True Christian witness flows not from memorised doctrine or intellectual knowledge alone, but from a heart overflowing with love for Jesus Christ. Just as a person in love cannot help speaking about their beloved, those who spend time with Christ and worship Him deeply will speak of Him to others naturally and authentically. This principle is demonstrated through Scripture and live examples. Authentic spiritual authority and effective witness come not through eloquence or education alone, but through a genuine, heart-level relationship with the Lord Jesus. When others recognise that we have “been with Jesus,” our words carry His authority and power.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] What I want to talk tonight about has to do with whether Christianity is largely a matter of the head or Christianity is a major matter of the heart, or some connection between the two. Is the Gospel something that’s mainly a set of things, propositions to believe, or is the Gospel about a person to receive? And we have here in this statement in the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus is questioning how it is some people are calling him Lord, and he’s questioning them because although they say he’s Lord they don’t do what he wants. So the final verse, 46, why do you call me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I tell you? But in the lead up in the earlier verses, he’s talking about the facts of fruit and trees. I like the way that Jesus often used agricultural or farming animal illustrations to get across the point about Christian behavior and the Christian nature. Now obviously the trees are not Christians, but he’s using it as a metaphor here, says for no good tree bears bad fruit. Now literally that’s not always true if the fruit falls off and stays on the ground, it can become pretty rotten. But there’s a truth in what he’s saying, no good tree bears bad fruit, nor again does a bad tree bear good fruit. For each fruit is known by its own fruit, and he’s drawing a relationship of how fruit trees exemplify about us Christians.

[00:01:57] And he’s talking about good things coming out of us, and you can’t get terribly many good things if what we are is bad. The lesson is quite strong. For figs are not gathered from thorn bushes, nor are grapes picked from a bramble bush. A good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of the evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. Another title I had for tonight’s message was speaking from the heart. And the reason why I’m interested in the topic, of course, of speaking from the heart is because we are about the business in our church of getting ourselves willing to and trained about how to speak for Christ. And it isn’t just the case that we have services to worship the Lord, that’s the major reason we come to worship Him, but it’s also the case that we’re here to be trained and to

[00:03:07] be inspired and to have a spirituality produced in us that will cause us to then take the message out to people who really need it outside of the church. And the statement there, for out of the abundance of the heart, His mouth speaks. That verse has caught my attention because it’s not only saying the general truth he’s earlier being hinting out about good trees and good fruit and bad trees and bad fruit, he’s also talking about where that goodness has landed or has taken roots, a better way to say. And how much of the Christian message, the dynamic of what it is to know Christ is something that’s gone deep in our hearts and the little extra word that’s in there that’s important for now, for out of the abundance of the heart, His mouth speaks.

[00:04:07] I learned that a long time ago living at the college where my dad worked and there were students from all sorts of places and there came a young man to that college who had just won a prize through Killogg’s Cornflakes competition and the prize was a brand new car which he brought and proudly drove in. He was the young man to come from a country place into the college, the particular college I refer to as an Adelaide, and he’d come on down to the college because he believed he was called to train for the ministry. But the weekend before he left his home church, they had a fellowship in the house of the pastor and the pastor gave a very stern talk to the young people there and he being one about not starting relationships too quick and rather trying to warn them to get their

[00:05:09] studies done and to really look to the law bodies leading them and not just be always thinking about, I think it was a rather silly talk because you can’t talk young people out of having an eye as to who’s sitting near them and at church, but anyway he had himself just started a relationship with that pastor’s daughter but the pastor didn’t know it so he thought perhaps the reason why he was giving the talk was because he did know it, but anyway he had to leave and go down to Adelaide to go to the college and they had become really close, his daughter and young man, and they used to write letters between them. This is back in the days where there’s not messages on phones that you can get but this is the days of writing letters, hey postman can’t you leave me a letter, you know the song.

