Ordinary People, Extraordinary Grace

[music]

Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His Kingdom.

[music]

 

0:00:21.6 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved. Welcome to Grace at the Fray. Today’s episode is a celebration of missionaries and the missionary endeavor and the way the Lord does extraordinary things in His Kingdom through and with ordinary people. Ordinary people who are just enchanted by the beauty of Jesus. So now, whenever I think about the idea of an ordinary life, the famous Talking Heads song ‘Once in a Lifetime’ immediately gets stuck in my head. You may find yourself living in a shotgun shack, and you may find yourself in another part of the world. And you may find yourself behind the wheel of a large automobile. And you may find yourself in a beautiful house with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, “Well, how did I get here?” Letting the days go by, letting the water hold me down. Letting the days go by, water flowing underground. Into the blue again, after the money’s gone. Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was. Are you at risk of letting the days go by? Today, my guest Iain Duguid returns to the podcast to talk about the sequel in his series on the book of Acts. It’s called “Bringing the Gospel to the Nations”, and it’s a fantastic survey of Acts 9 through 18 that I found very edifying, and I know that you will too. These Bible stories of just ordinary people who can’t help themselves but proclaim the death and resurrection of Jesus. So I’ll leave a link in the show notes for this book as well as his first in this series. And you know what? I’ll even throw in a link to his country music devotional as well. You’ll see. I encourage you to check out the show notes not just for these books by Iain, but also to listen to the first interview that I did with him back in season six. It’s another fantastic conversation. And you can be a huge help to this podcast if you leave a rating on your podcast app, subscribe to our YouTube channel, share this episode with a friend, doing all of those things. But today, if you’re afraid that your mundane life is merely letting the days go by, same as it ever was kind of life, this episode is for you. And if you find yourself comfortable in your ordinary life and the last thing that you want is for God to shake things up, I want you to listen really closely to this episode because I don’t want you to miss out on the Holy Spirit’s invitation to do extraordinary things in your ordinary life, all as you become more enchanted by the beauty of Jesus. So join me with Iain Duguid as we hang out in Acts 9 through 18 and explore the ordinary lives lived within the extraordinary grace of God.

 

[music]

 

0:03:12.4 Jim Lovelady: Iain Duguid, welcome back to Grace at the Fray. It’s great to have you back, man.

 

0:03:16.2 Iain Duguid: It’s great to be here.

 

0:03:17.1 Jim Lovelady: When you emailed me and you were like, “Hey, the sequel to my book is out,” and I was like, “You had me at hello.” Not just the sequel, just come on over. Come on over anytime. I love just listening to you talk.

 

0:03:30.2 Iain Duguid: It’s fun to chat.

 

0:03:30.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. So Acts 9 through 18, you sent me over your book and it’s called “Bringing the Gospel to the Nations”. And I was like, “Well, that’s what Serge is all about.” So this is very fitting. And I’ve been reading through your book and it’s been a lot of fun. Every morning it’s kind of like Iain preaches a sermon to me and it’s just been really good to jump into, delve into the nooks and crannies of the book of Acts because I forget a journey from one town to another was like a 45-day journey. Those little details that you put in there, I’m like, “Hmm.” It was a mob, it was the Thessalonians who want to go stir up trouble in Berea.

 

0:04:12.7 Iain Duguid: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:04:13.3 Jim Lovelady: Where was it?

 

0:04:13.9 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So they travel all that way just to be a pain in the neck.

 

0:04:17.6 Jim Lovelady: How do you stay riled up for a 45-day journey?

 

0:04:21.0 Iain Duguid: Well, I know some Christians who’ll do that too. But yeah, you’ve gotta be pretty upset about something to travel that distance in order to mess up somebody else’s ministry.

 

0:04:33.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. Those little details have just been really fun. So yeah, the book is these, you’re getting into the nooks and crannies of the Book of Acts, and it’s kind of building this tapestry, this beautiful thing that is like, oh, the Book of Acts is about all these missionaries who just went out and shared the gospel wherever the Lord told them to. So I want to hear you talk about some of the big picture of what missions and the missionary endeavor looks like, has looked like from the Book of Acts and from the Bible, but also even in modern society, the way we think of missions now. We are currently, on filming this, it’s Launch Week. So we have missionaries here in the home office who are spending the next three days just some last-minute prep before they head out. So we call it Launch Week, and it’s kind of like, let’s celebrate you, let’s prep you for a few more things, let’s remind you that God loves you more than you can ever imagine and that you are more broken than you could ever imagine and that the Kingdom is moving forward. Don’t forget as you head out. So that’s happening right now. And so it’s very apropos that we’re talking about the missionary endeavor. But first, I want to talk about your love of country music.

 

0:05:47.7 Iain Duguid: Well, what’s not to love about country music?

 

0:05:49.4 Jim Lovelady: Well, I don’t know, we could argue. You love ’90s… Okay, so your son-in-law, my friend Clint, I texted him and I was like, “Hey man, give me some of the inside scoop.” And so that was one of the ones. ’90s, so how did you become a lover of country music?

 

0:06:04.7 Iain Duguid: Well, we lived in Mississippi for a year.

 

0:06:07.3 Jim Lovelady: All it took was a year.

 

0:06:08.4 Iain Duguid: Yeah. Well, every other radio station is a country music station. And so as you go down the dial, as it used to be, you can’t avoid listening to something. And as soon as I started listening to it, I realized these are songs that tell real-life stories about sin, about brokenness, about sorrow, about joy, and sometimes even about the gospel. I mean, sometimes explicitly, sometimes implicitly. Faith Hill, ‘There Will Come a Day’.

 

0:06:36.3 Jim Lovelady: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah.

 

0:06:38.6 Iain Duguid: That song is beautifully eschatological, recognizing that this world is broken and sad and sin-sick, and yet the conviction, “there will come a day.” There’s a place beyond this that the Father has prepared for us and that will make sense out of all of our suffering and loss here. I don’t have a pop song that is remotely similar in terms of its topics.

 

0:07:05.2 Jim Lovelady: Very true. So true or false, you have a devotional, self-published on Amazon, devotional on country music?

 

0:07:13.2 Iain Duguid: I do. It’s called Me and God.

 

0:07:14.7 Jim Lovelady: I love it. Yes. Is it an ebook or like I can order it and it’ll be a physical book?

 

0:07:20.8 Iain Duguid: Yeah, it can be both. So it’s in both ebook and in physical form.

 

0:07:24.8 Jim Lovelady: Oh, that’s awesome. How much Johnny Cash is in there?

