I was in a political family. I knew what misery was. I knew what moral misery was. So before God, we look exactly like this woman. Seeing yourself as a true wretch without Christ is the first and fundamental strand of kingdom DNA. When you see when Christ continues his talk in Luke 14, we read this, and you can look at it in your scripture, Luke 14, 12-14. When you give a dinner or banquet, do not invite your friends, your brothers, your kinsmen, rich neighbors, lest they also invite you in return and you be repaid. But when you give a feast, invite the poor, the maimed, the maimed, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed because they cannot repay you. You will be repaid at the resurrection of the just. If you and I do not in our heart really believe that God, before God, we are these exact helpless people, the maimed, the lame, the blind, the poor, we will always think we're doing something special when we are called to do the work of the kingdom. When God calls us to help those that are now physically, socially, or culturally like those people in the parable, or in Jesus' phrasing there. But we in our heart of hearts know that we are them in God's eyes. If we do, we will deem it always a great privilege to go amongst our own kind. See, if we know that before God we are cripples, without Christ. And in our flesh, the flesh is still in us. We're still crippled by our flesh in many ways, right? Maybe you aren't, but I know I am. Then when God calls us to go to people that are hard for us to connect with or to even endure, maybe they smell bad. You know, maybe they breathe vodka on you, vodka breath on you. Maybe they look differently. Maybe they're from across the border. You know, maybe they speak a different language. They don't speak very good English. They don't speak English at all. We are those people before God. And then you say, OK, I can do it. It's my own. It's my own folks there. Right after Christ healed a woman, he says in Luke 13, one and all of his adversaries were put to shame and all the people rejoiced at the glorious things that were done by him. The kingdom of God is all about the glorious things that Christ has done and does and how shameful man is without Christ. If we are not about giving glory to Christ and taking it away from ourselves, we do not have Kingdom D and A in our souls. It's amazing to hear Paul write in 1 Timothy 1.15, he says, and I am the foremost of sinners. So that's toward the middle of his ministry there or toward the end, perhaps, 1 Timothy. And I am the foremost of sinners. Interesting, isn't it? Why didn't he say I was the foremost of sinners? Why did he say I am the foremost of sinners? I believe Paul stayed fresh and went joyful to his martyrdom because he understood that everything that God did for him was a good deal. You know, it's like Dave Ramsey says, how you doing Dave? Better than I deserve. So the first strand of kingdom DNA is being like Paul and I am the foremost of sinners. So I look back on our life of 22 years of some hard times in a brutal country, and I think probably the number one reason we have been able to endure it is we have, by God's grace, we have that perspective. No matter how bad it's gotten, and it's gotten bad, we've always gotten better than we deserved. And we are, Kathy and I are, and our children are the foremost of sinners. without Christ and before God in God's economy. If he was to look at us as we actually are and see our flesh, we are the foremost of sinners. So when people have a hard time reaching out, I've experienced this. It's, you know, I've been to churches and I've talked with people, I have a hard time, you know, reaching out and sharing the gospel. Well, it's because you don't think you're really a sinner. That's what it is. You'd like to, you know, well, I'm just busy. No, no, no, you're not just busy. You don't really think you're a sinner. So Jesus saving you is just not that big a deal. You know, I was a pretty good guy. Jesus is lucky he saved me. What a lucky day for him. That's exactly how people think. That's what our flesh says. Lucky day. True. I came a long way to tell you that. 6,000 miles. Yeah. So that's number one. That's number one, is the Kingdom DNA is understanding what Christ did to heal that woman and all that that involves. Secondly, we read in 1322, he went on his way through the towns and villages, teaching and journeying toward Jerusalem. And someone said to him, Lord, will those who are saved be few? And he said to them, strive to enter the narrow door, for many, I tell you, will seek to enter it and not be able. And once the householder has risen up and shut the door, you will begin to stand outside and knock at the door saying, Lord, open to us. And he will answer you, I do not know where you're from. Then you will begin to say, we ate and drank in your presence, you taught in our streets. But he will say, I tell you, I do not know where you come from. Depart from me, all you workers of iniquity. Kingdom DNA is exclusively for those who have submitted to the Lord's timing. You see what this passage is about? Matthew has a different take, a narrow gate of a city. This