We Are the S.S.! Saved to Send!

We Are the S.S.!   Saved to Send!                                         By Kelly Durant   6-8-14

John 15:16-17  16 Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain: that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you. 17 These things I command you, that ye love one another.

2. How do you feel about getting chosen? When I was a kid I recall getting chosen to be the first to show the PE class how to do push-ups?! Embarrassing if you fail to make it a good show, right? Or the music teacher asks the class to stop and for you to sing alone; or the math teacher asks you to answer the math problem on the chalkboard in front? I don’t think many of us like to be chosen to do many things.  People get away with saying “no” too. But then some people will not ever volunteer so you have to ask them and chose them to do stuff you know is good for them even though they may hate it. But then you have to worry if they will finish the job!

After last weekend, going to many services and hearing the General (and the Mrs. General) Andre Cox many times, who are sincerely humble inspired people, you can imagine I could share so much! The graduating class that was commissioned were the “Disciples of the Cross”, and the theme was to “deny yourself, take up your cross, and follow Jesus”.  Luke 9:23 And he said to them all, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me. 24 For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: but whosoever will lose his life for my sake, the same shall save it.

What was interesting to me was a new message of proclaiming the S.S. to mean Saved to Send. This year there will be 4 summer teams, not just 3, and they will go to Colombia, Kenya, India, and Louisiana. There are different kinds of teams, and these are teams of dozens of young people will go for 6 weeks to work in the Corps, orphan schools, and to evangelize on their mission. Jimmy Mestre went on a team before, and I hope others here from our Corps can go sometime in the near future as well, either for a week or for the whole summer. We know that after one works with poor and sweet people, it causes your life to have a whole new perspective! You may go to bless them with goods and labor, but in the end they bless you! 

3. Let’s discuss the S.S. meanings but before knowing what we know in the Salvation Army. As you are aware, Satan always wants to destroy the things of God by claiming for himself anything, a word, a symbol, colors, or anything to turn it into something evil, so that it will cause people to think of him instead of thinking of God. Here is a perfect example, the SS.

It took me sometime to accept that the S.S. had a new meaning of Saved to Serve, or Soup and Salvation, because after knowing WWII history the S.S. to me were the elite Nazi troops of Hitler! How many of you associated the S.S. to that? Take into account the original S.S. meaning was first coined by The Salvation Army.  It was an inspired concept from the beginning. And another acronym; using TSA today makes people think of the custom agents not us!

And the internet offers us a whole plethora of distorted meanings of common terms. For sermons, I search for images on Google and I am always annoyed that hardly anything means what it originally meant. Satan has made it harder to win people for God who have had their brains etched with thousands of songs and movies because everything to them has a new distorted connotation. One can speak of some term and they understand some other meaning, even speaking the same language! If I search the word “martyr” the first dozens of images are that of some horror film, not of Christians dying in the coliseum. And If I search “chosen” I also get some movie or gang tattoos. The point is you and I have a big job in getting others to understand the concepts and the simple things of God.  You and I must explain more, and redefine original meanings and intentions into language, into what we are communicating.

4. So what does it mean “saved to send”? Who is getting saved and sent? It all starts with you! You got saved, so did you go? In the verse of today Jesus is talking to everyone and he says in 16 (a) Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you, and ordained you, that ye should go and bring forth fruit. So what does chosen mean? Without a doubt, everyone is chosen! We have a “whosoever” faith, an “anyone” can be saved offer from the Lord, who calls out to all going through the already saved ones communicating His word which activates the Holy Spirit in their lives to have the conviction to be sent. But this always comes up discussing the chosen…

Matthew 22:14 For many are called, but few are chosen. Why are few chosen? Because not everyone answers the call to be chosen! God is never to blame for not offering salvation and a calling to the entire world; it is the blame of each individual if they do not respond to the message and the blame is on each Christian if they do not live the message, and “tell it”.

Similar to one being chosen is the “whosoever” concept from John 3:16, but listen to 17 &18  as well. John 3: 16 For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. 17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved. 18 He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

So to extrapolate, once “chosen’ we become saved and then “ordained” by Jesus (this implies an empowerment by the Holy Spirit) so then one goes on to bring fruit to God. There are several ways to interpret bringing fruit. One is by there being evidence that you are living a transformed life. Just as a plant grows over a period of time and then produces fruit, we are the same by comparison. We are familiar with Galatians 5:22 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, 23 Meekness, temperance: against such there is no law”. The reality is some of you master some of these things fairly well, but others of you do not. Maybe you are calm and have peace in God but you still need more love for others. Or maybe you have faith but need more meekness. Only God can show you where your weakness is at and all of us will always need to improve in bringing more fruit to God in our ever maturing, ever transforming, and ever holiness evolving character.

5. Another type of fruit is that for reproduction, the duplicating of yourself (in this case of Jesus) in the lives of others. What is fruit anyway? It is a watery encasing of a seed (and it tastes good: it is desirable to the eye and tongue). A grape, an apple, any fruit has a seed in the middle designed to be planted in the ground so that it makes more of its kind.  

To bear fruit for God is like raising children. How many of you have kids? Then you know about the sacrifice and the thousands of sleepless nights attending to them, about the giving up of your wishes for new clothes in order to buy them their clothes. Usually our children only learn to appreciate and value us as parents after they have had their own kids to learn about how much it taxes the body, spirit, and pocketbook.