 

0:07:28.9 Iain Duguid: There’s actually not… I don’t think there’s a Johnny Cash song in there, which is a bit of an oversight.

 

0:07:35.7 Jim Lovelady: ‘The Man Comes Around’?

 

0:07:37.4 Iain Duguid: Right, yeah. There’s more, maybe for volume two.

 

0:07:39.8 Jim Lovelady: Alright, so he told me about the country music thing. He also told me about… Are you still breeding dogs?

 

0:07:47.1 Iain Duguid: Not anymore. We used to.

 

0:07:48.9 Jim Lovelady: How many dogs do you have, though?

 

0:07:50.1 Iain Duguid: We currently only have seven.

 

0:07:52.4 Jim Lovelady: Only?

 

0:07:53.0 Iain Duguid: Yeah. This is the remainder of our breeding stock. They’re Cavalier King Charles Spaniels.

 

0:07:56.2 Jim Lovelady: How big do those get?

 

0:07:57.2 Iain Duguid: They’re small, 20, 25 pounds. And they’re the most emotionally intelligent dogs.

 

0:08:02.0 Jim Lovelady: Really?

 

0:08:02.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah. They’re bred to cuddle, but also to notice your emotions. We were once watching a football game that was really exciting, and so the emotions in the room were going up and down, and the dogs were so confused because they weren’t sure, are we happy? Are we sad? Are we concerned? Yeah, and they’re couch potatoes. So they don’t need a lot of… They’re not like… My sister has a Sprollie, which is a cross between a Springer Spaniel and a Border Collie. So you take the two highest energy breeds and you mix them together, which is perfect for my sister. She’s retired, she lives in a village, goes for four-mile walks with her dog three times a day. That’s not the lifestyle that we wanted to live. So you take a Cavalier for a mile and a half and it will stop and say, “Can you carry me home now?”

 

0:08:47.1 Jim Lovelady: That is so funny. We have a 70-pound Australian Shepherd-poodle mix, Aussiedoodle. And it is a. They call it a Velcro dog and it’s super cuddly, but weighs 70 pounds.

 

0:08:59.8 Iain Duguid: Yeah.

 

0:09:00.0 Jim Lovelady: Couch potato, but weighs 70 pounds.

 

0:09:02.0 Iain Duguid: Yeah, 70 pounds on your lap is a bit heavy after a while.

 

0:09:04.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So my wife and my daughters have been complaining about how we need another dog that’s smaller. So maybe the Cavalier. What is it?

 

0:09:16.6 Iain Duguid: Cavalier King Charles Spaniel.

 

0:09:18.5 Jim Lovelady: King Charles Spaniel. Okay. All right, there was one other thing. What was it? Oh, I gotta look it up. He gave me all the secrets. All the secrets of Iain Duguid. You had a monkey for a pet?

 

0:09:29.1 Iain Duguid: We did, when we lived in Africa. So this was Romeo.

 

0:09:31.9 Jim Lovelady: His name is Romeo?

 

0:09:33.2 Iain Duguid: Romeo, yep. Was a Powder-nosed monkey. So a small monkey.

 

0:09:38.2 Jim Lovelady: Like how small?

 

0:09:39.0 Iain Duguid: So like this size. You should never get a secondhand monkey.

 

0:09:42.1 Jim Lovelady: Is that what it was?

 

0:09:45.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like getting a secondhand child, right?

 

0:09:47.5 Jim Lovelady: I thought you were going to say you should never get a monkey.

 

0:09:49.6 Iain Duguid: Well, that too, but they have to be trained like kids from birth.

 

0:09:54.3 Jim Lovelady: Okay.

 

0:09:54.5 Iain Duguid: Because if you think about how much trouble a dog can get into in two dimensions, right, you just have to put stuff on the counter and they can’t reach it, or put it in a jar. But if you have something with opposable thumbs…

 

0:10:08.1 Jim Lovelady: That’s right. He can do anything he wants.

 

0:10:10.3 Iain Duguid: He can do anything he wants. So this monkey, the missionaries who’d had him previously said, “He has never known anything bad in his life.” Which, going on how they raised their children, meant, you know this whole gentle parenting thing? Yeah, well, that was their gentle parenting style back in the 1980s. That was their parenting style and it was their monkey parenting style. And so this totally undisciplined monkey that we inherited.

 

0:10:37.6 Jim Lovelady: Trying to reason with it. “Hey, don’t you want to…”

 

0:10:40.7 Iain Duguid: Yeah.

 

0:10:40.8 Jim Lovelady: Oh, man.

 

0:10:42.4 Iain Duguid: So we had it on a run outside for a while, but then you’d come back and it would be tied in knots with the…

 

0:10:50.2 Jim Lovelady: Oh, poor little dude.

 

0:10:51.4 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So he didn’t like green beans. So when you fed him his food, he would go through it and just toss out all the green beans behind him.

 

0:10:58.5 Jim Lovelady: What an ideal pet.

 

0:11:00.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So they are very, very cute and they’ll come and sit on your shoulder. Of course, they have red dirt, African dirt, so you get covered in dirt. But they are fun. My wife grew up with a monkey, or her parents had a monkey when they were in Africa. He was really well trained.

 

0:11:17.8 Jim Lovelady: And that’s just, that’s the key.

 

0:11:19.3 Iain Duguid: That’s the key, just like with kids, right? If you train your kids, they’re a lot of fun to be around.

 

0:11:23.6 Jim Lovelady: Train up a child in the way it should go.

 

0:11:25.4 Iain Duguid: Train up a monkey, same thing, right.

 

0:11:29.0 Jim Lovelady: When I was in Kenya, I had friends that were like, “When you go over there, you better watch out for the monkeys.” And for half of my trip, I never saw a single monkey. I was there for two weeks. And then we went down to the Maasai Mara and our tour guide pulls up to the place that we were going to be spending the night. And I had a hoodie on that had the pouch right here. And I had a banana in my pouch that I had forgotten about. So like a snack for our four-hour drive, right? And so I have footage of this. I’m filming getting out of the car and then I look up, “Oh, there’s a monkey.” So I’m filming the monkey and it comes down off the tree and just comes right at me going for the banana. And it jumps, springs at the camera, and I had to kick it away. And so I start yelling at it. So that was my first monkey experience.

 

0:12:21.9 Iain Duguid: Yeah, in Sri Lanka, it was a hotel we stayed at where they were very clear you had to keep the balcony doors closed at all times because if a monkey would get come to the balcony, it would get into the room and then would create havoc.

 

0:12:35.9 Jim Lovelady: Oh my goodness. Yeah. Those opposable thumbs, man.

