I'm going to do something a little bit different tonight before we dive into this. Here's what I'd like for you to do. I would like for you after the ushers get back to the back. I'd like for everybody to stand up with me.
I want you to find somebody around you, one of the person around you. Here's what I want you to tell, listen to them. Why did you first come to Calvary Church? How long ago was it?
And why did you first come? Stand up and tell somebody how long you've been coming and why did you first come? All right. Who can shout out a reason why somebody first came to Calvary?
Anybody? What? Came with your wife. Mom and Dad made you come, is that what I heard?
All right. Invited by a friend, VBS. Wasn't being fed. Anybody else?
You know, so many times what we discover is there's some tie-in to somebody inviting us to church. But we try to use all the means that we can. So that's why we have the Facebook stuff and why we have all the other things that we have. We want to encourage us to think about how did we come and how do we invite others, encourage others to come and be a part of this.
We try to put tools in your hand for you to use to invite other people to church. And tonight we want to talk about tools in our hand for how we share our faith, especially sharing our faith with people who we know and we're closely associated with. In Acts chapter 1, we're talking about tonight what is our calling. Remember, last week we talked about Acts chapter 1 where it says, so when they come together, they asked them, Lord, at this time we'll restore the kingdom.
This is after the resurrection. And he said to them, it's not for the times of the seasons the Father has fixed by his own authority. You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and all Judea and Samaria to the end of the earth. So why was the Holy Spirit given to us according to Jesus in this passage?
Anybody? So we get our power to be his witnesses. That power, one, empowers us to be bold enough to witness. But that power also is a power that makes our witness effective.
The Holy Spirit is going to be in our witness. And so we want to be a people who understand this, that our witness, our testimony, our story is powerful. In Matthew chapter 28 it says, and Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptize them to the name of the Father and the Son of the Holy Spirit, teach them to observe all that I have commanded you and behold, I am with you always at the end of the age.
This is where we get our mission statement. Our mission statement as a church is to compel every person in the central Illinois to seriously consider the claims of Christ. And all of us need to be pushing towards that end because we fundamentally believe that everybody is going to spend eternity someplace in heaven or separate from God and we want to give everybody the full chance to make it to heaven. But it's our job to go be his witnesses.
It's our calling. So he's empowered us to do it and he's called us to do it. Now one of the really shaping scriptures for me as a young man was in Ezekiel chapter 3. And I want you to listen to this closely because this really speaks to accountability and responsibility inside of the people of God.
He's the son of man. I've made you a watchman for the house of Israel. Whenever you hear a word from my mouth, you shall give them warning from me. If I say to the wicked, you shall surely die and you give him no warning nor speak to warn the wicked from his wicked way in order to save his life.
That wicked person shall die for his iniquity, but his blood I will require at your hand. But if you warn the wicked and he does not turn from his wickedness or from his wicked way, he shall die for his iniquity, but you have delivered your soul. Again, if a righteous person turns from his righteousness and commits injustice and I lay a stumbling block before him, he shall die because you have not warned him, he shall die for his sin and his righteous deeds of the his done shall not be remembered, but his blood I will require from your hand. But if you warn the righteous person not to sin and he does not sin, he shall surely live because he took warning and you will have delivered your soul.
That's a pretty sobering passage, isn't it? Talking about our responsibility as people to see around us and not to close our eyes to someone who's not living for God, someone who's walking away from the truth of God and even the righteous person who's stumbling our responsibility to step up and speak to them and say, hey, wait a second. You know, I think about the stumbling block issue that we have here. I think of times when Christians sometimes celebrate with somebody who's doing something evil, are doing something harmful, are doing something that's going to cause that's really against the word of God and the Christian celebrates with them instead of warning them in it.
And the truth is we're all going to stand before God in all of those things. Now what we want to remember is that there's power in our testimonies. This is what we talked about last week. This is primary to understand that how you, we just talked a minute ago about how you came to church.
That's not your testimony. That's just maybe it's part of your testimony, but you just have to invite you to church. Your real testimony, what's really powerful is how you came to know Christ. The journey of your life that brought you to having the saving knowledge of who Christ is and how Christ has changed your life since then.
You know, some keys to think about as you develop your story we talked about last week. What was your life like before Christ? What drew you to understand who Christ is? What is your life afterwards?
What does it matter? And what is the hope that we have now? Listen, I was born in a Christian home. In fact, I went to church before I went home.
My parents took me to church before they took me home. My parents were pastors, so I was raised in church, and I became aware as a young man that there's a heaven and a hell. And I didn't want to go to hell. And one night, because I didn't want to go to hell, I asked Jesus into my life.
