We believe that our intimacy with Father produces an awareness of who He wants us to be under the headship of Jesus, through the leadership of the Holy spirit. We also believe that it is necessary that each member become conscious of what we believe is Father's purpose for us, so we will do our best to describe that in the following pages.
Defining Our Purpose - Knowing Where We're Going.

There are 4 questions we ought to ask ourselves in arriving at a meaningful purpose for our fellowship.

What are we to be?
What are we to do?
Why do we exist?
What does God expect?

If someone stopped you at work and asked you the question, "What do you believe at your church?" How would you answer? Everything we do in this church must have a purpose. There is nothing we do just for the sake of busyness or tradition (the we've always done it this way syndrome). There must be a purpose to it all.

I don't think the members of the first church in Jerusalem surrendered to martyrdom just because they "enjoyed" what they were doing, or that they thought it was a good idea at the time, or because they read it in some instruction manual somewhere.

I like the slogan used by Saddle Back Community Church.
"A great commitment to the Great Commandment and the Great Commission will grow a great church."

Jesus had a very focussed purpose statement for the church.
He summarized the entire Old Testament, all the law, and all the prophets in one purpose statement. Mt 22:37-39. The great commandment.
And then in Matthew 28:19-20a He gave them the great commission which is just as focussed.
Thus, a good motto for our church would be, "Worshipping God,…Loving people,...Making Disciples."
From these great passages, we may derive five instructions for the church.

I. We Exist to Worship His Majesty

II. We Exist to Demonstrate His love

III. We Exist to Communicate His Grace

IV. We Exist to Enlarge His Household

V. We Exist to Equip His Disciples

I. We Exist to Worship His Majesty

How do we express your love towards God? We worship Him.
At City View we place a tremendous amount of importance on worship.

Our worship through music, message, ministry to the body are all integrated into one offering of worship in the presence of Father. However, each part of the whole has a specific purpose. The corporate congregational expression during our gathering time is what we would essentially label as "worship" It is simply a way of expressing our love for and to God. This "worship" is not necessarily confined to the congregational setting, although this is where it best finds it's expression.

You may be out on the lake all alone, in your bedroom, or in a crowd of 10,000. When we open our hearts, our minds and our mouths to Him in worshipful expression in song and word, we are showing our love towards Him in a meaningful way. This is not necessarily something we do because we feel like it, but more importantly because He seeks it from us. John 4:23-24 Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks.

The way that the world knew that Jesus loved His Father was that they saw Him do exactly as His Father commanded Him. John 14:31 "but the world must learn that I love the Father and that I do exactly what my Father has commanded me."

The way we express our love to God is to obey Him. Therefore, the way we express our love for the Father is to worship Him. Mt 4:10b says, "Worship the Lord you God, and serve Him."

Worship must precede work. Before we can be worthy workers, we must become willing worshippers. Jesus made it very clear that it was worship that he sought before service. This truth is emphasized again by Jesus in Luke 10:38-42 As Jesus and his disciples were on their way, he came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him. 39She had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet listening to what he said. 40But Martha was distracted by all the preparations that had to be made. She came to him and asked, "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!" 41"Martha, Martha," the Lord answered, "you are worried and upset about many things, 42but only one thing is needed. Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

At City View we will be careful to avoid the trap of becoming so busy working for God, that we have no time to love Him through worship.
Jesus second instruction to the church,

II. We Exist to Demonstrate His love
" Love your neighbor as yourself.."
John 15:12-17 My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. [13] Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends. [14] You are my friends if you do what I command. [15] I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master's business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. [16] You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit--fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name. [17] This is my command: Love each other.

Here is the task of ministry. Sharing God's love by meeting needs and healing hurts. Every time we reach out to someone in love, we are ministering. This is the responsibility of every church member. We have another motto at City View, and that is: "Every Member A Minister" Every member is expected to minister to others as an outflow of their ministry to the Lord.

We realize that although Jesus made it clear that our greatest act of service to Father is to worship Him with all of our hearts, it did not stop there. It was evident by His life that the fruit of this intimacy with Father is compassion and sensitivity to the needs of every other person. That story in Luke 10:38 - 42 reminds us also that wherever there is a Mary, there is a Martha close by. Both worship of "worship" and worship of "work" are important.

Wherever Jesus went He took pity on the multitudes because it seemed that they were so hopeless and helpless. Yet His ministry to them was always guided by His Father's heart. How important it was for Him to always be near to His Father in prayer so that He may sense His every wish with regard to ministry. This ought to be our attitude towards ministry as well. Always attentive to Father's wishes for us as He makes assignments for each of us along the way.

