Tag: Mission Impossible

Giving It Our All

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God created the church to be the place where His presence dwells on earth so that people who don’t know Him can experience Him and come to be in a relationship with Him. Nothing short of that is our goal. But this isn’t a goal to which we can give merely a half-hearted effort. It requires entirely more of us than that. As we wrap up our series, Building the Kingdom, today, we’re talking about Paul’s passion to see the Gospel advance, what that means for us generally, and what that means very specifically for this church. Let’s see what Paul has to say and what we need to do.

Giving It Our All

I still remember watching the original Mission Impossible movie with Tom Cruise as superspy, Ethan Hunt, when I was growing up. It hit theaters the summer before I started eighth grade. I remember its being terrifically fun. The plot mostly kept you guessing until the very end. The twists and turns left you never quite sure who was playing for which side. I remember over the next several years watching the second and third installments in the series, but neither one in theaters. And they were just okay. They were fun, but never quite up to the focused, spy-thriller par of the original. After that, I fairly well lost interest. Life got busy. Marvel’s MCU got up and running. Streaming services were still in their infancy. And, I wasn’t willing to spend money to buy the subsequent entries on DVD. They looked pretty fun, but seeing them just wasn’t on the agenda. 

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Digging in Deeper: 1 Peter 3:18

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“For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

What is it that draws someone to the Gospel? A whole number of different things. Some are pretty good reasons. Others aren’t quite so good or reasonable, but thankfully the destination is ultimately more important than the path as long as you do indeed wind up in the right place. One of the most powerful draws to the Gospel historically has been the promise of God’s love as expressed through the substitutionarily sacrificial death of His Son, Jesus. This assurance that God values your life even more highly than His own is a pretty potent one indeed. As the apostle Peter put there, Jesus was willing to lay down His life in order to make it possible for you to get to God. The latest entry in what has become one of the most Gospel-soaked film franchises in recent memory offered up a picture of what this is like in one of the most powerful recruitment scenes I think I’ve ever seen. Let’s talk for just a few minutes today about the most recent adventure for super spy Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning.

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Digging in Deeper: John 15:12-13

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“This is my command: Love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

One of the long-running debates about the action/spy-thriller genre of movies is which super spy is the greatest. Realistically speaking, there are only two possible entries in the debate: James Bond and Ethan Hunt. Everyone else falls a distant second to them. Bond has the advantage of a whole series of books and 27 films. Hunt has 9 seasons’ worth of a television series totaling 206 episodes as well as 7 movies with an eighth to be released next summer. Both are cool, suave, and always collected. They always get the job done. And in getting the job done, they’ve saved the world more times than is worth counting. So then, which spy is the better spy? Having recently watched or rewatched all of the previous six Mission Impossible movies, I would like to stir the debate once again by making an argument in favor of Hunt. Let’s talk about why.

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