I wasn't doing a lot of things that were really super evil or bad. I was just a young kid. And it didn't seem like my life, like anything really changed in my life. But God began to make me aware of my selfishness and some of the other places in my life were selfishness ruled and where he didn't.
And he began to speak to me through his word, teaching and through his teaching and through his spirit, convicting me to bring change into my life. And I was, I'm glad he did. And what I want you to know is that I think the most important decision you'll ever make in your life is a decision you'll make about Jesus. Deciding to surrender my life to him and follow him has been the best decision I've ever made.
Sunday I'm going to stand before God, all of us are, and I will lead to be heaven or hell. And my hope for heaven, it's not an anything that I've done, it's not an either works I've done, it's not that my parents were pastors, it's not that I've been a pastor. My hope is in Jesus that I've received him by faith and his grace was extended to me. And this is so real in my life I want to share that with you.
Have you ever thought about Jesus and who he is in your life? Now friends that didn't take a long time to share, it didn't take a long time to share our stories, but we need to learn to share our stories. So here's what we're going to do for about about six minutes. I'm going to ask you to stand up again, everybody stand up again and go find somebody, go find that person you just talked to.
Now this seems to be just groups of two people because we want to get a chance to talk here. Go share with somebody, that person, not how you came to church, how you came to Christ. All right, go, talk to them. Practice this a little bit tonight.
Okay, if you want this to be non-threatening and you want it to be easy, you've got to keep it short. You're telling the story, you're telling your story, you're intentionally doing this, you're setting it up to do it by asking them and telling them you want to talk to them about something. And you want to do it, now listen, I will tell you this, your children, your grandchildren, they need to know your story. They need to know if your parents got, if your parents are Christians, how do your parents become Christians?
If they're parents are Christians, how do they become Christians? You want that to be in the DNA of who they are that they know these transitional stories of how people came to Christ in their life and how it impacted their life. But we also want the people in our life to know that. So we have to have what we call relational intentionality.
So here's the question, who is in my circle, your circle of influence? So in just a second, I'm going to give you a chance on your notes to just start jotting down some names. And the names that we want to write down here are not the names of people that you know are saved, but the people that you know either are not saved or you don't know whether they're saved or not. So look on your notes and you'll see we've got some circles of relationship here.
There's family, there's friendships, there's people that you're connected with in your neighborhood, at the workplace or other involvements. Just take a minute or so right now and just be in the right down names that the spirit brings into your heart, a people that you know that you don't know what their spiritual walk is like or you know their spiritual walk is not strong. Go ahead and write those names down right now. Okay, thank you.
You can continue that exercise later if you want to. What I want to challenge you in tonight is our need to recognize all of these places as places that God has intentionally planted us. When you begin to see these places in your life with that intentional purpose that God has put you in these places, it begins to change the way you act and walk and feel and think about the things that you face in them. Let me have a relative that is just a real problem, just a real problem.
And this isn't a call to let that relative take advantage of you or run over you, but it's also a call to have a right heart towards that relative and to choose kindness and to choose the way you're going to live in front of them and what you're going to say to them. You may have a boss that is a real problem. You may have a co-worker who's a real issue. But when we begin to understand that God has intentionally placed us in places.
And remember what the disciples said when they face persecution or when they faced test or trials. They rejoiced that they were considered worthy for their faith to be tested in such a way. And so some of the places that God has placed us, He's allowing our faith to be tested. But He's placed us in places for us to be a witness of who Christ is.
And that's the most important thing we can do in all of these things is make sure that we understand who we are. So we need to give some analysis to our influence. And we look at these places and we ask ourselves, where am I with influence in these places? And here's one of the questions that we need to ask ourselves in all these places.
Am I living a credible life in this place? Am I living the type of life that gives me the influence that puts me as a Christian influence so I can truly be a witness for Christ? Do I need to repair my relationship with them or with somebody? Is there somebody that, boy, this gone so bad and things have happened that I need to repair this, I need to go and try to fix this and start making it different.
Now you've got to realize when you do that, it won't always be received gently. It won't always be received with walk-on because we've burned some bridges and it takes time to rebuild bridges sometimes. But we have to take that on and say, you know what, my responsibility is to try to rebuild this bridge and to rebuild a credible life. Do I need to repent of bad behavior?
Do I need to repent of something? Maybe not always live the way that represents God's will, having always lived in a way or used the words or had the actions that represents the will of God. Do I need to look at people in this? You're never going to be able to have an impact in your witness until you've gotten those kinds of things right.
Those things undermine our words. They shoot back to them. And if you don't acknowledge them and take note of them and say, listen, I know when you were a kid growing up, I wasn't the best dad, I wasn't this. I really blew it.