[00:06:06] Anyway, letters would come from her, what she didn’t know writing them was that she wrote lots of pages so the letter was bulky and she also put perfume on them and what she didn’t know was that when your mail came to the college you got put up on a common board behind those straps and you’d have to walk along and find the ones for you and I was a 14 year old teenager going to school living there because of my dad and I often walked by that notice board and I could smell something interesting had arrived and so I would at the meal table sit at this fellow’s table because by the time he ate tea his evening meal he’d read the letter and I was curious to know how that would change the conversation. He was someone who was very good at talking to me about the things young high schoolers are interested in, Leslie Carr’s, his Cortina that he’d won was the type of car I admired

[00:07:13] and my dad I talked him into a Cortina and that’s another story but there were lots of things like that that I usually spoke with this young man at the table but somehow after getting this letter there was only one topic of the conversation. It didn’t matter where you started talking about something you’d say that reminds me about what? And you say her name what she said. And off he go. And we who often sat at his table got to know that it didn’t matter where you tried to get him talking, it seemed to make him tell you more about her. And I learned by observation what I’m telling you now the truth of this verse. Out of the abundance of the heart, his mouth speaks. A lot of people come and ask, you know, how can I get to be a person that talks for Christ? It’s one of the most difficult areas of my Christian life, they say. It’s not my natural thing to do, to bail

[00:08:12] people up, they sometimes think it is, or talk to people, or speak about Jesus, just the name Jesus, to say in a conversation with a group of people that don’t know Christ, takes a bit of courage. And that question is often asked and the answer that I have to give us tonight simply is this verse out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks. And if you want to be a person that speaks about Christ, I want to tell you that it needs to be that you don’t allow your Christianity just to be the ideas you stack up in your head. Just to be the decisions you’ve made of lifestyle that you want to live alone, they’re all good things, I’m not knocking that. But what really counts that causes you to speak is where your heart is at. And the one way to become a person that knows how to speak for Christ is to learn to build up your love for Jesus, because it will burst out somehow, somewhere. I saw that happen on the youth camp once where some of the young

[00:09:28] people were getting keen and came and asked questions of me about how can we speak for Christ. And I often would give them advice that probably wasn’t good advice, relationship wise, but I’d tell them, why don’t you invite the person to come see you for an evening, you’ve got something to tell them, say, and their curiosity will bring them. And when you get them there, you can tell them that you’ve always been wanting, what you’re revealing there is of your heart, you’ve been wanting to share with them something that’s precious and people listen to you when they begin to hear it as coming out of the precious area of your heart. If you want to know the secret to being a person that gets to talk to a lot of people about Christ, the answer is to go deeper in love with Jesus, because it’s love in the heart that makes the mouth speak. We’ll move on to another few verses that I’ve got here to elaborate on this theme, but the theme is

[00:10:45] that how to learn to speak from your heart. Let’s go to another spot and we’ll make that this time in Acts 4 and verse 20. And here we have, if we follow through, there’s a bit of narrative you need to get a grip on to see the weight of the verse when we get there. When they saw the boldness of Peter and John, you know the question of how do I get to speak for Christ is well exhibited example answered when you read the book of Acts at people like Peter and John and the first apostles. Why was it that they got to not be able to stop speaking about Christ? It’s simple. It’s simple, they were with Jesus for three years and you can’t be with Jesus without something happening in your heart, some attachment that you get to him. And when the people saw the boldness of Peter and John, they are coming to the same conclusion without realizing it and they perceived that they were uneducated common men and they were astonished and they recognized that they had been

[00:11:59] with Jesus. And the way that you fan the love for Christ is premised on, it’s based on, who he is. You can’t get close to Jesus without learning to love him. You’ll either get scolded by what he says to you and retreat or you’ll find yourself loving him. They were astonished and they recognized that they had been with Jesus. Now if you want to be a person that does learn how to speak from the heart, work out some strategies of spending time with Jesus. Why you have to work out a few strategies is because we as Christians, if you’ve come to Christ then you do have the Holy Spirit but you also have the remains of the fall, Adam and Eve and the sin, the original sin. And it’s in the outer parts of a body, if not our deeper parts, it’s certainly in the very nature that we have as humans. The Bible calls that the flesh in contrast, contra distinction to the spirit. And because the flesh still carries the fault of the fall,

[00:13:15] we have something in us that rebels rebels against what God wants and what the Spirit would lead us to, what Jesus stands for. There’s something in us that can be problematic. And so the reason why there are some people that you meet who discover that they’re really not really getting gotten to the stage where they own their Christianity amongst others, they’re somewhat careful about telling that their Christians less to change their acceptance in different places is that they just don’t love Christ enough. And one of the ways to get over that is to get with him more because closeness to Christ causes you to get convicted anyway and causes you to have in your heart something that means that you can’t stop talking about him. I saw that in that young man come down from the country and we used to have giggles, my older brother who was still young. When we talked about the students, we picked up the name

