Burns knew that that one way to get the comedic juices flowing was to ask Gracie about her brother, George. Gracie was a master of weaving dizzyingly tall tales about her brother who was actually a reserved and quiet accountant for an oil company. Burns hit on the idea of starting a search for George, as if he were missing. It became a running gag on their show. It even carried over to other shows. Gracie would suddenly appear on another program and explain that she was looking for her missing brother George. People never knew when Gracie would pop up in the middle of another show’s story line. “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” became wildly popular.

But there was an unfortunate side effect. George Allen Jr,, Gracie’s brother, wasn’t in on the joke. He was a very private man, not used to publicity. Suddenly his sisters gag yanked him out of obscurity and made him the center of national attention. He was so uncomfortable that at one time he actually did disappear for awhile – causing a repentant Gracie to try to quell the publicity. Finally George Allen came out of hiding and resumed his life as an accountant. But he remained the butt of jokes for a long time afterwards.

You can certainly feel sorry for George. He hadn’t been lost and resented being found.

But there are others who are lost and who do need to be found. They may not know that. Ignorance of your need is part of being lost. But God knows it.

Life is preparation for eternity. You're going to do four things in heaven forever. And God wants you to practice these here on earth.

Now, we have looked at what they are. The first is worship, to know and love God. The second is to fellowship, to learn to love each other. The third is discipleship, to learn to become like Christ. And the fourth is service, to learn to use my abilities for God in serving Him.

Now, once you've got those four down, you come to the fifth purpose. This is the only purpose you can only do on earth. You were made for a mission.

In John 17, verse 18, Jesus said to the Father about His disciples, "In the same way that you gave Me a mission in the world, I give them a mission in the world." Today we're going to look at the mission that we share with every believer. In 2 Corinthians 5:20 Paul writes that “God has reconciled us to Himself and has called us into the ministry of reconciliation.

My fifth purpose is to share the Good News. Once I know that God is in control, once I know that God made me to love me, once I know that my life isn't an accident, that life has a purpose, God expects me to share that with other people. Everything we've been talking about for the last 40 days, God says, “Once you understand it, I want you to pass it on to other people. I want you to share the Good News.”

Now, there's a word for this, Like all these other words we’ve looked at every week, it is often misunderstood. It is the word "evangelism.”

Now one thing many Christians and most non-Christians have in common is that they don’t like that word. It makes them think of guys with really big hair who shout real loud on TV and say: "Send me your money!" But that's not what evangelism is at all, or an evangelist. Evangel is just the Greek word for “good news.” That's all it means. It means good news. And so the Bible says that once I know the Good News, God wants me to pass it on.

Now, where am I supposed to share it? Well, let's look at Acts 1:8. Jesus said to His disciples, "You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth."

Now, when Jesus told this to his followers they were in Jerusalem. So here's the point. He is saying, first, I want you to start at home. I want you to start with the people closest to you, right there in your own city, your own community. Then He says I want you to go to Judea and Samaria. That's like the county next door. The Samaritans are different culturally and different racially. So He said, “I want you to go to people nearby, but they are different from you.” Then He says, “I want you to go to the ends of the earth. I want you to go reach everybody else.”

Now, first I want you to notice that Jesus doesn't say, “You will be my defense attorney.” He doesn't say, “You will be my prosecutor.” He didn't say, “You will be my salesman.” You don't have to defend God. You don't have to be a salesman for God. All God wants you to do is be a witness.

What is a witness? A witness is somebody who just tells what they have seen. I saw this, and then I saw this; and this is what happened. And a witness tells what happened to them. You see, you are the expert on your life. Nobody can be a better witness on your life than you. Nobody can be a better witness of what God has done in your life than you, because you are the authority on your life, not some pastor, not some priest, not anybody else.

So God says, “I just want you to tell other people what's happened to you, what's happened in your life.” And He says, “I want you to go all over; the people close to you, the people who are near, but different, and then to everybody else.

Why does He say this? Because we go back to what we said the second week, God is building a family. God is building a family of people who love and trust Him, that are going to spend eternity with Him.

And that, my friends, is the whole point of history. The whole point of history is God is building a family that's going to live with Him forever and love Him. And so God says I want family members from every nation. I want them from all over. That’s why we are going back to Kenya this summer. And one day all believers are going to be gathered together in heaven.

This is not Mission Impossible. This is Mission Inevitable. It is going to happen. It has been God's plan all along. That is what Paul means in Ephesians 3:11 where he writes of “God's plan for all of history which He carried out through Christ Jesus, our Lord."

Now here's the amazing part: God has chosen us to complete the mission. The mission that Jesus Christ started when He came to earth, He says, “I want you guys to finish it.” Now, that's kind of a backhanded compliment, if you think about it. God puts the future of His plan in our hands.

I heard about this story. God is in heaven and an angel comes up and God says, "My plan is to give the Good News to my children on earth and ask them to share it." And the angel says, "What if they don't? What is plan B?" And God says, "There is no plan B."

We're it. Being on a mission is the greatest privilege we're ever given. We are in on making history. That's what we're going to talk about today.

So how do you become a history maker? How do you get on God's agenda and how do you let God use you and bless you so that you can be completing your mission?

Well, you do three things. First, to complete my God-given mission, I must share with those in my world. That's the starting point.

There's a guy who Jesus healed. And after Jesus healed him, he wanted to travel with Jesus and Jesus said, "No, I don't want you to do that." In Luke 8, He said this, "’Go back home and tell people how much God has done for you.’ So that man went all over town telling how much Jesus had done for him. Jesus says the same thing to you.