is a house. So this house that is opening and shutting. If you follow the flow of Luke, you go to Luke 24, and he was made known to them at the breaking of the bread. This is the church, okay? The house and the kingdom of God and the church are all mixed together in the scriptures. So this is talking about the church. It doesn't mean everybody will get into the hypocrite. There are hypocrites in the church, but he's talking about the kingdom of God being the house and the house being the church. And he's talking about timing. Timing. The people that got invited or were around Jesus and ate and drank with him in the streets, a lot of them didn't get to go in. Why? Well, it's not important now. It's not important now. So entering the kingdom of God in this context is submitting to the Lord's timing. You do things when he says to do them. And I have relatives that 20 or 30 years ago, 40 years ago, said, well, I'm going to sin now, and later on, I'm going to repent. And guess what? That later on never happens. He's a good guy, one of my close relatives. He's a good guy. He still doesn't believe in the divinity of Christ. He wanted to do things on his timetable. If you and I want to do things on our own timetable, then our relationship with God is still up in the air. That's what this parable is about. That's what it's about. If you think you have the right to dictate to God when you do things that he tells you to do, then your relationship with God is still up in the air. You say, well, I'm a Presbyterian. I've read the Westminster Confession of Faith. Yeah, so what? Jesus cares that you hadn't read the Westminster Confession of Faith? I mean, as if that's something in and of itself? Probably not. I hope there's some presbyterians in heaven though. So, it's all about God's timing. Now, we go to this word strive to enter the narrow gate. That word there is agonizomai. That sounds like a horrible word, doesn't it? It is the word to fight, so it says fight to enter They not get narrow gate, the narrow door, strive to enter the narrow door, agonize. That's actually what it says, agonize to enter the narrow door. So in scripture, it's very interesting that things are not really neat and tidy the way we would all like them to be. Because. For instance, in 1 Timothy 6, 12, this exact word is used, fight, agonizomai, the good fight, agon, from agony. Fight is agon, agon. Fight the good fight of the faith, agonize the good agony, take hold of eternal life to which you were called when you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses. You think Timothy did not have a saving experience with Jesus Christ at that point in his life? He was already a leader of the church. Had he not had a saving experience? Of course he had. You don't have to... It's not a trick question. Say, yes, in Russia we have interaction. Sorry, I'm always waiting for interaction. We make people have to interact. We're very demanding. Of course he had a saving experience, but he was still told to take hold of the eternal life. So he was saved and he was not saved at the same time. So Christ says, strive to enter the narrow door What the picture he's painting is, yes, you well, not so much here, but he's saying here it's a process. It's a process. Strive. How long? Your whole life. Strive to enter the narrow door your whole life. You can be Timothy and Paul still is going to tell you, fight the good fight of the faith, take hold of eternal life. How long? Your whole life. Your whole life. You keep striving your whole life. Well, I got saved when I was a Baptist, and I went forward when I was 16. So what? If you're in the kingdom of God, Jesus tells you that you're going to have to strive your whole life to enter the kingdom of God. So you're in, in a sense, and you're not in, in a sense. So, oh, my goodness. I'm sorry. John MacArthur, years ago, got in big trouble for preaching these exact things. It's called the gospel according to Jesus. He did. I had people tell me they shouldn't even allow his book to be sold. Isn't that interesting? So you might say, never bring this man back here. He says things Jesus said. Paul epitomizes these same thoughts in Acts 14.22. It is through much suffering that we must enter the kingdom of God. Paul didn't say you can pray a prayer and go forward when you're 16 years old and that's it. He said, it is through much suffering, you can look it up yourself, Acts 14, 22. It is through much suffering that we must enter the kingdom of God. The kingdom of God is a gift and it's the easiest thing to receive in scripture. The kingdom of God is a reward and it is the hardest and most precious thing to receive. It's both. Unless we accept both of these realities, we do not have Kingdom DNA within us. We have a spiritual and moral genetic disorder. Of course, I'm Reformed, so I believe completely in assurance of salvation. How do you mix all this is what Jesus said. It's a hard thing to do. You don't want to gloss over with our systematic theology what Jesus said. You know, Jesus might not like that. Kingdom DNA makes us constantly vigilant to growing the global kingdom in breadth and depth. In Acts 13, 15, what