22nd September 2024

The Heart of Jesus for the Lost

Passage: Luke 15:1-4, Ephesians 2:20
Service Type:

Jesus’ parable of the lost sheep reveals His unwavering commitment to seeking the lost, even at the expense of leaving the ninety-nine. This priority should shape the Church’s mission, with every believer participating through their unique spiritual gifts. Whether through direct evangelism or supporting roles within the Church, all are called to be part of Christ’s mission. A thriving church is marked by rich fellowship, expository preaching, and a unified focus on reaching the lost, reflecting Jesus’ own heart and mission.

Automatically Generated Transcript

[00:00:00] In recent times I’ve been doing a number of different things. In the Bridging side I’ve been trying to draw attention to something to do with Jesus and His goals and where He puts His emphasis upon. To that end, we’ve been looking at, I want us to continue to look at Luke chapter 15. The first of three parables that Jesus gave is the lost sheep, the lost coin and the lost son. We’re not going to go over the whole of the chapter, but just read the first four verses of what you’ve already had read to you, but we’re going to put it on the screen again. What has really struck me to make me be hung up on this passage is something that I’d never actually noticed before. Part of the reason for noticing it is of course there’s a big difference back in Jesus’

[00:01:01] day as to how farming sheep, you know, looking after was done and what happens today. had spent time in Tasmania, on a sheep farm, and also a cattle farm, they had big dairy. But the man with whom we lived was the grandfather, and he put the dairy side into his son’s hands, and he looked after the sheep, and he used to come and wake us up in the morning and say, come on, and sometimes go out and look around at all the sheep. There’s a very big difference between farming now and farming back then. I wonder if someone can tell me some of the differences between what a sheep farmer did back then, as to what happens today, who can help you out, what is there about a sheep farmer that’s different today or different back then from today? Let me see, come on, if you know, put your hand up.

[00:02:05] Alright, fair few of you do. Okay, alright, well here’s someone down the front. They didn’t use motorbikes back then. Well done, well done. That’s better than what I was thinking. What else was it that they did not have back then? Yeah? So the chevits crop? No, they did have a shepherd’s crook. We don’t have shepherd’s crooks these days.

[00:02:35] But you’ve got the point, that’s one difference. Okay, back there. Yeah, fences, fences and when you have fences what it means is that you can have all the sheep kept in one spot quite nicely by the fences and its gates. We used to go down to visit one place in South Australia of my dad worked on a big property. There was a global library there, but it had sheep as well and we had a dog who was a spaniel sort of mixed with a blue Gila, and he loved going to visit that place. The reason I did the dog was that he’d chased a sheep around and we discovered that when they left the gate open he’d go out there and chase all

[00:03:26] sheep and gather them up, put them in the little paddock next, then once they were all settled down he gather them up again and herd them back. He’s having them going backwards and forwards, because he just loved the task of chasing them from one paddock to another. But in Jesus’ day, they didn’t have …there were no fences. In fact, if there were someone with a fair bit of property, they might have several shepherds who looked after their sheep. The way they looked after them wasn’t to fence them in but it was to train them to follow the shepherd. The shepherd would walk ahead and the sheep would just follow. And the ones that the shepherd got to know intimately they followed him everywhere. There was one other thing that they did back then in Jesus’ days in looking after the sheep. Someone told me one more thing that they sometimes but not always had. What is it that they used back

[00:04:22] back then the nearest thing to us having fences and having more than one paddock, what did they have? And particularly at night time it was useful for a good farmer to have one of these. What was it? I’m surprised. He has his rod. He had a rod to beat off the hounds or beat off the dogs or lions or whatever. And he had a crook which was mentioned before the crook. The crook was to gather the sheep in, which was being recalcitrant. You know, stubborn. They get the crook around the neck and pull them back back in where they should but the rod was to whack over the head the animals that came to eat the sheep. So the rod, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me the staff, I’m not sure which is which but one is to whack the dogs and the other is hook or the crook around the necks. But that’s not what I’m thinking of. There’s one other thing that they had to keep

[00:05:31] sheep safe? I think you know. Yeah sheep fold at night Exactly. Yeah and there’s different stories that are told as to whether they actually had a door. They had a space for the sheep to come in and out but it was made a door by the shepherd lying across its entrance. I’m sure it wasn’t the same in every place but this is the usual thing that you found But not many of the owners of many sheep had the money to have a very nice, tight little fold. And in the most cases, more often it was the shepherds they employed whose chief job was just to live with the sheep all the time, they would get the ones that knew them and they’d just follow them around and their presence was the safety for the sheep