 

0:12:39.0 Iain Duguid: Yep, get you in trouble.

 

0:12:40.1 Jim Lovelady: That’s wild. All right, well, those are the fun secrets of Iain Duguid. It should be a regular segment because I know that there’s a lot. There’s a lot more. There’s plenty. Well, so, okay. I want to hear you talk about your book. I guess, kind of the main question besides, well, you had to write a sequel because your first book was only one through eight, chapters one through eight.

 

0:12:58.1 Iain Duguid: Right. And there’s a volume three that I’m working on currently to complete the set.

 

0:13:03.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So besides that, what is it about the book of Acts that has been, in writing about it, that’s been just really edifying for you?

 

0:13:12.7 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So as somebody who’s a multiple times church planter, Acts is so foundational. It addresses all the issues as a new church, as a small church, a beginning church that you want to address. And so it seems an obvious place to go. And so, yeah, in each of the places where we planted a church, I preached through Acts because it touches on all of those topics.

 

0:13:38.2 Jim Lovelady: As I was working through your book, it’s fun how every chapter that you’re writing is just following what’s happening. And so it is kind of all over the place, because these folks are just all over the place. They’re just doing, “This is where the Lord leads them and this is what happens next.” And they’re in prison and suddenly they’re not in prison, and here’s what’s happening next. And so how you were able to take every chapter and go, “And here’s how your life is like this as well. Here’s how our life in society today, in our culture today, here are some of the things that we can glean.” And how ultimately at the end of the day, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus is our only hope, and how you just land in on that, but from a different perspective because Acts is doing that, but from different perspectives every time. So that’s where my mornings lately have been really edified. So I appreciate that.

 

0:14:30.0 Iain Duguid: Yeah, the scriptures always bring us to the gospel, but always from a different perspective. And so every sermon should bring us the gospel, but not in the same way all the time, because every passage is different. Every passage has its own law, we might say, something that wants me to do, say, think differently, and therefore it has a different way in which Jesus has fulfilled that law in my place. And then recognizing the gospel, we come back to what reformers called the third use of the law, which is, if this is true, then my life should be different on Monday morning. And so how does this specific law inform the way that I interact with my wife, with my kids, with my coworkers, with my neighbors? And how does it shape my view of this world? And then we always come back to the gospel again because the reality is I’m not going to keep this law perfectly. And my hope doesn’t rest in how well I say, “Oh, now I’ve got it. Now I’m going to follow Jesus perfectly.” I think a lot about 1 Samuel 7, where the Israelites set up this stone of remembrance, Eben-Haezer, or Ebenezer, as we call it. And what they say is, this is how it’s typically translated, “Thus far the Lord has helped us.” That’s an intriguing thing to say, isn’t it?

 

0:15:49.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So far, so good.

 

0:15:51.2 Iain Duguid: So far, so good. Yeah. Or, “Thus far the Lord’s helped us and now we don’t need Him anymore,” right? Because what comes after 1 Samuel 7? Well, 1 Samuel 8, when Israel asks for a king like all the nations around them.

 

0:16:01.4 Jim Lovelady: “Hey, thanks for your help so far.”

 

0:16:03.3 Iain Duguid: 1 Samuel 7, everything’s worked perfectly. God has delivered His people. They raise a stone, “Thus far the Lord has helped us,” but now we need a king. And we don’t need you. And Samuel’s feeling hurt because he’s feeling rejected. And the Lord’s saying, “It’s not you they’ve rejected.”

 

0:16:21.8 Jim Lovelady: “It’s me.” Yeah.

 

0:16:21.9 Iain Duguid: “It’s me.” So, yeah, I think we so often are looking for ways in which we can be our own saviors and say to God, “Well, thanks. Thus far the Lord has saved me, now I’m fine, thanks.” Like a kid riding a bike, at first you have to hold the back and they wobble around all over the place, and then they’re good to go. And sometimes they think they’re good to go before they really are.

 

0:16:44.2 Jim Lovelady: Right. Right.

 

0:16:44.5 Iain Duguid: And as a parent, you say, “No, you’re not ready to go yet. I still need to hold on.”

 

0:16:49.6 Jim Lovelady: That’s one thing we’ll never grow out of with God. He’s probably more than just training wheels. But I get your analogy ’cause so often I’m like, well, maybe it’s not even as humble as to say, “So far you’ve done this.” It’s like, “Well, I’m glad I’m here.”

 

0:17:07.8 Iain Duguid: Yeah. Yeah. “Got this.”

 

0:17:11.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. “How did I get here? I don’t know. But I don’t know who it was that got me here by their grace, but I’ll take it from here,” hold my beer, Jesus.

 

0:17:23.6 Iain Duguid: Well, going back to country songs, “Jesus, Take the Wheel.” Right. As if He’s had nothing to do with things so far.

 

0:17:30.2 Jim Lovelady: That’s right. That’s right. After reading your book, my favorite missionary in Acts 9 through 18 is Barnabas.

 

0:17:40.1 Iain Duguid: Oh, isn’t he great? You want to pick a coworker, that’s my first pick.

 

0:17:46.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:17:46.6 Iain Duguid: Not Paul. Not John Mark. Not even Timothy.

 

0:17:51.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:17:51.6 Iain Duguid: But Barnabas is a good guy to have. If you’re going to be in jail with somebody, Barnabas would be the guy. He’s probably pitching the tune for you to sing the psalms and hymns at midnight.

 

0:18:01.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Oh, man.

 

0:18:03.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah, he’s such an… Well, his very name, right, son of encouragement, and he lives up to that, even when that means a knockdown, drag-out fight with Paul over whether to take John Mark with them on a second missionary journey.

 

0:18:18.1 Jim Lovelady: The whole aspect of Barney, and it’s his nickname. I love it.

 

0:18:23.4 Iain Duguid: “I love you, you love me, we’re all a great big family.” There’s a reason for that name for the dinosaur.

 

0:18:30.0 Jim Lovelady: I confess, when I was reading your book and every time it said Barnabas, I was thinking Barney, and then immediately I was thinking about a dinosaur who’s just a super encouraging dinosaur.

 

0:18:39.3 Iain Duguid: He is. He is. Yeah. It’d be interesting to know if there was any connection there.

 

0:18:44.1 Jim Lovelady: I wonder. Although, man, when that song gets stuck in my head, I need to flush that out with some good country music.

 

0:18:52.6 Iain Duguid: There you go.

 

0:18:53.7 Jim Lovelady: “All My Ex’s Live in Texas.” So Barnabas is doing this thing where he’s like, “Hey, I’m going to vouch for you, Paul. Oh, and hey, Paul, I’m vouching for John Mark.” And he just seems to be vouching for everybody. Like he’s the eternal optimist. “It’s going to be okay.”