So for Christians, every person that we share the faith with, every soul saved from us praying with them is our fruit for God and we are responsible to bring them up and sacrifice for them.  What is the big picture? Every Christian is “saved to share (the message)”, or “saved to send” their self and others out to reproduce and bear fruit by sharing the gospel of the love of God. Sending ourselves out implies sharing the gospel in “word and in deed”. Everyone must walk the talk proving the fruit we have in our maturity reflecting in our fruit in the many others we win to faith in Christ. How many have you won to Christ? It’s not too late, save and send yourself out!

6. What does it mean “that your fruit remain’? Jesus basically is saying we must be faithful to remain in Him all our lives bringing fruit to Him. We can remain by maintaining our faith by daily reading His Word and praying being obedient staying in fellowship with other believers. We remain by growing more in the spirit, maturing and producing the fruit of love in our lives which God expects. We have to work at it to grow!

What about the other fruit we produce, that of people? We cannot control if a person we win to the Lord in the faith will remain or not.  Some people last a few months and then they backslide and leave the Lord; this is not what we are expected to control, once you have done your part to win them and disciple them then they are in God’s hands. Well, there is the flipside that if you shared with someone about Jesus and then you just abandoned them like a newborn baby, then that would be something to repent of and feel bad about. But fruit that remains implies that you or someone is disciplining and preparing them so they can be sent out to save others as you were once saved and went.

To the suffering people in the world, we as Christians represent an elite class of people that are not stuck in the slime pit as they are; we are an army of hope and salvation, that cares and provides soup and salvation, saved to save, saved to serve, saved to send!

7. Reflecting on those Commissioned, here are the words on the “My Covenant” document the Cadets sign, a part of the diploma one receives when being sent and commissioned.  This is a promise my wife and I did, and it is what every Soldier should promise as well, in my opinion.

CALLED BY GOD to proclaim the Gospel of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ as an officer of The Salvation Army

I BIND MYSELF TO HIM IN THIS SOLEMN COVENANT

To love and serve him supremely all my days,

To live to win souls and make their salvation the first purpose of my life,

To care for the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, love the unlovable, and befriend those who have no friends,

To maintain the doctrines and principles of The Salvation Army, and, by God's grace to prove myself a worthy officer.

(Done in the strength of my Lord and Saviour, and in the presence of (the following wording to be adapted to local circumstances) the Territorial Commander, training college officers and fellow cadets.)

What a high calling to love the unlovable and those who have no friends, to care for the poor, feed the hungry, clothe the naked! Have you ever done this ever or if so, how many times? Jesus calls all Christians to love unconditionally and to serve and teach others to serve and save souls. This means dealing with people we may despise, with people with serious sins, but no matter the sin, only God’s love (our example of it) can save them out of it!

8. Now the difficult part of verse 16, “that whatsoever ye shall ask of the Father in my name, he may give it you”. This implies that in order to have your prayers answered you must be in agreement with the previously established conditions of heeding God’s call to go out and bear to bear fruit . Everyone wants to get their prayers answered so what were the conditions again?

A person must let their self be chosen to obey! One is chosen to be saved (by Jesus), thus implying submission to Him who chose you. After that what happens? That person, being you or me or someone, must get ordained. Ordained is not some ceremony done by some leader in an institution, it is a spiritual ordaining from Jesus himself which is (taking into context the rest of the chapter) an empowerment by the Holy Spirit freely given to any follower.

Next, “that ye should go and bring forth fruit, and that your fruit should remain”, in other words you need to go and produce good character values in your own life maturing into a loving person you normally are not, and staying busy producing, or as discussed reproducing fruit which means you are getting more souls to follow Jesus.

9. And finally, how many times and in how many different ways do we need to hear Jesus tell us that it is imperative that we must love?  Verse 17 “These things I command you, that ye love one another”. So all of the above are commands all wrapped up in the fact that if we do not love, love God and others above everything, then we are nothing less than rebellious, disobedient, unfaithful, unwilling, ungrateful, unfruitful, unordained, worthless unchosen people! It is love that wins people to want to accept Jesus!

When the moment comes when someone asks, who will go, who will speak, who will serve? You should stand up and say, “Send me”! Where there is a need to love and to do a work for God, then ask God for the anointing  ordaining of the Holy Spirit to give you the grace and the power for the hour to just do it! It is like swimming, you just need to jump in the water!

Year after year we see Cadets in the Southern Territory get chosen in numbers of 40 or 50, and in 2016 they expect even 70 Cadets to answer God’s call unconditionally!  Doesn’t it amaze you how many thousands of people worldwide respond to the call in the Salvation Army? Complying with no control over one’s destiny, no control over much of anything! When we are submitted and obedient, under the condition of rendering fruit to God, then we gain the power of having God on our side as never before. What a blessing! I have meet so many people that want the privileges of being chosen but few are they that are willing to pay the price of living the chosen life; the one of dying daily and taking up your cross to do God’s will and not your own. Thank God for the ones that chose that, they are out there, and we must find them!

With the conviction the Cadets are willing to be sent should this convict you as Soldiers to follow a bit more closer as well as God allowing Him to reveal what direction to go in? If God is choosing you, if he spoke to you today, why not answer the call? Has God reminded you of a mission or a desire to serve in some way this morning?  Say to God, “Send me! I am saved to be sent!