[00:14:27] of this particular student, we’d have a laugh because he never stopped talking about that silly girl up where he came from. He married her in the end, of course, because he loved her. And how you know what people love is very much made clear by what you hear them talk. And the closer you get to Christ, the more ashamed you get of wrongful talk. The more moved you get to want to speak of him and find opportunity to tell what it is to be a Christian or to share what he has done for you. One of the signs within Christian Fellowship when we do have our sharing time is whether or not people only share on the human scale of things. My latest news. I have lots of latest news. My car was giving trouble, it cost me thousands to get it fixed, but it’s going terrific now. And you can get me talking about cars any old day because I love cars, that talk,

[00:15:35] but not as much as what I love Jesus. As a matter of fact, there was some event in my high school years that changed to swap. Because amongst my friends, I was known for someone who’s all up on the latest cars. And I could talk with my friends about all the models and about their motors, the compression ratios and how good they were and whether or not they would be more into understeer or oversteer when you slid them in the corner. And I was an expert. I rather relished in the fact people thought me a bigger expert than I really was, but they were just going on my talking. And I had a good friend and his father was one of the chief leaders of the Chrysler Company and in Adelaide they made the Chrysler Valiance there at the factory where his dad and so his dad always took

[00:16:32] Chrysler Valiance home and he would bring them to school. I’d bring my dad’s Cortina and we would talk about which was the best at taking around corners. We actually set up an experiment where the other lads would be standing on the corner to see which car we could get through quicker and in a good controlled slide. And dad’s Cortina was very good on corners, so I won. The other guy would come with his Valiance and they had this soft suspension. He came wallowing through the corner and made me win more easily. I made sure we didn’t have an acceleration race because the Valiance would win that. But anyway, that was what cars, so people were used to me, Jim, talking about cars. That was what I was always on about. When I got 16 and that’ll educate your license, what a day

[00:17:23] that was and what dad didn’t know about how many races his Cortina won. Anyway, but something happened to me in that time and it happened to me that one of the other students at the college was someone that was always talking about Jesus and he used to talk to anybody. If I had a friend come over from school, I’d take him down to just meet this next bloke. I won’t say his name but I take my friend down and the student who’s of quite a personality, he was from New Zealand and he was a man that had done many different things and could talk about him, that sort of person and he would lead the conversation. But if I took a friend down there, the student, I might just tell you his name. His name is Kevin and he would witness to this person, this friend of mine. In fact,

[00:18:21] he took it as the reason why I brought the lad, which was largely true, I’d take all my friends down to see him, and he’d tell them about Jesus. The thing is that they listened. Why did they listen? Because he somehow communicated something wonderful about his relationship to Christ. There’s something very witnessing when people speak from their heart, just like the student who talked about his later fiancé. He couldn’t stop talking about her. We laughed at that being the case, but we somehow admired it as well. I was learning in observation the lesson that if you want to learn to talk about Jesus, you want to get over the hurdles that you might feel, because there is a bit of a spiritual thing you do when you open the conversation about Christ. It’s not an easy thing to get to be a person that causes everybody to think you’re a religious quack, or think that just the very conversation about

[00:19:26] Jesus polarizes. There’s a spiritual happening. Oh, I used to experiment. When I found out this lesson for myself, I used to experiment, and what happened if I turned a casual conversation to mention about Christ. I was doing university by this time, and in the university, in the psychology course, there was a man. He was actually a trained minister, but he had a nervous breakdown, so he taught university instead in psychology. He’d give his ideas. Some of them were okay, and some of them were wonky. On one occasion, he said something that really I didn’t agree with. My reading of the scripture didn’t agree with, and so I put my hand up and gave my comment. His comment had been about what is a Christian, and his description of a Christian was just to do with their psychological makeup, or he had some explanation. I said, no, a Christian is a person that’s come to know Christ. Then I quoted a Bible verse, he that has the Son has