 

0:19:13.0 Iain Duguid: He believes the best about you.

 

0:19:14.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. I want to be like that guy.

 

0:19:16.9 Iain Duguid: Now, that doesn’t mean he’s always right. I mean, when it comes to the fight over whether to take John Mark, you can see Paul’s side of the argument. “This guy bailed on us. There we were on a mission trip and he couldn’t hack the pace. He ran home to mom. We can’t risk that.” We’re on a mission from God. And this is why missions places often have a lot of tension, because we’re all on a mission from God.

 

0:19:43.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Well said.

 

0:19:44.9 Iain Duguid: And so we can’t afford to have somebody who’s not 100% committed. And talking about people you’d like to work with, Paul would be tough to work with. His standards are so high and he pushes himself hard, and you bet he pushes everybody around him hard, too. Not in a necessarily mean way, but he’s just got… he’s on a mission from God. It’s not even clear to me that if Barnabas and Paul had taken John Mark, if it would have worked out the same way. Suppose Barnabas and Paul had taken John Mark on that second trip. I don’t know that it would necessarily have worked out the same way that Barnabas and John Mark worked out. We don’t know much about that trip, but it seems perfectly plausible to me that Barnabas’ pace is a little slower. And that gives John Mark perhaps a little bit more room to grow into that, whereas Paul is able to take Silas off and do his thing. And the result in God’s sovereignty is two effective mission teams. But they’re the result of an absolute knockout fight between Paul and Barnabas in which, yeah, Paul is wrong ultimately, but John Mark does prove himself. We know that because he writes Mark’s gospel. And Paul sees that too, because in one of his letters he asks that John Mark would come to him because I found him useful in ministry. So Paul comes to see that in the end. And Barnabas has family motivations. John Mark is his cousin. We read that in Colossians. So there’s more going on to this simply than Barnabas being an encourager and Paul being a stickler for high standards.

 

0:21:25.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it’s more than just temperaments.

 

0:21:27.2 Iain Duguid: Right. But there is that. I think one of the things that challenges us is we constantly want to make Bible stories hero stories and to make the characters the good guys. And that on steroids with Paul and Peter, who are the two main apostles that we see in Acts. We want to make them the hero characters. But it’s in one of Paul’s last letters to Timothy that he calls himself the foremost of sinners.

 

0:21:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah.

 

0:21:58.6 Iain Duguid: And I don’t think we take that seriously enough. You think, “Oh, you’re just being modest, Paul.”

 

0:22:04.3 Jim Lovelady: You’re great.

 

0:22:05.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah, you’re great. You’re wonderful. But if he’s right in saying he’s the foremost of sinners, and I think we need to take him at his word there, that surely showed itself somewhere. And if you were imagining a place where that might show in somebody with Paul’s temperament, being hard to get along with when somebody doesn’t agree with you seems like the kind of place where that might show itself. And so I think it’s quite plausible that Paul is in the wrong here. And again, he’s in the wrong because he wants something that on one level is so good. He wants people committed to mission. If anyone is going to follow after me, Jesus said, let him take up his cross and follow me. And I think there’s a temptation for mission organizations to look for those Paul people. Attempt great things for God, expect great things from God, and that becomes your slogan. And maybe in the process, you then overlook some candidates who aren’t going to attempt great things for God or expect great things from God.

 

0:23:12.7 Jim Lovelady: But they’re going to be really good encouragers.

 

0:23:14.5 Iain Duguid: They might be really good encouragers. And they might ultimately have an important part to play, like John Mark. Again, when we think of the history of missions, the people who get books written about them are the Paul and Silas characters. Intriguingly, of course, even the book of Acts focuses on Paul and Silas and tells us nothing about what’s going on on the other mission team. From what we know later about John Mark, there must have been good things happening there. And God was up to good things, but it’s just not exciting enough to write about.

 

0:23:45.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. The humanity of all of it is just really glorious to me. Because even you pointed this out in your book that later Paul speaks very affirmatively of John Mark. And I was chuckling as I was reading that because I was like, yeah, but he never says, “I’m sorry.” He never gives a public… Well, we don’t have record of him giving… So there’s no public…

 

0:24:08.0 Iain Duguid: There may have been a point when they next met, maybe there was an opportunity for him to apologize.

 

0:24:13.6 Jim Lovelady: Right, right. We just don’t have that.

 

0:24:14.9 Iain Duguid: We don’t have that.

 

0:24:16.4 Jim Lovelady: So, but that’s… It’s almost like that’s perfect too, because it’s just messy. The whole thing is just so messy and loaded with humanity, mortality, weakness. And even the best of us, even the ones that we would go, “Oh man, he’s the best.” Sometimes they’re jerks. And, oh, okay.

 

0:24:36.8 Iain Duguid: Well, I think of Jim Elliot, one of those missionaries who was murdered by the Auca Indians. He would have been the college roommate from hell. They were at Wheaton and it’s Friday night and so you put your books down, you want to go out and socialize and go down to the roller skate rink or whatever. And he’s taking up wrestling to get his body in submission and he’s taking the train into Chicago so he can evangelize.

 

0:25:04.2 Jim Lovelady: Writing in his diary.

 

0:25:05.4 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So profoundly spiritual that, yeah, it’s tough to live with people like that.

 

0:25:12.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. And that the Bible would have room for that, that the book of Acts has room for that is just really encouraging for me, especially working at a missions agency. We’ve said it a couple times or hinted at it at least, that it’s a messy endeavor. It’s the most important thing. And so, of course there’s going to be conflict. And Paul isn’t being selfish, he’s being wise. And well, what do you do when two people are being wise?

 

0:25:39.3 Iain Duguid: Yeah. But I think it’s important to see you can fall off on both sides because in our cynical time, it’s easy for us to berate Paul and say, “You need to lighten up,” or say to Jim Elliot, “Calm down,” right? But that passion for the gospel is something that is really good, even if it’s difficult to work with. And then, yeah, then the flip side, there’s also places for Barnabas as well as for Paul, for the encourager. Probably once he separates from Paul, he’s not moving at quite the same pace that Paul did. But God has a plan and a purpose for that mission team, too, that’s right for the people that He’s called to do that. So the team is made up on a larger scale of a variety of different people with a variety of different gifts who God is using according to His own sovereign purposes.