we see is the following scriptures and two analogies. And I'll just read the two analogies. He said, therefore, in verse 18, 13, 18, what is the kingdom of God like and what shall I compare it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his garden, and it grew and became a tree, and the birds of the air made nests in its branches. And he said again, to what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of flour till it all leavened. And then at the end of the passage he tells us And then at the end of the passage, he lets us know the scope of the growth of the kingdom. Verse 29, 1329, if you're looking at it. And men will come from east and west and from north and south and sit at table in the kingdom of God. Now, guess where that comes from? Men will come from east and west, north and south. Open your Bibles, if you would, to Genesis 28, 14. Genesis 28, 14. And this is where God spoke to Jacob and Jacob was going to Esau on the way coming back to the promised land. And the angel said to him, the Lord stood above it and said, I am the Lord, the God of Abraham, verse 13. your father and the God of Isaac the land which you lie I will give to you into your descendants and then verse 14 and your descendants shall be like the dust of the earth and you shall spread abroad to the west to the east to the north to the south and By you all by you and your descendants shall all the families of the earth bless themselves or be blessed so Jesus is actually referring back to Genesis and These four cardinal directions are repeated throughout Scripture. I So when Jesus says men will come from east and west, north and south to eat in the kingdom of God, he's referring to the fulfillment of the Abrahamic covenant. He's referring to the fact that Abraham was called to be a blessing to all nations. The interesting thing, too, of course, is he said many of you will men will come from there and you that are here in Israel will not eat, but the people that come from there will eat. So from the Scope, what Christ is saying, is the kingdom of God is like a mustard seed that is planted and then becomes huge. And it's like leaven inside dough that does its thing. What does it do? It rises? What does it do in there? It leavens. I need to look that up. It leavens and the dough changes nature, doesn't it? It becomes a completely different chemical composition once it's leavened, and it usually tastes better and it's softer, and especially has a little sweetening in it, it makes it even better. And then, where is the scope of this, these two kinds of growth? They're going to be from east and west, north and south. It's going to be every nation on the face of the earth. That was the Abrahamic covenant. Jesus is talking about being a blessing, growing in that way to and for all the nations of the world. So when Jesus said, what kingdom DNA is like, what is it like? It grows. So if you and I are in the kingdom of God, guess what we're going to be eaten up with? If the kingdom of God always grows like leaven, It always grows like a mustard seed. Then what are we going to be eaten up with? I'll wait for an answer. Growth. Very good. We have a theological giant here. That's right. Growth. We're going to be excited about it. If you're in the kingdom of God and the kingdom of God always grows, then you're going to be about growth. The scope of the growth is the whole world. You're going to be excited about it. Well, I like the kingdom of God, but I don't like missions. I don't like evangelism. I just like the kingdom of God. That's not possible. It's not possible. You can't be in the kingdom of God and not be leaven and leavening. You can't be in the kingdom of God and be the mustard tree, a cell or something or a branch, whatever you might be in the mustard tree. And you can't be in there and not be a part of the growth. You can't. That's your nature. If you and I are in the kingdom of God, we are excited about expanding the kingdom of God on the earth. And say, well, you know, I like the other kind of kingdom of God. It doesn't grow. OK, you can do a study on that. So. The kingdom of God, what is the nature of it? I'll go back. The nature of it is that it always grows, and so if you're in it, you're excited, you're part of that growth. The other thing, the kingdom of God, is it's for people who have submitted to the Lord's timing in their life. And the first part, of course, was the kingdom of God is for those who give glory to God for everything. It's a gift. The kingdom DNA is a gift. So it's a gift. It is something to be submitted to. We submit to God's timing in it. And at last, it's about growth, global growth. Now, the carriers of Kingdom DNA are what is actually covered in Luke chapter 14. We don't have enough time. to go in depth, but let's just look real quick at verse 16. And he said to him, a man once gave a great banquet and invited many. And at the time of the banquet, he sent his servant. And that's the word in Greek, doulos. He sent his doulos to say to those who had been invited, come for all is ready. So the servant, another time the doulos is mentioned. The slave, the house servant slave, came and reported