I think this is what Jesus had in mind when he asked his disciples to pray the Lord of the harvest would send workers into the harvest field. He knew that when we take it upon our hearts to pray for those who are in need, that prayer is often turned by God, the Lord of the harvest, into a burden for ministry to those we are praying for. Our prayer is then answered by our going and ministering.

So we get our first two purposes from the Great Commandment.
The next three we get from the Great Commission.

III. We Exist to Communicate His Grace
Matthew 28:18-20 Then Jesus came to them and said, "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. [19] Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, [20] and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

"Go and make disciple..." This is the task of evangelism. This one is very obvious, but is often the hardest to do.
In Romans 1:14-16 Paul describes the reason why we exist to communicate the grace of God.
I am obligated both to Greeks and non-Greeks, both to the wise and the foolish. 15That is why I am so eager to preach the gospel also to you who are at Rome. 16I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

What Paul is speaking about here is a fire that is burning within his heart. This may not be immediately apparent from this passage, but if you study the content a little more closely, you will discover that Paul is a man with a Holy heartburn.
In vs. 15. "I am eager to preach the gospel."
This phrase is really two words in the original Greek text. prothumon euangelitzesthai. The first of these words is a very active word, and it comes from the same stem as a Greek word for "fire" or "burning" The second word means to share the gospel. It is the word from which we get our word, "evangelist". In other words, Paul is saying, "I have a burning within my heart to tell the good news. There is a fire that ablaze within my being that compels me to share the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Family, everyone of us has had that spark ignited in our hearts when we were filled with the Holy Spirit. Part of our purpose as a church is to allow the Holy Spirit to fan the spark into flame until it becomes a roaring fire of passion for a lost and dying world.
Paul reveals three reasons why this must be included in the purpose of City View Christian Fellowship. Firstly because we are:

I. Mandated By the Call from Above.
Romans 1:1
At the beginning of this chapter, Paul stresses that he is an apostle, a messenger specifically commissioned by Christ to spread the good news. Just as each one of us is because of the Great Commission.
Paul says that the reason he must go and tell others about Christ is because of the call of God on his life.
This call begins with the conversion experience which Paul describes in Acts 25.
On the road to Damascus to do away with these crazies called Christians. On the way he is confronted by the claims of the living Christ upon His life, and marvelously saved.
Paul's conversion is followed by his commissioning, as he explains to Agrippa that Jesus said to him, "Paul, I have appeared to you today to make you a minister and a witness. "Whereupon, O Agrippa, I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision."

When Peter, James and John were interrogated as to why they so brazenly shared the gospel, they replied simply, "We ought to obey God!"
Look again at 2 Cor. 5:17-20. "As ambassadors of Christ we are to speak His message of reconciliation just as if it were God himself who was making His appeal for us."
Our lord's orders are very clear. When we come into that life changing experience with Jesus Christ, He immediately appoints us His ambassadors, to speak out His message of reconciliation. He does not give us the option of waiting until someday when we might have more time, or when the circumstances are more fitting, or when we are in the right neighborhood, or when our health improves, or when our kids have graduated and moved out, or when we are more mature spiritually.

He does not give us that option. He requires of us immediately to be obedient to Him. The woman at Samaria was a spiritual baby, yet she ran and told the whole village about this one who had given her living water and changed her life.

And when it comes to not having the time, look at Jesus own example. He was never too busy. He always had time to invite the little children to sit on His knee. In the middle of a busy itinerary, the disciples tried to shoo them away, but Jesus found the time. He had time to heal a woman who touched the hem of His garment when thousands thronged about Him. She saw how busy He was, and thought, "He will never have time for me, but if I could just touch His clothes" and what did Jesus do? He stopped the parade so that He could minister to that one shy little lady in her personal moment of need. Jesus always had time for those who needed Him, and in John 20:21 His words echo throughout the ages: "So send I you!"

So we must obey the call from above.

The second factor that motivates us to communicate God's grace is the fact that we are:
II. Moved by The Crowd All Around Us
vs. 14. "I am a debtor to both the Greeks and the Barbarians; both to the wise and the unwise.

Today we are in an age of picking and choosing. We make excuses for our lack of evangelism across the canyons of color and culture. We make excuses for our lack of fellowship across the divide of denominationalism. We hide behind the smoke screen of homogeneous units, because we believe that like responds to like.

We have forgotten that Jesus said He has come to make all ground level at the foot of the cross. We have forgotten that Paul wrote under the inspiration of the blessed Holy Spirit in Colossians 1:19 that God saw fit through Christ on the Cross to draw together in unity everything that is in earth and in heaven.