I really messed up and I'm repenting of that and I want to make that up. If you don't start doing some things to repent and to fix those things, you're never going to have the credible witness with them. Whether that's a co-worker or a family member. And then the third part of it is, once you've gotten those things done, you've got to ask, do they know my faith?
But before you share your story, you have to come back to this point of repentance for inconsistent behavior or our past will get in the way. Now, that's not so much the case for a new Christian. If you're a brand new Christian, you just came to Christ and you walk into the office or you walk into your family next week and you go, hey, I just want you to know I've just discovered Christ in my life and my life is going to be different. They're going to look at you and go, really.
And they're going to watch to see whether your life's really different or not. But they're not going to hold that against you as much as the person who said, I'm a Christian. I've been a Christian for a long time and we haven't lived a credible life in front of them. And so you're going to analyze that pretty clearly in your own life and the places where you've got to go back and say, hey, I want to ask you to forgive me.
I haven't done this well. I've seen our past calls for an apology and it calls for an invitation. So if we haven't lived properly or we've not done things right, we begin this thing with apologizing. Listen, I haven't done right around here.
I haven't been right with you. I haven't been right action here at work or in the neighborhood or in whatever. I haven't done it right. And I've been convicted of that.
The spirit of God has convicted me of that. And now I'm asking you to forgive me and I'm going to try to do better. So that's the apology. And hopefully they go, well, you know, I've had people, when I was younger, I did that a few times that people say, well, good praise God.
I've had other people say about time. And others say, we'll see. So don't expect that to be, you know, okay, we accept you as you are. That's not probably, many times that doesn't happen.
So that apology comes with an invitation. And the invitation is an invitation to watch my life now. Hey, you know, I just want you to watch me now. If I mess up, you can challenge me.
If I let the same thing happen again, you can say something to me. I'm not going to be offended by it. I'm going to repent of it. But I'm going to do my best to straighten this thing out, to start living the life that truly reflects Christ.
Can I just tell you, I think this is the most important thing in our life is that we live a life that reflects Christ, that we live for His glory and not for ours. And I'm telling you, that's hard for everyone. It's hard for me. It's hard for everyone of us to day in, day out live that life that reflects Christ.
And hopefully inside the body we can give each other some leeway and we can give each other some grace. And we can give each other some mercy when we mess up. But when we mess up in front of the world, we got to go in front of the world and repent in front of the world. Are you with me?
So again, it comes back to how do I see myself and how do I see others? I had somebody tell me a few months ago. They said, I look at other people through a microscope. I said, you got that backwards, man.
You got this back. You look at yourself through a microscope. Look at everybody else through grace. We look through other Christians with an element of grace, an element of understanding, an element of how hard this battle is.
Is this easy? Is living the right way every day easy? I haven't found it to be easy. I find it to be difficult sometimes.
I find it to be a challenge to get my flesh under control, especially when things are poking at it. But we have to work at that and pray for them. We're talking about this Sunday's. We're being to pray for the Spirit of God to rule in our life and to help us.
And as believers we help each other. And before the world we have to repent. So all this stuff comes with an apology and with an invitation, an invitation to watch our life. Now, how did Jesus build influence?
Jesus built influence by serving. His greatest moments of influence came from serving people. Now, as He serves them, they came to Him in great crowds. And when they came to Him in great crowds, He told them the truth.
And when He told them the truth, guess what happened? Some of the crowds left. Some of the people didn't stick around. But He built a relationship.
He built these things by using, by serving the people and serving their need. So I want to give you just three keys in this for us to really get this together. One is we have to choose to love people. Now, there's some people that it's really easy to love.
You get around them and it's just easy to love them. And then there's other people that you know, you get to know them, you love them. Because you get to know them, you kind of accept them and it's a little bit different. And there's people like me which a little more hard.
You get to know me a little harder to love. No more difficult. You got to work out a little bit more. There's flaws and things that come up.
And all of this have people in our lives that are easy to love. You grow to love them and then there's ones that are hard to love. The real taste of our faith isn't the ones that are easy to love. It's not even the middle crowd.
The real taste of our faith and our obedience is the difficult crowd. Do I still treat them wanting the best for them? Do I still treat them in kindness and love? Do I still do these things?
And so we have to make this choice. Love in this instance is a choice. Agape love is not about some feeling that wellms up in us. The kind of love we talk about at the marriage.
There's so much feelings going on in a wedding. There's so much feelings going on in that kind of relationship at that moment. But that's not the kind of love we're talking about in that wedding. We're talking about the choice to love.