[00:20:32] life. He that doesn’t have the Son does not have life. The whole crowd – well, there wasn’t that big, 30 or so students sitting up all listened, and they started asking me questions, and the professor was trying to get back his crowd, but they weren’t listening to him. They ignored him standing at the front down there, and they kept asking me questions. Something happened in that moment was very costly for me. I used to get into trouble for speaking out times when they weren’t wanting so. But there’s something powerful and the more that I listen to these students that I’m telling you about and the more I spent time in following their precedent in prayer, something would happen when I talked about Jesus. And that’s what we read here. When they saw the boldness of Peter and John and perceived that they were uneducated common men, they were

[00:21:38] astonished and they recognized that they had been with Jesus. You can’t stop this spiritual impact of the presence of Christ in the time that you spend. But seeing the man who was healed and standing beside them, they had nothing to say in opposition. But when they commanded them to leave the council, and so they’ve got the Christ, Peter and John, whoever it is in the council being told off, they conferred with one another testifying, what shall we do with these men for a notable sign has been performed through them. And it’s evident to all of the inhabitants of Jerusalem and we can’t deny it. But in order that they may spread no further, the ideas may spread no further amongst the people, let’s warn them to speak no more to anyone in his

[00:22:35] name. So they called them, they charged them not to speak or teach at all in the name of Jesus, but Peter and John answered them. Now these are Galilean people from the country and these are answering the big high volute, you know, intellectual Jewish leaders. Whether it’s riot in the sight of God to listen to you rather than to God, I bet that essay gave a shock to those leaders. You must judge for we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. Now I tell you that Christian witness is done by people who’ve seen something and heard something. It’s not just the doctrines alone, that’s clear good. I’m not knocking good doctrines. But I’m saying that what gives you an ability to speak to others is when you’ve seen Jesus at work, when you’ve heard from him. And in your Bible

[00:23:37] readings they’ve been, sometimes they were just normal readings that you read and that’s that, but other times he speaks to you and you’ve heard from him in the Scriptures. And when you’re a person that has been in receipt of hearing and seeing things from Jesus, then you get to become like these disciples we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard. My high school years started with me being known for playing cricket and for loving cars and being dangerous with his father’s Cortina, but my years finished by the whole school knowing that I love Jesus. Somehow he organised that. I know I’ve told this story before but the youth group at the place where we went, the youth leader, he put up on the notice board a list of youth teams of young

[00:24:43] people who were all going to go out and speak for Christ somewhere. He didn’t even ask us, he wasn’t, that was a mistake really. He should have got us to know what he was doing, but we just went along and there were all the teams I saw my name and where they planned and already arranged for my team to go to to go and be involved in giving a witness. Guess where it was? My school. There’s a lot of, at that school, really tough fellas who had to live there. They came from the country and they were the borders and they were mostly the ones on Sunday who went to the chapel service that we’d been booked in to speak at. And at the organisation for that meeting I was scared because I didn’t really want to turn up at my school and go overboard with my

[00:25:34] Christianity and suffer what I knew might be the result from the borders. So in the organisation night that was called at someone’s home I actually pulled the couches so that I could sit in the corner of the room of a couch on either side making me less visible and all the somewhat older young men who are planning this service we’re all going to do together. Planned it all and they were all types who wanted to take the roles and they didn’t think to give me one and I was happy. So we arrived at our school on the designed Sunday morning and the chaplain. He organised for us to get ready to take the service. He’s real pleased to do it. He happened to be the coach of my cricket team and it didn’t do well for me because he looked down the list of participants and he said you

[00:26:27] haven’t given anything to Jimmy. And he pulled that his pen and he wrote in testimony. And I was trying hard not to say too much at all and he wrote testimony and on that morning every eye watched for some reason. I know now why because it wasn’t because I necessarily had swift words they had another very good speaker who was quite famous footballer who also spoke but it was me they listened to. They all sat forward and listened. Why? Because what counts is not what reputation you might have and they can you know say he’s a famous singer or he’s good at this or he won the swimming and you know not those things alone. They do get a bit of attention to people but there’s something that brings about an authority that’s far stronger. I want to

[00:27:32] tell you it’s the authority of Jesus when he’s in the event and he speaks through it and that’s what happened to Peter and John. They took knowledge that they had been with Jesus when they further threatened them they let them go finding no way to punish them because of the people for all were praising God for what had happened for the man on whom the sign of healing was performed was more than he was more than 40 years old. Well we’ll go to another passage we’re just tracking through why people listen. It’s in my thesis I’m advancing to you is that they listen when you’re speaking from your heart when you’ve got something to say about what Christ has said to you and what he’s done. So go into the next spot which will be Matthew 28 16 to 20.