 

[music]

 

0:26:38.9 Jim Lovelady: I’m going to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we here at the headquarters in Philadelphia are praying for each week. We meet on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pray, and this week we’re praying for our teams in the UK. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that You would bless these folks. Remind them of Your extravagant love for them as they find themselves struggling in what may seem to be just the ordinary and mundane challenges of ministry. But give them great joy in their work in Your Kingdom, and the pleasure of Your joy as they follow You. Give them wisdom and let Your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members and children, and with the people that they serve. Heal all sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, and restore to them the joy of Your salvation. And let Your Kingdom come and your will be done in these places, just as it is in Heaven. We pray in your name. Amen. Now back to the conversation. 

 

0:27:53.9 Jim Lovelady: So the book of Acts is all these stories about missionaries, the first missionaries of the church, sharing the good news of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. You had me when I opened your book. You had me at this paragraph in the preface. You said, “This book is dedicated to the many cross-cultural missionaries who have followed in the footsteps of Paul and Barnabas, in most cases without having a Luke to record their faithful labors for anyone to read. In particular, it’s dedicated to Sam and Pat Befus,”

 

0:28:23.6 Iain Duguid: Befus.

 

0:28:23.7 Jim Lovelady: “Befus, my wife’s parents, who spent over 20 years with the Pocket Testament League in Asia, Africa, and South America, introducing many around the world to the Savior that they loved so much. Thank you for your service.” In that moment when you mentioned their names, you were being Luke. And so I realized this podcast is me getting to be Luke. Like, I get to go around and tell stories of missionaries. I get to find ministers of the gospel and be like, “Hey, tell your story.” So that was super encouraging and very centering for me that these aren’t just fun conversations, but it’s like, no, no, there are beautiful gospel stories to be told. So, yeah, thanks for being on the podcast. Thanks for letting me be your Luke right now.

 

0:29:09.9 Iain Duguid: Well, and we see that in Acts. The spread of the gospel begins in Acts 8, so in the previous volume, with ordinary people being scattered by persecution. And they go wherever they go, they’re gossiping the gospel. And what’s interesting to me, particularly as a seminary professor, is that you don’t get the theological justification for this until chapter 10. In other words, the gospel goes out, and then the Lord reveals to Peter, “This is what I’m doing.” Which is, I think, a cautionary reminder to those of us who are so enamored with good theology that sometimes God is up to things even before people have figured out the good theology. And God can use people who, in this case, they’re not apostles, they’re not leaders in the church, they’re just ordinary christians who don’t know any better than to share the good news of Jesus with the people that they’re meeting. Now, it’s important that the theology does match what they’re doing, but we don’t always have to have our theology perfect before we go out on mission.

 

0:30:25.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. So often we’re building the plane as we’re flying it.

 

0:30:28.7 Iain Duguid: Right.

 

0:30:28.9 Jim Lovelady: But eventually the plane is going to get built, and we want to make sure that we’re using the right plane.

 

0:30:33.9 Iain Duguid: Right. It’s going to fly the right way up.

 

0:30:36.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Right. I mentioned earlier that this is Launch Week, and Marc Davis opened up Launch Week by saying something like, “Let’s just point out the obvious. Missions is weird. This is weird. Like, what you’re about to do is a strange thing.” And there was kind of like a room full of a sigh of relief. He even said something like, “You may find yourself right on the cusp of going, and while you’re about to go, experiencing more doubt about this Jesus endeavor than you’ve ever experienced in this moment. And, hey, welcome. We are people who are sent, and we are people who doubt, and we need grace.” So I want to hear you talk about the missionary endeavor. I want to hear you talk about, like, give me a pitch for the grandeur of the gospel and God’s plan for the world that leads guys like Paul and Barnabas and Silas and all these guys to do all these little adventures.

 

0:31:37.8 Iain Duguid: Yeah. Well, let’s start with the weirdness of missionaries, because I think that’s exactly right. In fact, I’ve heard that there are certain standardized psychological tests that people have noticed missionaries don’t score the way other people score.

 

0:31:51.2 Jim Lovelady: Oh, really?

 

0:31:51.5 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So, well, for example, one of the questions is, “Are you on a mission from God?” which is designed to pick out people…

 

0:31:59.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. This person’s crazy.

 

0:32:01.2 Iain Duguid: This person’s crazy, right? Well, yeah. Okay. Welcome to crazy world. But we experienced that in our time in Africa. There were a number of older missionaries. Often they’d gone to very conservative Bible schools and imbibed what we would often regard as quite a legalistic view of christianity. And yet people who we would think as weird and would not normally associate with socially here, and yet in many cases had been in a context there where they had loved people well for 20, 25, 30 years and just poured themselves into relationships with local people, local churches. And saw fruit from that. And so, again, it was a reminder to me that we can be very quick to write people off. And maybe even the oddness of some of these missionaries was part of God’s design for them to feel like Africa was their call.

 

0:33:08.3 Jim Lovelady: Right.

 

0:33:09.8 Iain Duguid: And certainly, in many cases when they went home for furlough or whatever, they didn’t feel like they fit in here. But God does use some very weird people. And of course, that’s so typical with the book of Acts, right? I mean, none weirder than Paul himself, right? I mean, when we read Acts 9, here is the persecutor of the Christians, and there he is on the road to Damascus, and he gets struck down and he’s blind. And you can imagine people hearing of this for the first time saying, “Yes! Finally, God’s going to break the teeth of the wicked. He’s going to stop Paul,” Saul, as he is at this point, “from being able to hurt us anymore.” And how do we know that? Well, because the Lord appears to Ananias and says, “Go and meet with Saul because he’s praying and I want to give him his sight back.” And Ananias is like, “What are you thinking?”

 

0:34:07.1 Jim Lovelady: “Wait, which guy? The guy that’s been killing us?”

 

0:34:09.9 Iain Duguid: Yeah. I mean, you gotta feel something pretty intensely to talk back to God. So you know that Ananias is really exercised by this. But that’s the instrument. The Lord says, “I’ve chosen him. I’m showing him what he’s going to suffer, but I’m going to use him to preach the gospel to kings.”

 

0:34:30.1 Jim Lovelady: The most unlikely.

 

0:34:31.6 Iain Duguid: The most unlikely of instruments. And why does God do that? So He gets all the glory. Right? So that people can’t look at that instrument and say, “Well, of course, obvious. He’s so talented, he’s so gifted. Of course people are going to follow him.”

 

0:34:48.3 Jim Lovelady: He got top scores on all the church planting assessment categories.

 

0:34:53.0 Iain Duguid: Right. Yeah, yeah. Of course he didn’t, right? The people in Jerusalem wanted nothing to do with him, right? Except for Barnabas. Barnabas was the one who came along and nudged people and said, “Remember that gospel thing? That means we have to love this guy as well.”