[00:06:21] without necessarily having a fold. In our storyline that we’re giving in Acts 4, the tax collectors and the sinners were all drawing near to hear Him. One of the things you notice about the difference between churches today and back in Jesus’ days as to what he experienced was that there was something about Jesus that he didn’t repel the outsiders, they all used to come close and they wanted to hear Him. And the reason is that there’s something about Jesus that’s rather magnetic, that’s rather winsome and his teaching really struck a note, in the common person. The Bible tells us that common people heard Him gladly and by common it really means that that which is natural to human nature, just humanity as it is, caused people to listen

[00:07:25] to Jesus. And it happened with those who were sinners. Now you’ll discover that in terms of religion in our day across the last century or so as well, that the church has gotten into ill favour, meaning that the common people try and stay away. Isn’t that the truth about our generation? It’s not true about Jesus, but it is true about what is understood as Christianity. And there are varying responses that church people, Christian people, using the term in a very broad sense, Christian, have taken to respond to that, and some of them have responded by saying it’s because we have too many severe doctrines, the idea of heaven and hell. The idea that we are very strict on sins. That does happen amongst people, but it’s not what was the problem with Jesus, because he didn’t water down his strictures and what he taught that they should be doing. And yet,

[00:08:38] they love to come and gather and hear him. That is a fact about Jesus, even when it’s not a fact about the Church, but because the common people of our generations and the last maybe the last 100 years has been the world turning away from Christianity, that the common people try and keep their distance. It’s happening now in politics, where they seem to you know, militate against Christians, whereas they’ll let all the other religions have a good go. But somehow tell us that we’re wrong for teaching our doctrines when those doctrines are not one that they like. But that’s not a fact about Jesus, it’s a fact about our generation and maybe it’s also a fact about us. And that which happens to Jesus is what we need to learn somehow to be a church that will be what we experience as well. You know I was recently on a retreat at Fraser Island and a body of

[00:09:48] pastors come together and usually there’s maybe one new pastor there and one older one that’s dropped away. But the same set of people come. And we’re a bit of a band of brothers who share together about churches we all say the things about our church that’s going on and we all generally say good things about our church because we want the other other people to think that it’s doing well, and this last one that I was at was a fellow who had a bit of a sad story to tell me, and the sad story that he told me was about the fact that our union had chosen a very important person in the works and him to go down to a conference in New South Wales, and the conference was going to be one that they would present to the Government as to how we Baptist churches are, and he went down really eagerly glad to represent what he saw to be the truth of the scriptures and the Gospel and what churches

[00:10:58] are, and to present to the Government so that they wouldn’t have these silly ideas they keep getting about, saying that we can’t proselytise and you mustn’t use anything like conversion therapy, and you have to treat everyone the same, so you shouldn’t be frowning at homosexuality practice or to other things that the Bible disagrees with. But when he got there he discovered that the Baptist people had already set out what we had talked about and had ruled out all the controversial ones. They basically shut his mouth, he couldn’t tell the truth, and nor could the one in the Union who’d gone with him. So they went down there to this conference where the Christian people had taken on different philosophies as to what is the Church, and what should we be doing.

[00:11:58] They had a couple of pet names that have been happening across the last generation. I want to think that I’d better teach you about those in case you also find among those that you talk with outside the church as to how people are expecting us to be. The two terms that I want to elaborate on and explain what it is that might be wrong all, are called the emerging church or the missional church. They both have elements of truth about them, that churches gradually change, certainly in culture. It’s the fact that across time they develop slightly different understandings as to how we should be. I’m rather glad for some of them.