this to his master. Then the householder in anger said to his servant, go out quickly to the streets and lanes of the city and bring in the poor, the maimed, the blind and the lame. And the servant, fourth time he said it, the servant said, sir, what you commanded has been done and still there is room. And the master said to the servant, go out to the highways and hedges and compel people to come in that my house may be filled. For I tell you, none of those who are invited shall taste my banquet. The definition of servant here of this word doulos is slave, but it's one who gives himself to another's will. One who gives himself up to another's will, those whose service is used by Christ in extending and advancing his cause among men, devoted to another to the disregard of one's own interests. The Luke 14 shifts from the nature of the kingdom to the carrier of the kingdom. If you carry the kingdom of God DNA in you, then it's interesting. There's only for people that are definitely in the kingdom of God, there's only one job. There's only one job, it's Luke 14, verse 16. It's a household servant. And guess what his one job is in this in this context? He has one job, it's to go out and invite others in. That's it. You're a household servant, and you have one job. It's to go and invite others in. This is very, very interesting for us to consider because in many of our circles, this is looked upon with great question. When I look back, though, and I think about how God has blessed us in the Soviet Union, I realize that this kingdom DNA that we have, God really put into our lives starting in 1974. When I think of how God is blessed and an event happened, and I'll close with this event, an event happened about four or five years ago. And this, I was teaching in the seminary, and one of the men from one of the republics that has been quite abused by the Russians, so a lot of the surrounding republics have been invaded by the Russians, and he was from one of those republics. His dad was in the Gulag. He was raised outside the Gulag, so it was a horrible, horrible life he'd had, a very difficult life. And he was skeptical. I was teaching on the need for children, for parents to take real responsibility for educating their kids. And I said, normally, and we have not done, almost 100% of our children in all of our churches are in public schools, okay? Because it's very difficult in their environment to live, period. And secondly, it's very difficult for them to figure out how to get out of public schools, because they're very controlling. So I was talking about the need, when possible, and when God enables you to do it, to get out of the public schools. He was very skeptical, and I thought, well, I can share with this man, I can share with him about the authority I have and so forth. But the reality was, I didn't have much relationship with this guy, so what authority did I have? I'm just a professor or the president of the seminary. But for him, I had no authority. During the break, I thought, okay, I'll share differently. I'll go kind of more Paul's route in 2 Corinthians 11. Paul has this list of things that he'd gone through to serve Christ. So, we come back and I said, you know, you don't have to take my word. You know, we've raised six kids in the former Soviet Union, in the Soviet Union, and they're all walking with the Lord, and they all have ministries of their own in some form or fashion now. You don't have to take my word for what I'm teaching here. But I just want you to know what we've been through. And this guy didn't know me very well. So I said, you know, we came to the Soviet Union with our three kids and we had three more later. There was no food in the stores. And at the last minute, we packed beans and rice and tuna fish. So for six months, we didn't know there weren't going to be food in the stores. We just happened to pack that at the last minute. So for six months, we had beans and rice and tuna fish. And I said, when Kathy was nine months pregnant with one of our children, she pulled over in front of some mafia and bothered them. And they ended up on a medium speed chase through downtown St. Petersburg. They jumped out of the car when she stopped. beat the sides of the car in, and she thought they were going to try to kill her, about four big mafia men. I said, my son, John Mark, was coming back from kindergarten so he could learn Russian with my wife. The mafia came out and right next to them and shot a policeman dead, right next to him, and they ran home. I said, my son Graham, I was telling y'all's family about some of these escapades. My son Graham has been assaulted and attacked probably five times, but two times seriously by Russian soldiers. And I said, every time my wife went shopping for the first five years, she'd come back in tears because there were no foreigners there. And she couldn't, at least at first, she couldn't understand what they were saying. No matter how she counted the money, the ladies in the shop would scream at her. And she would come back in tears for five years. She's still not real happy that I made her go shopping by herself. So I was just sharing some of