 

0:35:05.3 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Give this guy a chance.

 

0:35:06.4 Iain Duguid: And they say, “Okay, we’re going to love him, but does he have to stay here in Jerusalem? Maybe we can send him back to Tarsus and he can go do something good there for a while.”

 

0:35:14.4 Jim Lovelady: He was there for three years, right?

 

0:35:15.8 Iain Duguid: Yeah. And then Barnabas went looking for him to bring to Antioch. And I’m sure there were people in Antioch who were saying, “This guy’s an intellectual, right? He’s a rabbi. What’s he going to do here? Why do you want him? I mean, he’s that persecutor of the church.” I mean, that would have hung around Paul’s neck his whole life, right? But Barnabas, being Barnabas, said, “I think this guy has some gifts. I know he’s got some rough edges, but I think he’s got some gifts and it seems to me like God’s calling him to join us here in Antioch.” And of course that then becomes the foundation for really the beginning of the modern world missionary movement. It’s really only in Acts 13 in Antioch that you start to get deliberate cross-cultural evangelism. The theological foundation is laid in Peter’s vision in Acts 10, but we don’t see the Jerusalem church immediately saying, “Oh, we’ve gotta do something about this call to world evangelism, so let’s set aside people.” No, God goes to the church in Antioch and says, “This is the place.” Cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic, urban Antioch. “This is the place where I’ve given you five leaders. You don’t need five leaders. I’m going to take away two of them.” And the other three are thinking, “Oh no, what’s that going to do to my workload?” right? And particularly when you lose Paul and Barnabas.

 

0:36:41.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, don’t take them.

 

0:36:42.6 Iain Duguid: Yeah. Well, except they’re probably also saying, “Well, but don’t send me either.”

 

0:36:47.1 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

 

0:36:48.6 Iain Duguid: Maybe we’ll have to give up them. But that’s really the beginning of this cross-cultural world missionary journey that has continued on to this day and continues on from here. We may miss that fact and think that the missionary age is sort of finished.

 

0:37:03.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. Talk more about that.

 

0:37:06.2 Iain Duguid: Yeah. So from a western perspective, missions really started to pick up alongside exploration, and this would be both Catholic and Protestant missions often went alongside exploration, often with some challenging problems that went with that.

 

0:37:23.5 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

 

0:37:24.9 Iain Duguid: Are we here to explore, conquer, and civilize, or are we here to serve and share the gospel?

 

0:37:32.1 Jim Lovelady: Once again, super messy.

 

0:37:34.5 Iain Duguid: Right. But it hit its heights in the west in the late 19th, early 20th century, particularly British missionaries, and then a wave of American missionaries later on in the late 19th, early 20th century, up to perhaps the high point of the 1910 missionary conference in Edinburgh. From there the…

 

0:37:54.6 Jim Lovelady: You would say that’s the height?

 

0:37:56.2 Iain Duguid: I think, yeah, the high-water mark, I would say, perhaps. Because after that, the inroads of liberalism really start to take its toll as you get into 1910s, 1920s. But the reason I say we see things from a western perspective and so have kind of seen the numbers diminish since then, but on a global scale, the number of missionaries is still increasing. Particularly Korean missions is massive, in part because the Koreans know their own history. They’re a church that acknowledges and recognizes, “We owe our lives to missionaries who came here and in many cases gave their lives.” And in the Korean context, that’s within recorded memory. So 19th century is really when the gospel starts to come to Korea. And so people can name the Western missionary who came to their area and planted the first church there. And so I think that gives the Korean church a particularly missionary vision. But it’s also spreading in China. The church there, persecuted as it is, has a big vision for spreading the gospel. And of course, China itself is an enormous mission field, cross-cultural mission field in many cases. But then there are also Chinese speakers around the globe, and so that mission can go broader than that. In many countries, of course, the western missionary can stand out and people can be suspicious of the western missionary, whereas an Asian missionary sometimes can float under the radar a bit, is just perceived differently, and so has an opportunity to plant churches there in some ways in a different way from westerners. So, yeah, God’s work of bringing the gospel from Jerusalem to Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth, in one sense it’s done by the end of the book of Acts, right? It’s gone to Rome, the ends of the earth, which of course is a very humbling knock on Rome, right? Because it thinks of itself as the center of the world, it’s the ends of the earth. But there’s a sense in which Acts 29, if you like, is the continuing work of global missions as the gospel continues to go out to the ends of the earth. And when that task is done, Christ will return.

 

0:40:11.1 Jim Lovelady: One of my favorite Piper quotes, I think you quoted in your book, is “Missions exist because worship doesn’t.” And I’m a worship leader. I’ve heard Tim Keller say, when the Lord returns, there will be no more need for pastors, right? I’ll have to find another job. And we will all have some sort of vocation in Heaven that is beautiful and edifying and life-giving in… I’m saying these words, it’s like these words are silly when we’re talking about… There just aren’t words to describe what that’s going to be like. But I think about how, yeah, missions, missionaries will have to find a new job too. But I won’t. I’m going to strum my guitar.

 

0:40:49.9 Iain Duguid: But you’ll have competition from all those people who are happy amateurs right now.

 

0:40:54.1 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

 

0:40:55.2 Iain Duguid: But they will be so gifted.

 

0:40:56.9 Jim Lovelady: That’s right. That’s right. It’ll be one big choir. It’s going to be awesome. So yeah, missions exists now because worship doesn’t. And I think that that’s kind of a clue as to why the missionary endeavor continues on to the uttermost parts of the earth. I guess the argument that I want to hear you speak into is, well, why do we need missionaries now?

 

0:41:20.5 Iain Duguid: Right. Right. First let me pick up on that quote, “Missions exists because worship doesn’t.” We can flip it around and say missions exists because worship did. There in Acts 13, it’s while they were worshiping and fasting that the Lord said, “Set apart for me.”

 

0:41:38.3 Jim Lovelady: Oh, I love that.