[00:12:48] Because in my young days, we had to wear little suits all Sunday long and we weren’t meant to do anything like go out to sport. And I still remember being allowed to kick the football across our own garden, but we were allowed to go down to the park. Another one was you weren’t allowed to buy any food on Sundays, because it meant someone wasn’t keeping the Sabbath, or the people who were running the shops. And if you keep populating them and going and buying

[00:13:19] their stuffs, you’re helping them to break the Old Testament laws, actually. But anyway, those were things which were attitudes to church people had that I think are – I’m glad they’re gone. But how it was construed when people talked about the emerging church and the missional church also have got elements of wrongness about them. And so let me just elaborate, for you, some of you already know these things I know

[00:13:53] but others of you, this might be news to you. But emerging church? What is that? Well emerging church, it’s really something in the late 20th Century and the early 21st Century where people took on the idea. It’s basically a northern hemisphere lead, but it affected Australia and New Zealand. And the idea was that you’d no longer used categories of there being a Conservative church that believed the Bible and a Liberal church that didn’t believe the Bible, they were categories of the previous era.

[00:14:34] I remember in theological colleges in which my dad was involved, that there was something about Queensland College that my dad made to be the case, where the people who got trained to be pastors, were trained that the Bible was God’s word and that it was true. But you could go to other seminaries and colleges where what they taught was that the Bible was basically good ideas, but not necessarily all true. And the other branches of Baptist Church training, which is down on some of the other states, had varying degrees of teaching the non conservative position. But what happened when the emerging Church came about is that they wanted to no longer bother with whether it was conservative or not conservative. They wanted to talk about the fact about what you do when you do Church. And what you do when you do Church

[00:15:41] Church is not talking about the doctrines but it’s rather being more interested in having what happens at church telling good stories or having a narrative that exemplified the sort of behaviour you wanted the people to have. It was a way of looking in the Bible as the Bible is trying to tell you by stories. It may not be true stories but they would to give you the idea as to how you’re meant to behave. There was emerging a church that just was different. So if you went along to a church that had emerged or was emerging, then you discover that what they did there was not the same old have a sermon. It also was applied to the songs that we sang and the hymns. So it wasn’t the old hymns which and in them, in an essence the doctrines of the Church were in the hymns. But the new things that were sung were things that were to give the good feelings, and it was a deconstruction

[00:16:48] of the way that our worship gets done. That was an emerging Church. We here are not an emerging church. One reason is that the church was founded by Jesus and his first apostles and the foundation is forever, until he takes us all to glory. And it doesn’t get founded a second time. This actually came up in One of our home groups as to whether or not you would always go to the scriptures to find out what available gifts of the spirit they would have. But there was a teacher in California who taught about church growth that you really get a long way when you realise that God has acted a second time and in the second time he was giving a Re-Foundation and there are different gifts that come out in the church that’s emerging because God’s doing the work again to set up what are the gifts of the Spirit. Now I just

[00:17:53] I jus reject that totally because I think we’re given the Scriptures once and for all. Although it’s not always clear by what is written in the Scriptures, do you look at all the passages and the gifts and some total, what’s there and are there ones available, or are they illustrative as to what type of gifts are possible, the way you interpret is still something you base on what God has found in the church of in the first place Christ and he doesn’t have any second moments of founding. They were founded by Jesus Christ, the centre-piece, the central stone, and in Ephesians 2.20 the fact that there are the apostles and the prophets and they’re the big rocks that go next to the central stone and they define the actual dimensions of the building which has been used in the illustration of the church.

[00:18:47] Jesus Christ, the big foundation block, and the one that’s going this way, apostles, and the one that’s going that way, which defines the orthogonal, that’s a right angle, the building is got specifications of it. It’s how they did their building back then. Using that as an illustration, Ephesians 2.20 said that the Church was founded on Jesus Christ, the central foundation stone and the apostles and the prophets. Now doesn’t mean that the word Apostle means being sent out, we don’t in every generation send people out, we just don’t use the Greek word apostolo but we use the Latin word misiṬo which means mission. So we still have missionaries but they don’t found the total church, the once and for all found the church over there in in Turkey or somewhere else that missionaries go but they take the

[00:19:46] Church founded by Jesus in the beginning it never needs to be founded again so the idea of there being an emerging church which is the new foundation is all about a bunkum, that’s why week by week from the scriptures someone like me in an Evangelical Church will preach expository from the scriptures because those scriptures, once given, are given forever. There were certain persons apostles, and certain persons who were prophets, which wrote what we have as scriptures. And those two have sets and given us the New Testament canon, as well as the Old Testament canon we got from the Jewish religion. So we have here a book that is, once and after all, the centre of Christianity. And there won’t be any giving of a new book, and even though there have been Baptists pastors who

[00:20:47] sent out emails to all the other pastors. I used to get them, I won’t say their names, one pastor said that because he believed he was a modern day Apostle. He said new light is coming, I’ll send it you and what he expected, is that we get from him the email and take that to be something of equal standing as this. I thought to myself how stupid is he for him to think we’re actually going to take his wisdom to be like the Word of God? I don’t ask of you that you take my wisdom to be the Word of God. It is my opportunity to open to you what the scripture says. It is the Word of God. An essential message, which is the Gospel is also understood to be the Word of God. That is what the Church was founded on in the first place and continues to have as its source of power and fruit every generation there is.