You know where your mission starts? Right at home, starts in your own neighborhood, in your own community. It says he went all over town. That's what God wants you to do. He wants you to go to your friends, your family, your coworkers, your neighbors, anybody who crosses your path. God says, "I want you to share the Good News with the people first in your Jerusalem, with the people in your home.”

When I was in college, people from Campus Crusade for Christ came to our campus to recruit students to take part in beach evangelism over spring break. Their movie showed people partying on the beach when a guy comes up to them and says, “I’d like to talk with you about Jesus.” In the Crusade movie, the spring breakers immediately drop their Frisbees, their beers and their girls to talk about the Lord. We laughed. We knew it doesn’t work that way.

But people are interested in spiritual issues. Every single poll and every single survey says that Americans are more interested in spiritual things now than they were ten years ago. Not less, but more interested in spiritual issues. Gallup did a survey and discovered that 65 million Americans have no church home, but 34 million of them said they would attend if somebody would just invite them. 34 million are just waiting for an invitation! Another Gallup poll said teens would rather talk about God than sex, drugs or music. What teens is he talking to? But that's what he found out in his survey, that they are interested in talking about God. You see, opportunities to share the Good News really are all around you. They are staring you in the face every single day. You just have to be ready for them.

That is why I personally pray three prayers. I pray first that God will give me opportunities to share the good news – that he’ll open the doors. I pray second that God will give me the eyes to recognize the doors He opens. I pray third that God will give me the guts to make use of the opportunities He gives me.

Every once in a great while someone says to me, “Dave, isn't our church big enough?” And I want to say, “It got big enough about five years ago.” But we don't grow for our benefit. We grow because everybody needs Jesus. The wrong question is, “How big should we get?” The right question is, “Should anybody be left behind?” The answer is no! The church that doesn't want to grow and reach out is basically saying to the world, “You can go to hell.” That's what they are saying. And when you don't ever share your faith, you are saying to the world, “You can go to hell. I’m in. Best of luck to you.”

If you want God's blessing on your life, you must care about what God cares about most. And you know what God cares about more than anything else? People. The people, your friends and neighbors and co-workers and loved ones and relatives who don't know Jesus. We have the best news in the world. We have to share it.

Now, “You were made for a mission” is the fifth purpose of your life. First, I must share with those in my world. But that's not enough. It is not enough to just care about the people who are around you. Number two, I must dare to reach beyond my world. Love demands I move beyond my comfort zone to people with different background, different education, different language, different economics. You see, our mission has such eternal consequences that we must be willing to risk anything to get the message out.

If I had the cure for cancer, believe me, I'd be shouting it on the street. It would be criminal to keep it a secret.

But I have something even more important than that, the way to eternal life. Somebody cared enough to tell me, I've got to be caring enough to tell others. Paul says this in I Corinthians 9: "Whatever each person is like, I try to find common ground with him so that he will let me tell him about Christ and let Christ save him." In other words, I just don't hang out with people like me. Christians are called to build bridges, not walls.

One day Fulton Sheen, the famous Catholic bishop, was in a leper colony over in Africa. He was repulsed by these open cancerous, cankerous sores on the bodies of everybody laying there in the dirt. He walked by one man laying there. He not only had leprosy, but he had a bunch of other skin diseases too, and wounds – open, pussy wounds on his legs. And as Fulton Sheen leaned over to talk to him, the cross that he was wearing on a chain around his neck broke. The chain broke and the cross fell into that open wound. He said, “You know, for a minute I was just repulsed. I wanted to just kind of step back. And then all of a sudden I was filled. I was overcome for this love for this person who had nothing.” He said, “I reached into the sore and I took up the cross.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is what Christianity is all about. It is about picking up the cross and healing broken, messed up lives. That's what it is all about.

Its also hard. We don’t tend to like people who are too obvious about their lostness. We’d rather work at our Jerusalem level that in the uttermost parts of the earth. People who are at our “uttermost parts,” even the ones in our own community, look different from us. They talk different from us. They may even smell different from us. And they can sure get their life in a mess -- family problems like you can’t believe and dangerous dependencies. They have a tendency to be ruled by emotions rather than by good sense. That’s one reason they are lost.

In short, they are not our kind of people. And that is why we avoid them – or would rather avoid them. We’d rather focus on winning people like us. After all, they have their problems too. And we can think of plenty of reasons to stay in our Jerusalem and focus on our own kind of people.

But God says, “Go!” God expects us to make the first move. In fact, over and over again God says it in one word: "Go." I want you to go. You can't spell “God” without “go.” You can't spell “Good News” without “go.” You can't spell “gospel” without “go.” You have to go!

The whole business of Christianity is healing hurts and helping people. It's love. Now, I’m not going to kid you. If you get involved in your mission in the world, it is going to cost you. It will break your heart. It is going to break you out of self-centeredness and comfortable things, and it is going to cost you time and energy and effort and money and maybe even your privacy sometimes; but God has promised eternal rewards.

Is anybody going to be in heaven because of you? When you get to heaven, is anybody going to say thank you, thank you for telling me the Good News? You knew it and you didn't keep it a secret. You passed it on. Here's the test to know if you have completed your mission or not. Take two fingers and place them on your wrist. Do you have a pulse? Are you still alive? If you're still alive, your mission is not completed. So as we close, you’ve got four possible responses. You can say like Moses, “Who me?” Or you can say like Jonah, "Not me." Or you can say it like Habakkuk, "Why me?" Or you can say like Isaiah, "Send me."

You have heard me say this many times. The most dangerous prayer you can pray is "God use me." I dare you to say it. Do you have enough courage to say, "God use my life"? And then watch what happens! Little becomes much when you put it in the Master's hand.