 

0:41:40.0 Iain Duguid: So missions is born in worship as well as bringing worship. And I think that’s a very profound insight, right? Because for worship to happen, we need worshipers. And worshipers, by definition, are people who have new hearts given to them by God’s Spirit, those who are able to worship in spirit and in truth. Without the Spirit, you can’t do that. And so, yeah, that missionary vision of worship, again, it helps us to focus on what we need to focus on, right? Because there are all kinds of good things that we can do in this world. And as a missionary, those things are often very much in front of you. So medically, in many parts of the world, you put the average person from America down and they immediately have more medical understanding than many local people. Particularly if you have somebody who has some nursing background or any kind of medical background at all. And so it doesn’t take long before people start showing up with medical needs. And those may be very limited or they may be overwhelming, but still, you have more than they do. And so how do you not meet that need on some level? And so you can easily see how missions that often went to plant churches, alongside that, pretty quickly you develop a clinic, a hospital. There’s a long history of that in missions. And likewise in terms of education, you know more. And often, particularly in more rural areas, there are very limited resources. So you don’t have to know much in order to be a benefit to people. And so there are people who will come to you seeking help, seeking educational help. And these are good things. But it’s so easy for the good thing to take over from the best thing. And so again, historically, missions sometimes have got sidetracked to the point where all of their resources start to get poured into medical missions, educational missions, agricultural missions, aviation missions, each of which has their part to play, but only if they keep the main thing the main thing, which is, well, we’re here to share the gospel. Because if we don’t do medical missions, if we don’t do educational missions, if we don’t do aviation missions, somebody else may do that. The UN or some government agency or nonprofit may do that. But nobody else is going to share the gospel. And so if that’s going to happen, that’s going to have to be a priority for us.

 

0:44:26.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. And there seems to be a feedback loop as well. No one’s going to do that if no one’s going to be an aviator, or maybe there will be people that are aviators, no one’s going to be proclaiming the gospel. And if no one proclaims the gospel, the desire to go do good things with your ability to fly a plane is kind of just self-serving and you’re not going to want to die for that. And so they feed on one another.

 

0:44:58.0 Iain Duguid: But of course, the flip side of that is there’s nothing that gets missionaries in trouble more obviously than preaching the gospel. And certainly you see that in the book of Acts. If Paul had been content simply to go and help people, whether that was in terms of their medical state or here I got Luke, he’s a doctor. Let’s take Luke around and do some healing visits. Or if he’d stuck to miraculous healing. I mean, the apostles are doing miraculous healings too. If he’d stuck to that, that would not have got him into the kind of trouble he got into. The trouble he got into is because the gospel is…

 

0:45:39.5 Jim Lovelady: It’s turning the world upside down.

 

0:45:40.3 Iain Duguid: It’s turning the world upside down. So too for contemporary missionaries, I think sometimes it feels easier to go and help people and they’re more likely to be grateful. Whereas if the main thing we’re doing is preaching the gospel, then at some point we need to expect people to get offended because we’re telling you you’re a sinner, you can’t save yourself. Doesn’t matter how hard you try, doesn’t matter how good you are, it doesn’t matter how long a history your religion has, none of those things can save you. Because look at Cornelius, right? Cornelius, the Roman centurion in Acts 10, he’s a God-fearer.

 

0:46:18.9 Jim Lovelady: God-fearing man.

 

0:46:19.7 Iain Duguid: He’s well respected by the Jewish community. But the Lord says, “Peter, you gotta go tell him the gospel.” It’s not enough to be a God-fearer. It’s not enough to be an upstanding person to donate to Jewish causes. He needs the gospel. And if Cornelius needs the gospel, then how much more do the rest of us who don’t measure up to those high standards?

 

0:46:39.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Your exploration of that in this book is really fun. Like, he’s a God-fearing man. He’s great. Everyone loves him. Not good enough. Watch out. Yeah, it’s really good. All of these stories are fantastic and they seem to be kind of not just history stories of like, this is where we come from, but also, oh, our lives are kind of like this. Just significantly, very much like, oh, I’m like Cornelius and a great guy, but if you don’t have the gospel, you miss it all.

 

0:47:13.3 Iain Duguid: Yeah. And all of that requires the Spirit. It’s interesting to see these occasions when you have a kind of mini Pentecost. So you have it here. When the gospel comes to the Gentiles, Peter is going to have to go back and report this to people in Jerusalem. And you can see Peter going, they’re never going to believe this back home.

 

0:47:32.8 Jim Lovelady: What am I going to say?

 

0:47:33.7 Iain Duguid: What am I going to say? Right? But when the Spirit comes and Peter and those with him see that the Spirit has come down in an extension of Pentecost. Now Pentecost has gone from Jerusalem to Judea. Well, there it is. If the Spirit has come to these people, then they’re Christians like we are, which means that we can’t be adding additional things like circumcision and kosher food and all the things that up to 30 years ago or 10 years ago would have been required. That’s why Cornelius is just a God-fearer and not a Jew, because he hasn’t gone through with the whole circumcision thing and kosher eating and all the rest of it. I mean, there’s a reason why there were more women in the ancient world who were willing to convert than men.

 

0:48:22.2 Jim Lovelady: You want me to what?

 

0:48:23.7 Iain Duguid: Yeah, exactly. But what happens now is that that’s all finished. The particularity of being Jewish first is gone. It’s not because the church has replaced Israel. People sometimes think that that’s what Reformed people are saying. No, it’s that Jesus has fulfilled Israel. So in John 15, when Jesus describes Himself as the vine and you are the branches, He’s picking up on an Old Testament image for Israel. God has a vineyard, and He has a vine in Isaiah 5 that He’s been taking care of, and it’s only borne bitter fruit. That’s the problem with Israel. What we need is a new Israel, and it comes in the person of Jesus. He is the new Israel into whom even Jewish people need to be engrafted. We need to become branches in His vine. We’re not born branches, right? We become branches through faith in Christ. Well, if that’s true for Jewish people, then it can also be true for Gentiles as well, that they too need to be grafted into this true vine and thus become children of God and children of Abraham, to use Paul’s language in Romans 4. I mean, I think we miss the significance of that as Westerners because our ancestors really aren’t that significant to us. I mean, a few of them we know, right? Mom and dad, grandma, grandpa, but not really beyond that. There’s a few people, if you’re a son or daughter of the American Revolution, you can trace your way all back to the Mayflower, whatever. But most people, it doesn’t go back more than a generation or two. But in many parts of the world, your ancestors are everything.

 

0:50:04.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

 

0:50:05.0 Iain Duguid: That’s why ancestor veneration in various forms is such a huge deal in so much of the world, and why parents will disown their children when they become christians, because you’re cutting off our ancestors, so we’re going to cut you off. You can’t be part of the family if you don’t also show this veneration for the ancestors. But what Paul’s saying is that when you become a christian, you get a whole new set of ancestors. Now Abraham is my father, and all the way back. So now I’m engrafted not just as an individual into Christ, which is how westerners often think about it, but as fellow branches with other believers, Jews and Gentiles alike, into this one family of God that has these ancestors that stretch back spiritually to Abraham and Sarah, and through Christ, becoming part of this second Adam where Jews and Gentiles are incorporated together.

