Our Mission

A mission statement answers the question “What does God want us to do?” as His called-out people in the church of Jesus Christ. Each word or phrase seeks to convey various aspects of the strategic task set before us at OGC.

Calling

The miracle of regeneration makes every Christian a new creation (II Corinthians 5:17-20). With that work of grace come two consequences. First, we are reconciled to God through Christ (18a). Through the substitutionary atonement accomplished by His Son’s death on the cross, God has removed the enmity between us and Himself giving us peace! As if that were not enough, we read of a second consequence in verse 18b - He has given us the ministry of reconciliation. Verse 20 goes so far as to call us ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us. By making us His own, God has not only reconciled us to Himself, He has entrusted us with the extraordinary responsibility of imploring others on His behalf to be reconciled to Him!

Therefore we have a stewardship from God that involves actively calling others toward reconciliation with Him. God intends for every one of His people to move into the lives of unbelievers with the same message that Jesus and His apostles proclaimed in the New Testament – a call to repent (Matthew 3:2; Acts 2:38). Peter punctuates the same idea in explaining why the Son of God delays in His return in II Peter 3:9 saying that He is not willing that any should perish but that all should come to repentance. God zealously desires people to repent! To repent means to change one’s mind, to turn from moving in one direction in favor of a better one.

The Bible minces no words as to the nature of every human being’s most pressing need – to be delivered from the wrath of God that abides upon him for his sin – his falling short of the perfect standard of the law of God (Romans 1:18). There is none righteous (Romans 3:10). No person by his own good works in obedience to the law will ever be justified in a holy God’s sight (Romans 3:20). Without genuine repentance from his sin and belief in Jesus Christ as the only Savior from his sin, no man can be saved and delivered from his just condemnation in hell forever (Acts 4:12). This is the good news – God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).

This then is the starting point of our mission at Orlando Grace Church. We are to call sinners living under God’s wrath to turn away from (repent of) sin and its deceptively inferior and enticing pleasures and to believe in Jesus Christ whose death on the cross purchases the forgiveness of their sin and makes possible the gift of His imputed righteousness in their lives (II Corinthians 5:21). Only then can they begin their pursuit of the superior joy and ultimate satisfaction that comes with a personal relationship with God where His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, is treasured above all else (Psalm 16:11).

The heart of our mission at OGC involves obeying God’s commission (Matthew 28:18-20) to engage those outside the church by words and works designed to influence them toward turning away from lesser affections in favor of the pursuit of Someone infinitely better (Colossians 4:5-6). God alone can turn a person’s heart in this fashion, but He uses believers who call unbelievers to repentance and faith as an important means of affecting that transformation.

Peoples everywhere

Don’t mistake the “s” in peoples for a typo! God’s plan for making disciples by baptizing and teaching them to observe all He has commanded pertains explicitly to nations (Matthew 28:19-20). By that He doesn’t mean geopolitical nation states, but rather specific ethnic and linguistically identifiable people groups that inhabit all regions of the earth. Furthermore the Scripture reveals that God has elected and destined for worship around the Lamb’s throne a great multitude which no one can number comprised of representatives from every single one of these peoples (Revelation 7:9-10)!

So while our mission clearly directs us to influence peoples in our immediate community of Central Florida, it by no means limits us to that alone. God calls us to act as witnesses of His stunning grace even to the remotest parts of the earth (Acts 1:8). Nothing short of a local and global scope will suffice if we are to accomplish the mission God has set before us.

From seeking fulfillment

Everyone longs for joy, lasting contentment, real satisfaction. People are inherently driven by a hunger and thirst for that which will meet their deepest needs. The things we pursue, invest in, and ultimately worship reveal what we essentially believe will deliver the goods when it comes to the fulfillment of our heart’s desires.

Jesus played off this notion in His conversation with the Samaritan woman in John 4. She came to the town well to draw drinking water and Jesus offered her something far better - living water (verse 10) - a fountain of water springing up into everlasting life (verse 14). She begged Him to give her to drink of the same only to find Christ confront her with a common but tragically misplaced pursuit of joy - you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband (verse 18). The Samaritan woman sought personal fulfillment in repeated illicit sexual relationships – sin that stood between her and the satisfaction of Christ’s living water.

In inferior pleasures

No one will deny the inherently pleasurable aspect of God’s numerous gifts to the world. Sex, food and drink, family, work, leisure, knowledge, technology, sports, wealth, possessions, nature, and a host of other things, when properly used in His appointed contexts, all come from God as gifts for our enjoyment and His glory (James 1:17). The problem is none of these things was ever created with the intent to supply ultimate and lasting soul satisfaction! In fact, when we value these gifts over the Giver who lavishes them upon us, we turn them into idols which ultimately rob more joy than they deliver (Romans 1:18-32). Jeremiah calls this propensity to worship the creature over the Creator, to treasure the gifts over the Giver, one of two great evils worthy of nothing short of heavenly astonishment.

“Be astonished, O heavens, at this, and be horribly afraid; be very desolate,” says the Lord. “For my people have committed two evils: They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters, and hewn themselves cisterns - broken cisterns that can hold no water.” (Jeremiah 2:12-13)

One way to understand sin then is foolishness that prefers broken wells that hold no water. No matter how many times we dig into the well of idolatry in pursuit of lasting joy and contentment we will only ever end up with mouths full of dirt and gravel. Our thirst remains unquenched and our deepest longings go unmet. Inferior pleasures will never deliver ultimate satisfaction. God never intended them to accomplish such a purpose. Our preference for pleasures over God is what makes them into sinful idols that invite God’s judgment and discipline.

To pursuing ultimate satisfaction

Once we repent and turn from this worship of idols we discover a source of ultimate satisfaction does exist! This is good news, great news, fantastic news! There is a fountain of living waters that never runs dry and overflows with torrents of cool, refreshing, ultimately satisfying living waters (Jeremiah 2:13). It is that fountain to which our mission directs us to lead peoples everywhere. The only thing that will lure people away from a sinful fascination with lesser pleasures is the prospect of an infinitely superior object of satisfaction that never fails to deliver on what it promises. We must model our own preeminent satisfaction in this fountain and influence others to pursue their joy in the same.

In Christ

What is this fountain of infinitely superior satisfaction capable of meeting humanity’s deepest needs? God! They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters (Jeremiah 2:13 - emphasis added). People look for joy in all the wrong places. They treasure the gifts over the Giver. They worship the creature over the Creator. They seek their idols over the great I Am.

King David, a man after God’s own heart, wrote: “Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart” (Psalm 37:4). God commands this notion; He does not merely suggest it. C. S. Lewis called us “half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”

We must vehemently pursue our joy in God through His Son the Lord Jesus Christ! We must help other believers who have yet to make this earth-shattering discovery come to understand the folly of digging broken wells and learn to drink with abandon from a very different, markedly superior fountain. We must call unbelieving peoples everywhere from the sinful futility of seeking fulfillment in inferior pleasures to pursuing ultimate satisfaction in Christ. May God deliver us from the folly of being far too easily pleased! May we forever give up mud pies in the slum for the surpassingly superior delight of a holiday at the sea - for God’s glory, our satisfaction, and the peoples’ joy!