The decision to treat people with love. The decision to say I'm going to treat you with love no matter what. For better or worse, for richer, for poor, in sickness and in health, for saking all others, keep only under you as long as you both shall live. That's what we're doing in that moment.
And we sit here today and we got to sit here and say, okay, we walk out in this world and we make a choice to love people. We make a choice on how we're going to respond to them. Here's the next choice. We choose to serve.
We make the choice to look in our life and say, God show me in those in my life, how can I serve them best? How can I care for them best? What do I do to take care of them and to bless them? And it's a choice to not be demanding but to try to give and to try to pour into other people's lives.
And we choose to open our life up in many, many different ways. Every family, every person is called in some very different ways to choose to live. Choose to love somebody many, many times when it would be easier not to. This isn't just a matter of bringing somebody a glass of tea.
This is a matter of using our life to try to pour in and build somebody else's life. And the third choice is this. It's to choose to be patient. To choose in this process to recognize that we're not going to see some changes overnight.
It's glorious. It's wonderful when a person comes to salvation. It's wonderful when their life begins to change. It's wonderful when it's easy and when it's quick.
But I want to tell you in our relationships, there's many, many times in the relationship aspect of our life that that transformation, that revelation comes into their life many times after years of us pouring into their life. After years of somebody praying for them, serving them, loving them. Now, again, this isn't a call to be taken advantage of it for somebody to steal from you or take from you. You got to protect the things of your life.
But it's a call for us to always want the best and look for the best and try to help them find how we can best serve them and to pour our life into them. And to be patient in the journey. I've actually had family members say to me, yeah, I've given up praying for them. I've actually had people say that to me over the years.
And I'm like, don't you love them? Yeah, but they're just never going to get it. Well, you never know when they're going to get it. Guess what?
The Holy Spirit loves them every bit as much as you do. Why are you giving up on them? We pray and form. Put them in some place where you see their name every day and pray for them.
There are houses in this city that when I drive by them, I knew a teenager, when I was a youth pastor, raised in that home. And that home now to me is a marker when I drive by those homes to pray for that teenager to steal. As far as I know, it's not living for God. I got two or three of them.
When I drive by them, I say, I think about them. They're like, God, you know what they're doing? I haven't heard anything out of them. That means they're not living for you.
They're living for you. They'd be calling me. God, whatever they're at, whatever they're doing, moving their life today. Because you know what?
I know the Holy Spirit knows exactly where they're at. I know the Holy Spirit loves them. I know God sent His Son to die for them on the cross. I know the Holy Spirit wants to convict them.
I want to be a part of that prayer for them that God will move in their life. And so I want to call you. You may have somebody you've witnessed to and you've witnessed to and you're thinking, you know, every time I ask them to come to something, they just scoff at me. And I just want to tell you, ask again, keep asking, keep inviting, keep doing what you can do to be a witness to them.
Keep praying for them. And keep building that relationship so that when the day comes that God begins to move in their life, they're thinking about you and they're calling you. And they're saying, hey, can you help me? I need to understand.
We heard Jamie Kemp talk about this with a young man a couple of weeks ago on Sunday morning in Indonesia that he poured into his life for several years. And almost weekly, Jamie, if you remember, Jamie said to this kid, you ready to give your life to Christ? I said, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not. And then one day that answer changed.
Well not yet. Not yet. And Jamie took note of the change. And then the night came when the young man called Jamie and said, I think I'm ready for this in the middle of the night.
Was it worth being patient? I just want to challenge it. We want to get people here to church on Easter Sunday. We want to pray that people get saved.
We're going to pray on Sunday night and Monday night. We're going to prayer times this week about asking God to move in people's lives. And I believe that this is the pivotal point in the journey for many people this Easter where they have moved down through this journey coming to Christ and this Easter they will cross the line. But you may be working with somebody.
There's still a couple of years away. Invite them anyway. Keep talking to them. They say, why are you doing this?
They say, you know, I'm going to keep doing this. You know, it's 2am. And I love you so much. I'm going to see you come to know Christ the way I do.
I just want to invite you. I'm not coming. I'm not coming. I'm going to invite you next Easter.
One of these days you'll be ready because I'm praying for you. I'm asking God to move in your life. And just be patient. Just be patient.
Don't be offended. Don't be, you know, they rejected me again. Okay. We'll keep praying for you.
And let God do His work because He loves them. Amen. Let's stand again. Let's come down on the altar.
Amen. You love the Lord today? Are you glad somebody was patient with you? Amen.
Are you glad somebody shared with you? Amen. That's okay. Now you said, thank God they made me go to church.