I'm so glad that there will be no divide in heaven. There will be no Baptists in heaven. No Methodists. No Pentecostal Holiness. No Presbyterians. Just Jesus People. Plain and simple Jesus people.
And when we look around us, at the crowd that surrounds our church's, 90% of them on their way to hell, we should be compelled by the burden that burns within our hearts.

Look at vs. 14 again. Strange words. Paul, as far as we know, had never seen, nor done business with these people. How could he be indebted to them? And how would he repay that debt? But Paul was not speaking of a financial obligation. He was speaking a truth that when anyone becomes a recipient of the saving grace of our Lord Jesus he immediately becomes indebted to the rest of humanity to share that grace.
Romans 13:8 says, "Let no debt remain outstanding, except the continuing debt to love one another, for he who loves his fellow man fulfills the law." And how can we love our fellow man without feeling a tremendous burden for the lostness of their souls.
Let me illustrate for you.
Imagine for a moment you are on a cruise to Honolulu. Right in the middle of the ocean you come across the scene of a shipwreck. There are thousands of people without life jackets swimming frantically against the tide. Hundreds of miles from land, they are drowning one by one. Men, women, boys and girls. All drowning. You look around and you see all of those life preservers aboard your ship. You look back at the drowning mass. You know that if you throw out those life preservers you will save those people.

The question is, do you owe them anything? Is it our responsibility they are where they are? Did we cause the shipwreck? Did we have anything to do with them boarding that ship in the first place? Absolutely not. Yet there is not a single sane person who would deny that we owe it to those drowning souls to throw out the life jackets. We are indebted to them. It is our responsibility.
This is what Paul is trying to say. We are living in a sea of drowning souls. God has given us a life preserver and we are indebted to throw it out to them.
We have more ordained ministers in the US than in every other country combined. 1,330,000. We have more Christian radio and TV stations than the rest of the world.
There is more Christian literature in the English language than in all the other languages put together. There are 60,000 young people attending Bible colleges. In America there are more people in Sunday Schools than in the rest of the world combined. There are Bibles in 100,000 hotel and motel rooms.
In spite of all of these things in our favor, it takes an average of 4 Christians to lead 1 person to Christ every 365 days!
In our denomination last year, 6000 churches that meet every Sunday, recorded zero baptisms for the entire year.
Why? We are not understanding the nature of our heavenly calling and we are blind to the catastrophe of human depravity that prevails around us. We have taken our lights and hid them under a bushel. Our spirituality is suffocating. We have reneged on one of our primary purposes for being.

Once again we can look at the model that Jesus presented to us. Whenever He saw the crowds He had compassion on them because they were like a sheep without a shepherd.
San Antonio is full of them. All around us. Lost people. Broken homes, broken lives. Broken hearts. Broken marriages. But God can put them back together again, if only they knew. And how will they know if no one tells them?
Every 24 hrs., 146,000 people die. That is 6000 every hour. By the time our service ends this morning, 9000 people will have died. 7,200 will end up in hell.
Our hearts should be on fire to share the gospel because of the Call from above me, because of the crowd around me, and finally, we see in the example of Paul's life that our hearts ought to be burning within us to share the gospel because we are:
III. Motivated By the Cross Behind Us.
Vs. 16 :I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile.

What power is Paul speaking of?
I believe that is speaking of the power of the cross.
Paul's thoughts were forever fixed upon the power of what was accomplished through the cross of Christ. Whenever he looked upon a lost person I believe that he had this image of a dying savior on a cross shedding His blood for that person.
We sing that old song, "I have decided to follow Jesus"
One stanza, "The cross before me, the world behind me."
Perhaps it should have been "The Cross behind me, the world before me"
It is the event of the Cross that is forever etched in history which constrains us to share the love of Christ to the world before us.
Have you looked at Calvary lately?
In 2 Cor. 5:14 Paul writes: "For Christ's love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all..."

A man worked a railway draw bridge over a large river. One day during the summer he took his young son with him to see how the bridge worked. Showed him all of those massive gears. Before long they went back to the control room to get something to drink. The dad got busy with some paper work, and the time went by. Little Johnny got bored and went exploring. All of a sudden, the alarm sounded, reminding the dad that the bridge had to be lowered. A passenger train was on it's way. Dad reached for the controls and began to lower the bridge. Just then he noticed a movement down where the gears were located. There to his horror, he saw little Johnny playing around. He knew that if he did not shut the machinery down his little boy would be crushed. Then he looked up and saw the train bearing down. It was full of summer vacationers. If the bridge was not lowered they would all plunge to their death. What would he do? For a moment he thought, then turning his head and breaking into a wailing cry for his son, he let the bridge settle into place.
The train clattered past, and he could not help noticing how carefree everybody on board was. Children playing, moms chatting, dads laughing, no one even knew the price that had just been paid for their lives!
Family, that heart rending story is insufficient to describe what God did for a lost world when He allowed His only son to die on Calvary so that they may escape the penalty of death for their sins, and 90% of the world today has no idea what He did for them.
I am sure that if any one of us was a witness to that tragic scene on the bridge that day, we would not have rested until we had gone to everyone that was on the train to tell them what price the father had paid for their lives.
O, we need to catch a glimpse of the cross behind us again. The cruelty of the Roman Cross. The agony of Gethsemane. So that motivated by that we may be compelled to go and tell what He has done to bring peace and eternal life.