[00:21:47] The second term that I use the first term I have just been talking about is the Immersion merging church. But the second one is the missional church. It sounds a lot more biblical to talk about our church – that’s on mission. And the truthful part of the term missional church is that the church is meant to be on mission – and that’s something that is good and right, and it’s not an option for us to be a missional church. It is that when you let Jesus loose, he will do missioning. And here in this passage that I’ve got this morning and I’ve been harping on it a little bit, in Luke chapter 15, the thing that really struck me as I’d never noticed it before that keeps happening, you know. Because I’ve been over the Bible a lot of the times but I keep spotting stuffs I never really noticed before, and it’s there if you look on the screen, it says about him, Jesus, verse 3.

[00:22:47] So he told them this parable, what man of you, which person of you, what man is there, having a hundred sheep, if he’s lost one, it means he’s got 99 left, does not leave the 99. It’s the next little phrase that’s in the open country. Because this is an illustration based on him being a shepherd and the sheep have to follow him to be safe, he is their safety. It’s possible that he also might have a sheepfold somewhere but he’s not there with a sheep fold, but he’s been leading the sheep with While he’s there, his attention is on them as the chief thing. That tells us of course that when you have the gifts of leadership, that includes pastoral leadership, it is a major part of that, that is the care for the church. Every now and then, you get a young friar who gets trained in our colleges, who gets

[00:23:52] an idea of setting up a fantastic new way of reaching out to the neighbourhood and setting up a church and ignoring the existing members, he spends all his time on the project that he’s got and that always causes havoc. And one of my students did exactly that and made a rule in his church because he took it that he was being like Jesus going and seeking to lost. But he was abandoning the people who were the church people because a part of doing church is looking after them as well. There’s a twofold thing that pastors do. I got the idea wrongly in my head that the task of a pastor was just looking after the people. When I first went to college and got trained and I was put into the ordination tracks to eventually be ordained, but they said we’re not going to ordain you unless

[00:24:55] you recognise your call to spend your time in the church. And they put pressure on the church where I had been sent. I was the youth pastor. It was the Wyndham Baptist church, they put pressure on the leadership there. The existing pastor, who was my senior pastor, very good one, but they put pressure on him not to let me going off and taking crusades in other places.’ I don’t know why they did it, it was rather stupid but they hit me with a letter which said, you’ve got to stop being part-time and become full-time, and we’ll give you a full time salary and not go other places. And they said, this is what we’re asking you to do? The only trouble was that when the senior pastor, and I have told this story to the evening congregation, when the senior pastor had gone away on holidays, there had started a movement of God whereby people, it was an evangelistic movement, would come

[00:25:55] into Christ, every service. It was a special time, you cannot make that happen but it just started happening, and there was an evangelism time, and I had felt the Lord led meitch. and what was happening is that he’s, I don’t know where I got the idea, but that there were 16 messages I had to prepare, some other Crusader would be elsewhere in my itineration, that I’d have to go and pretend, and I did, I got 16 sermons ready, and then I got this letter from the church, you’re not to go anywhere else,

[00:26:30] but I said the Lord’s giving me 16 sermons and they’re all prepared. And the church didn’t relent so I had to resign and leave. And that was when the union said, well, you’re off our list as people who are being prepared to be ordained. They kicked me out, basically, of a college, even though my dad was the principal and he didn’t agree. But nonetheless, he wasn’t going to,

[00:26:57] but the system he was committed to be a part of. So I got kicked out of the Ordination track. I went back teaching and I earned enough money to be able to get my bank card out of the debt and use it to my ticket overseas and I went to study in Dallas and attended the Dallas Theological Seminary and went to the church in the middle of Dallas, which is the church that was the biggest Baptist Church in the world actually, First Baptist Church in Dallas

[00:27:32] And they had a preacher who was both a pastor and an evangelist. And God knew what He was doing. And I had a lot of things that, I had difficulty with my thesis because I had people who didn’t like me, my beliefs. And, but I had taken it to the chaplain and he was a man who had connections in Wheaton. And he agreed with me and told me to stick to my guns.