Well that was our wife saying, come go to church with me. You know, whether that was a friend inviting you and sharing faith with you. You know, whatever it was, aren't you glad now that you're a Christian? But that happened.
And there's somebody out there right now that maybe they're not too excited about you giving them an invitation or sending them one. But someday they're going to look back and go, I'm glad they did. I'm glad they did. Because see at the end of all of this, Jesus brings light to the full to us.
At the end of all this, the world's better when Jesus is in our lives. And at the end of all of this, heaven's our home when Jesus is in our lives. Amen. So maybe if you have in your mind right now and name somebody to mail this suit, how many do you have one already?
Okay, how many of you need to get one? Raise your hand. We're going to pray for that right now. All right, Father, you see those of us who have these in our, who have these and we want to know who you'd have us to mail them to this week.
Father, some of us in this room, we may have a bunch of people you want us to mail them to. And so Father, I pray you just give us faith and patience to do that. To look at their names and addresses and jot a little note to them and invite them to come. So Father, we pray you'd anoint us to hear those names, to hear those people, whether it's a co-worker or a landlord or an old friend that we haven't seen for a while or a relative.
Father, whoever it might be, lay their name upon our heart so that we can be faithful to do this very thing. So Father, touch us and anoint us. Lord, you see those who you've already named, laid their name upon their heart. And we just pray for them right now.
That when this comes into their home and they open it up and they read it and they see a note from us on it, a little word from us. I say, I'd love you to come and I'd love to see you. Let me know what service you'll be there and I'll meet you. Father, let it just spark something in their heart and say, yeah, you know, I need to go on Easter.
I should go on Easter. Just tear the walls and the excuses of the enemy down. Father, we're doing different things this year. You know them.
We've got Saturday night service and three on Sunday morning. Lord, we don't know how all that's going to work. We're just doing our best to compel people to come. I pray you'd use every one of those services in a mighty way and direct us and all of them.
Now, Father, these invitations, we pray you give us boldness to hand people in Vites, Lord. Father, when we're at a store or we're at work or Father, wherever we may be in our neighborhood that you'd just stir in our hearts to give people an invitation. And so Lord, we just pray that you're annoying to everything that we do. Protect the unity of the church.
Protect your will inside of our lives and help us to go on boldness and in strength. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen.
Listen, why is this the man that wins souls? Why is this the man that wins souls? So let's go out and scatter. This is what we're doing as a church.
You know, like I told you, we're sending out 10,000 direct mail pieces all throughout our community. And so here's what we're hoping. We're hoping those go out. And as we put stuff on Facebook and other social media, you can copy that over to other social media settings that you may use, that your friends will get those and see them.
And then they'll get either handed an invite from you or they'll get another invitation in the mail from you. And then all of that just continue to pile onto them and the Spirit of God will move in their life. So when you mail this, pray over it. When you have these in your pocket, pray God, show me who to give these two and just let's just be praying together because we want to see people come to Christ.
The most important thing that we're going to have in person's life is when they come to Christ. And we're called to be a part of that. We've heard this from scripture these last two weeks. We're called to be a part of that.
And so your help in just sharing on Facebook and on your other social media sites, this helps get the word into our community and the people around us. And I've got some people who live a long way away. When I post stuff on that, they'll write me and say, I can't come. I live in California.
And I'm like, yeah, I know, go to church someplace. You know, they do have churches in California. It's okay. But just, you know, have fun with it and just encourage people and in the middle of all that.
And we believe that God's going to change lives. Amen. Father, we know there are people who are lost. They don't even know what they're doing that's wrong.
They got the enemy building values in their life that are far from you, that are destructive to our community, destructive to them. And Lord, we wanted to see the light of your gospel. So tonight we ask you to help us. And Father, if there are people in our life where we have, you know, we've blown it, we haven't lived a credible life, we've lived in ways where we need to repent, give us the courage, give us the courage to repent before you and before them so that our life can become that credible life that influences them.
And Father, with those who we're in long-term relationships with, help us to be patient in the journey, patient in the journey, never giving up, never doubting, but believing that you're moving in their life as we talk to them in Jesus name. Amen. Amen. Let me share with you one thing on the Wednesday night, after Easter, on the Wednesday night after Easter, we're going to show a video in here.
It's going to be a joint service, one joint service in here on what is truth. And this video will help you understand some of the arguments of the day and how to understand and talk about what is really true. And so we're going to take a night and do that and then we're going to launch into some other series stuff a week after that. But don't forget that first Wednesday night after Easter, that's what we're going to do here in the auditorium.
All right, God bless you. I love you going to the name of the Lord and me. It's joy being your heart.