 

0:51:02.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, that’s so good. I know that you wrote this book for Christians, but you didn’t write this book for Christians to read it on their sofa like I have been every morning and to just put it down and be like, “Well, that was nice.”

 

0:51:16.8 Iain Duguid: Right.

 

0:51:17.2 Jim Lovelady: You wrote this because Christians are called to follow Jesus wherever the Spirit leads them on mission. We are on mission. And the mantra of Serge is gospel renewal leads us, propels us on mission, and being on mission drives us back to the gospel. And that’s kind of just always happening all at the same time. What would you say to the Christian who just finished reading your book? Hey, that’s me. What would you say to the folks who read your book, and how would you encourage them to take what they’ve learned and take what they’ve been meditating on and say, “Okay, well, maybe I’m not going to fly to another country, but I am going to go to the grocery store, and then after that I’m going to go pick up the kids, and after that I’m going to go do some work on this or that thing, or I’m going to start a business,” or whatever. What do you say to the average Christian who is called on mission?

 

0:52:19.9 Iain Duguid: Yeah, it’s really interesting how the book of Acts ends. It’s sort of an open-ended book. Some people almost think it kind of fizzles out.

 

0:52:30.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, it feels like that.

 

0:52:32.6 Iain Duguid: Because here’s Paul, he’s still on trial. He’s not free. But the last word in Greek is “unbound,” and it’s talking about the gospel. So Paul is in chains, but the gospel is unbound because the Spirit is unbound. And so the story that we’ve seen here from Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, to the ends of the earth is still continuing because the Holy Spirit is still continuing, which means that the Holy Spirit is continuing to work through ordinary people. Right. It’s not just a story about Peter and Paul. It’s a story about the gospel and the Spirit’s work through the gospel. And as we saw in chapter eight, the Spirit can do that work through ordinary Christians who don’t even have their theology… These are people who don’t necessarily have an M.Div. They don’t have to have a seminary qualification to share the gospel with your neighbor wherever you go. And when the Spirit is at work, that gospel will bear particular fruit. And sometimes the gospel will not bear particular fruit. I was just reading again today Paul’s encounter with Felix and Drusilla. Felix is looking for a payoff from Paul, but it says he’s well informed about the way. And for two years, Felix and Drusilla listen to Paul preaching. And you think, how do they not come to faith? Right? Because we’re tempted to think, well, Paul, right? I mean, if Paul’s preaching, people are falling left, right, and center and being converted, surely.

 

0:54:03.8 Jim Lovelady: Well, some people fall asleep and fall out of…

 

0:54:05.9 Iain Duguid: Well, yes, that’s true. Yeah, that can be.

 

0:54:08.2 Jim Lovelady: There’s that one guy.

 

0:54:09.0 Iain Duguid: Yeah, Eutychus. It is possible for somebody to listen to the apostle Paul preaching for two years and not be converted by it. And then, yeah, then you have other people whose exposure to the gospel is much more limited and they come to faith. Right? It’s the Spirit’s work. So often I feel like, okay, I’ve got to get my evangelism strategy down, I’ve got to get my presentation right, I’ve got to have my memorized six points that I want to say, whatever, and then, then I’ll be ready. But if this is the Spirit’s work, then we should be listening to the Spirit’s prompting. I think sometimes the Spirit’s going to nudge us and say, “Here’s an opening.” You don’t have to get it all right. You don’t have to have everything ready.

 

0:54:55.8 Jim Lovelady: Just show up.

 

0:54:56.4 Iain Duguid: Yeah. How hard is it to say, “I’m a sinner saved by grace and I think you need the same grace from God that I do”? Start there and see what happens.

 

0:55:06.1 Jim Lovelady: Jesus is alive. He’s King.

 

0:55:08.2 Iain Duguid: Right. And maybe people will throw stones at you. That’s a possibility. But we’re often more afraid of that than we need to be. But sometimes people will listen because the Spirit will take the often fumbling, incoherent words that we say, and when the Spirit’s work is at somebody’s heart, that’s going to change their life. Yeah.

 

0:55:30.8 Jim Lovelady: Amen. Well, thank you so much for writing part two. Part three forthcoming?

 

0:55:37.8 Iain Duguid: Yep.

 

0:55:37.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Thank you so much for this. It’s been a delight for me to sit with this, and I know that anybody who picks it up, it’ll be a delight to sit with it, but then to go with it.

 

0:55:48.2 Iain Duguid: To the ends of the earth.

 

0:55:49.0 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

 

0:55:49.7 Iain Duguid: Or around the corner.

 

0:55:50.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, either one.

 

0:55:51.8 Iain Duguid: Either one.

 

0:55:52.9 Jim Lovelady: Thank you so much.

 

0:55:54.2 Iain Duguid: You’re very welcome.

 

[music]

 

0:56:01.3 Jim Lovelady: I think my big takeaway from my conversation with Iain was the relationship between worship and missions. The idea that missions exist because worship doesn’t, well, that’s John Piper’s famous line, right? And that missions is born out of worship, and that’s Iain Duguid’s line. This is the dynamic of the ordinary Christian life that by the power of the Holy Spirit, it reveals extravagant, extraordinary grace. So here’s the invitation, you see the beauty of Jesus and it propels you. It propels you out to participate in His Kingdom, out to love and serve people who don’t yet know the beauty of Jesus. And what’s extraordinary about this is that the Holy Spirit always leads us in self-sacrificial love, humility, repentance, joy, things that are rare in this world and impossible to conjure on our own apart from His grace. And all we can boast in is that once I was lost and now I’m found. And that’s what makes your ordinary life so extraordinary. It reminds me of Matthew 25, when Jesus revealed how our seemingly ordinary christian life is actually way more extraordinary than we realize. Find yourself in this story. “Then the King will say to those at His right hand, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food. I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me. I was naked and you gave me clothing. I was sick and you took care of me. I was in prison and you visited me.’ And then the righteous will answer Him, ‘Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food or thirsty and gave you something to drink (in our mundane lives)? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you or naked and gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?’ And the King will answer, ‘Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did it to me.’” These are the ordinary things of life that can only be accomplished in humble reliance on the King Himself. So ordinary that these folks don’t even realize that they’re doing something actually really amazing. So that’s my prayer for you today. That you would find yourself within the story of God here in Acts and see that your seemingly ordinary life is actually an anticipation of the inheritance of the Kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. So follow the one who loves you and receive His blessing as He goes with you. May the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you, turn His bright eyes to you and give you His peace. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, life everlasting. Amen.

 

[music]

---