these things that we had experienced in those nine years. And he went from being skeptical, I turned around and I looked at him and he had tears in his eyes. And he said, if we, my wife and I had gone through similar events like that, he said, I would have left the mission field years ago. And so it's interesting, this last parable I just read you says, go out quickly. And he became a teachable man at that point in time. That's the point of the story. OK, all of a sudden he became teachable because of that. This last parable I just read you says, go, the house servant is to go out quickly. And I didn't really know what was going on at the time, but now looking back on it, The fact that we got there in 1990 meant that we got to meet some of the best people. We got there first and some of our converts are still to this day the most faithful and fruitful servants of Christ in the whole former Soviet Union, a place that had 350 million people. Some of the best. And because they were with each other, married each other, had kids, that group of people formed our church. That church helped form the seminary. That seminary gave credibility when other pastors came in. And so being there in 1990 to 1995 is what is still giving us credibility and traction and influence in our ministry now that's spreading out across nine time zones and in four countries. We actually have our fifth country. We have men from Georgia. that want to come and learn and they speak Russian. So I realized then when he says go out quickly that the house servant has to go out quickly into the streets that God wants to train us and most of the time we don't even know we don't know something big is going to happen. He just says go out quickly and invite people in and you go out quickly and you invite people in. So I had no idea from 1990 to let's say 2005 what God was doing. Seemed like it was many times it was that we were having a problem growing at all. Now looking back on it, I see that what he was doing was he was getting us to grow like the leaven. He was getting us to grow like the mustard seed. And it was mostly painful and it was mostly chaotic. I couldn't tell what it was, but he had trained Kathy and I through the Navigators and through Campus Crusade to be quick. To obey him quickly. He had trained us, as the other parable said, when the Pharisee gave a banquet, he said, when you give a banquet, don't invite those that can invite you back. Invite people that can't invite you back. So when we got there, we were already prepared. We were used to using our home. We probably had 200 non-Christians come through our living room. And of those 200, 10 of them came to Christ. And they're now the leaders, some of the moral leaders of the whole church of the Soviet Union. If we had stalled, if we had been cautious, if we had been careful, if we had been rational in some ways, you know, if we tried to make sense of it all, why do we need to get there now? Why do we need to be the very first? Then we wouldn't have half the fruit we now have. So in closing, The reason that we have that was in 1979 we basically prayed a prayer that said this, Lord you said go and make disciples of all nations and therefore all people on the face of the earth that believe in you have to be willing to go anywhere on the face of the earth. That was a message to me in 1979 by the Nabs. They said go out and pray. So I went out and prayed. And I honestly believe it's because of that prayer that I'm I'm standing here before you today and that we ended up serving and living 22 years in the Soviet Union. And even though I saw the agony in front of me, it was like, OK, God, yeah, you're not you're not calling me to do things I can't do. But, Lord, I'm not willing, but I'm willing to be made willing. I'm not willing, but I'm willing to be made willing to serve Christ there, it is going to take sometimes agony. But if we will pray the prayer, Lord, we are willing. I am willing to go anywhere for you on the face of the earth. I am willing to face agony for you on the face anywhere on the face of the earth and do any ministry and live any lifestyle you call me to live. And Lord, you know, in my flesh, I cannot do it, and that's exactly what I told God. I cannot do it, but I'm willing to be made willing. I'm recruitable. Just keep recruiting me. I'm recruitable. You know, my life is on the altar. Keep recruiting me. And that's what God did. So I would challenge you all before you go to bed tonight to do just what the navigators asked us to do and that is to go out by yourself somewhere not too far if you're a child. Don't run off and say to God Lord I'm willing to be made willing to go anywhere and do anything for you on the face of the earth so that Through us, men will come from East and West, North and South, and eat bread in the Kingdom of God. This has been a presentation of Redeemer Presbyterian Church. For more resources and information, please stop by our website at visitredeemer.org. All material here within, unless otherwise noted. Copyright, Redeemer Presbyterian Church, Elk Grove, California. Music furnished by Nathan Clark George. Available at NathanClarkGeorge.com