[00:28:27] Actually I had the joy of assembling some of these Bible verses and I discovered there’s more than I could use in one sermon and they’re all saying the same thing. You have the ability to speak for Jesus when you get close to him and what counts is not just the knowledge in your mind not just the culture that you might be good at. I wasn’t good at that culture back then I want to tell you but I found a secret. Now the 11 disciples went to Galilee to the mountain this is after the resurrection of Christ and he’s told them to meet them at mountain and Galilee to which Jesus had directed them and when they saw him they worshipped him. I’m introducing a new thought to the thesis I’m developing with you about you’ll be able to speak for him when you love him

[00:29:27] and I want to tell you one of the steps that bringing you to love him is when you learn to worship him. Partly because of what worship in the Bible is actually about worship involves a number of things where you praise the person where you recite the things they’ve done there’s various aspects of worship. But But the little word there, worship in the Greek, proskuno, has a very special meaning. Pros means towards, and the kuno bit means kiss. And what worship was is when you met someone that you greatly revered, you bent down, you looked towards them, and you kissed towards them. Worship is actually about the heart. We think worship’s all about music, music is a good medium for this to be expressed,

[00:30:25] but what makes it worship is not just that it’s music, not just that we might say good doctrines, but what makes it worship is that it’s an expression of the heart. When they saw him, they worshiped him. They had a good reason, because he died and they’d seen him dead. They knew about the body in the tomb. When some had been to look for it, they found it was empty. And eventually he spoke to different ones and told them where he’d meet them. And they’d go together, these ones, to a bit of a trip to get to the spot. And when they saw him, they worshipped him. I know why they worshipped him.

[00:31:08] One, because they’d loved him when he led them. But two, because he had gone through death as he’d promised, and he’d come up the other side. No wonder they worshipped him. The idea of worship isn’t only love, but it’s also to worship the recognition of the deity of Jesus. And when you know him as the one who’s raised from the dead, when that’s got a grip of you and you understand of Jesus that he’s the resurrected Saviour, you worship him, although some doubted. I love the way the scripture includes the truth in all these things, some doubted. But Jesus came and said to them, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,

[00:31:56] baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, that means listen to this, behold, I am with you always to the end of the age. One of the things that happens to people who spend time in worship of Jesus is that Jesus goes with them out from that worship time, and it is his presence that makes other people listen. You want to know the secret of being a preacher? I found the secret. It’s not that I’m necessarily a good preacher and I’ve been told many times at college and wherever I don’t, my sermon designs are not very good.

[00:32:46] I get told that I did at the Baptist College. And the man who was the preaching professor told me off for not having good introductions. I have not escaped from that sort of criticism because when I go home, Michelle, who teaches English in high school and grade 11 and 12, I have to teach persuasive speech and she tells me all the things I don’t do well. And she tells me about what I should do this. I’ve been trying to learn a few of them and I’m doing better now. I do announce to you than what I used to. But I know I’ve never been a good organizer of somehow how you do the talk. But I’m telling you a secret.

[00:33:28] I know that when I find time to worship Jesus and I go to some event that I’ve been invited to speak at, there’s something that happens that’s not because of me. When you worship him, he goes with you, which is what the Great Commission promised then. I’ll be with you always, even to the end of the age, and it’s the presence of Christ and his authority coming out that actually causes people to get a real hit that comes from the spiritual realm. That’s the secret of knowing how to speak with power. It is to speak from the heart, and by the heart I didn’t mean just be soppy. I didn’t mean just have emotional tricks or something. I meant speaking from something that comes from your heart because Jesus has dealt with

[00:34:32] you there. If you speak just from your mind, you’ll make people’s heads learn something you’ll affect their mind. Or you won’t of us, they don’t agree with you. But if you speak from your heart the message goes deeper. And when you’re a person that has spent time with Jesus, it’s somehow quite uncanny how the people in the receiving end can spot it. And at my high school, my whole school saw that in me, and I began to have lunch times where if I just stood somewhere, they ended up a group of people asking questions. And I’d tell them of Jesus.