Paul knew that Jesus Christ took upon himself the sin of every man, woman, boy and girl. Lost in our sin, deserving nothing but God's judgment, Jesus provide a way for us to be made acceptable to God.
His death for every person proves His love for every person. We can look every person we meet in the eye and tell them with absolute assurance that somewhere way back there, there is a cross upon which Jesus died. And in dying He took upon himself all of our sins. All of our suffering. All of our sorrow. Every stripe that marked His back brought healing to our infirmities.
There is not a person in this world that Jesus does not love and that He did not die for. And all they need to do is know.
If we could only go and tell, I believe the world would change.
He loves the up-and outers. He loves the down and out's. He loves the man who spent last night in a drunken stupor. He loves the woman who cheated on her husband. He loves the teenager who woke up this morning all strung our on drugs and alcohol. He loves the young lady who in a moment of confusion and deception took the life of her unwanted, unborn child. He loves the homosexual in his depraved and disgusting perversion of all that is holy, and He longs for all of these to be born again through the blood that he so willingly poured out on that Roman cross.

This is what Paul is trying to say when he says, "the love of Christ compels me!" This is why he says, "There is a burning in my heart to share the gospel of Jesus Christ."
Can you say it?

If enough of us say it, my brothers and sisters, then it will be said of us as it was said of the apostles. "These men who have tuned the world upside down have come here to us"
This is why a vital part of our purpose for being as a church is that we exist to communicate His grace.

In the fourth place,
IV. We Exist to Enlarge His Family
To bring them into the body of Christ.
"Go and make disciples, baptizing them…"
This is where they are incorporated into the church. The was the identifying mark of the early New Testament gathered church.
Ephes. 2:19-22 Consequently, you are no longer foreigners and aliens, but fellow citizens with God's people and members of God's household, [20] built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus himself as the chief cornerstone. [21] In him the whole building is joined together and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord. [22] And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

In my home country, South Africa, our theology is a little different. At least it was when I was there. Baptism was not considered to be that important. As long as you were saved and in a church. So we had many adherents. This is not Biblical. There were no adherents in the New Testament church. Adherents cannot be counted on when the crunch comes. We must be identified with the body. That is through Baptism and it is very important. It is one of our purposes. As we do all these outside ministries, it should be a very definite purpose of this church to make disciples, Baptizing them into the family of believers and channeling them into this local body. That is the New Testament model.
The Christian life is not just a matter of believing, but also belonging.

We exist to enlarge his family. Finally,
V. We Exist to Equip His Disciples
[20] and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you
This is the task of discipleship. Equipping, educating, bringing into maturity.
Teaching others how to do the work of the ministry. Duplicating that life of Christ which is in us, into the lives of others.
Why do churches have these up and down spurts of growth? Because there is uncertainty about what their purpose is beyond saving the lost.
Great evangelistic sermons. Lots get saved. They pride themselves with the number of Baptisms, but they have the same number of people this year as they had last year. Why? Because there is a lack of purpose in this area.
2 Tim. 2:2 And the things you have heard me say in the presence of many witnesses entrust to reliable men who will also be qualified to teach others
James 1:22-25 Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. [23] Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror [24] and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. [25] But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it--he will be blessed in what he does.

At City View we are careful to provide many opportunities for discipleship in our small group times. We provide programs that are geared towards spiritual maturity and encourage all of our members to participate in as many of these opportunities as possible. We do not profess to be an "easy" church to belong to, because our expectations of our members is high. That is because our Lords expectations of His disciples is high.
These are the five purposes we get from the Great Commandment and Great Commission. They were important to Jesus, they should be important to us.
I. We Exist to Worship His Majesty "Love the Lord your God with all your heart"

II. We Exist to Demonstrate His love "Love your neighbor as yourself"

III. We Exist to Communicate His Grace "Go and preach the good news"

IV. We Exist to Enlarge His Household "Making disciples, baptizing them…"

V. We Exist to Equip His Disciples "Teaching them to obey…"