[00:35:19] One of my good friends became a Christian that way at the beginning. He had lots of reasons why not, but eventually he said to me, he said, Jim, you’ve got something. I don’t know what it is, but I want it. And I said, it’s not a something, it’s a someone, someone. And I told him about Jesus. And there is nothing more powerful in all the world than a Christian who’s been learning how to worship that starts telling people about Jesus. I’ve been thinking about our evening congregations and the fact that we’re growing some more people coming here. We had a bit of a hit on the evening congregation by the success of the mornings when we have

[00:36:12] the higher grounds and people stay sometimes, a couple of hours after the service finishes, and everybody seems to love the fellowship there. But it meant that people don’t need to come again to an evening service when they’ve had a big dose in the morning, but we’re collecting some others, some of you, who are coming. And I’ve been praying about and thinking about what to do with our evening service. And what I’ve reflected on is what happened to me when I was young. I got going. You know, another of those students at that college had a little church he was given to. He was quite young. There’s hardly any people, there was only one teenager.

[00:36:57] And he saw what was happening to me. And he said, Jim, will you come along and preach? So I gave my first proper sermon in the church at that fellow’s place, and the one young person came forward to come to Christ that night. And I think there’s a power when you get young people who know the Lord, who speak to their peers. I am 75, and I’m going to go on preaching, but I think I need some help from the generation you represent. And what I’m wanting to happen here is to begin to give opportunity to some of you who were.

[00:37:48] I started when I was, what was I, 16 back then? And 18. I came up here to Brisbane and became known as a preacher at 18. And for folk to get to have a chance to speak, sometimes you’re in a church and you’ve got to be 35 and very much a family person or something before you even get a start. Well, I don’t want us to miss getting a crop of people who are seeking to see whether they’ve got a gift to do that or not by having a go. And some that I think you already know that you have a gift to do this, and we’ll start with them and get them to take turns. I’m still going to preach from time to time, but I’m going to get, what I want to happen

[00:38:38] is that there gets to be a hotbed here of people who’ve heard and understand the message I’m giving you tonight, that if you let Christ be developed in your love of Him in your heart, you won’t be able to stop yourself speaking or you’ll want to find out where your gifts are. Not everybody has a gift to be a public speaker, others have other gifts that are equally a part of the church, but you’ve got to experiment to find and how you find out is trying this and trying that. Sometimes you can be a terrible flop at first, but you do it by having an opportunity and to use our Sunday evenings where we regularly have different things. We’ve got something really going well with our worship and our music, but I’m wanting

[00:39:28] there to be a hotbed of people who know how to pray. And because you’re put on deck, you go and have an all night of prayer when hopefully there’s no assignments to be done or whatever, but you learn from being someone who’s had a taste. When I came up here to Queensland at the age of 17, turning 18, and Youth for Christ picked on me and used to give me opportunities, and that was a grand time. And I got other young folk joining with me and we had a camaraderie ship, if you like, of young fry who were going to turn the world upside down so we understood of ourselves, that we had a good go. And we had some pretty big results.

[00:40:22] And I think our church should be aiming at getting something going with our evening services. Will you join with me in that, even if that’s not what you see as perhaps your area? But to join with a prayer that God will make this a place where his spirit moves. One thing we can do is bring others in and let there be something that’s happening because people will recognize that we have been with Jesus. I had a whole lot of verses I was going to lay on you tonight, but I think I said enough and we’ll have a word of prayer, but keep your ears open because that will start. I’ve already started talking to some people whether they might want to get on the list and we’ll see how we go. Let’s have a prayer.

[00:41:13] Heavenly Father, we thank you in Jesus’ name for the Scriptures. Those people took knowledge that they had been with Jesus and it’s the being with Jesus that works. How to be a person that speaks with power is to have been with Jesus. Help us to live that out, Lord. It’s a constant thing for me to have to always have a decision to get back to my prayer times. Help every person listening to my voice, Father, to be challenged tonight to walk with you more closely and ask you where you want them to demonstrate that presence of Jesus through them to others. We ask you, Lord, to speak to us all and to take this moment and make it forceful for the Kingdom. In Jesus’ name we pray. Amen.