[00:28:01] come too many thousand miles to change the pitch in your propellers. Anyway. But I had to leave Dallas Seminary and they said stop this thesis you’re writing. It was on the side of evangelism and that being a good thing. And I had to leave and I thought boy I was having problems again. But what I didn’t know was, that man who was the fellow who gave me the good advice, that Chaplain, he was still on the board of the Billy Graham Crusade, and on which that was operating in Chicago, and involved with the Wheaton College. Eventually, when I went up there, they said, we’re going to send you home to Australia, and in Australia, you’ll be with Leighton Ford, and with the Graham team. And when I came here, I ended up, the person in charge of Operation Andrew. Andrew, I’d had to go along and see

[00:28:57] the leader of the Baptist denomination sitting in his office, and it was my role to see all the different denominations that organised Operation Andrew with them. I took brochures with Leighton Ford’s picture on the front and it had Leighton Ford, the Reverend Leighton Ford, and I put them down on the desk with a superintendent man, and so Leighton Ford, his denomination, Presbyterian, ordained him as an evangelist. Why can’t our denomination ordain me as an evangelist? I turned around and walked out. I asked him to do something about it. He took

[00:29:37] it to the body of people and it happened. That’s how I got ordained. The trouble was that in Queensland this group that ran our Baptist denomination had some influences. Not the total one, but of what is called this missional church. The missional church is good because it emphasizes that the church needs to be on mission. That’s the true part. The error part is, they believe that you’re not the church if you’re not on mission. The only part of you being church is when you’re on mission. And that has the reversed problem, not of emphasising mission but so over emphasising it, it doesn’t recognise the normal aspects of church life. That was the teaching that got one of my students to try and run the church by ignoring the church and just doing his outreach projects. And The idea of missional church is something

[00:30:42] which has also been propagated by people who don’t actually understand the mission the same way that we do. And they want to reconstruct what it is to be on mission, to be more how to give people our values, how to help the weak. And there’s good things that they put there but they make it that you’re on mission when you’re feeding the poor. Now, you can hear that there’s a truth in that. It’s certainly like Jesus,

[00:31:12] he didn’t make a difference between telling him about the kingdom of God and also helping them when he saw the need. We are to do both. But nonetheless, the mission is very easily discerned in the scriptures, Matthew 28, Luke 16, if you wanna look them up, the mission is about the gospel. And here we have an illustration of Jesus doing it. And this is in verse 4, which man of you

[00:31:45] would not leave the 99 in open country? That’s the part that got to me. In open country with a lot of sheep, they’re in danger. There’s no fences, they’re not near any place to put them in a container at night. they don’t have their shepherd with him, because the shepherd, Jesus, has a priority to go out and find the one lost person. The one lost person is always on his heart. Jesus, He’s moved by the lead of one little sheep, stuck

[00:32:21] in, I just imagine, stuck with His horns in some bush He can’t get out of. Or He doesn’t know where the rest are gone. But Jesus goes. And if you read the rest of it, it’s fantastic. No, no, no, no, just same passage, wonderful. It’s there, isn’t it? OK. He leaves the 99 in open country and goes after the one that is lost.

[00:32:51] And then the next bit, how much emphasis on reaching the lost until he finds it. And I learned something about the heart of Jesus that he never gives up on a lost person. And even though they fall over many times or get stuck in a number of bushes or have no idea of how to get back, Jesus persists with this priority of chasing down the lost until he finds it. You know, seeing this, this is a basic

[00:33:37] for me because seeing this helped me interpret something that had been going on in my life. I once had found a little book about a certain pastor and a past generation who didn’t sort of do all the normal things that people with dog collars were meant to do, and he used to get some imperative of some person who was lost. He doesn’t leave any lost person because there’s so many of them around, but he would get something that the Lord led him to. And he’d go out and seek to find how he can bring that person in and never give up. And the book is written about stories

[00:34:18] of times he didn’t succeed and other times when he did succeed. They hit me like an arrow. I think I have a calling in the overall range of things that are to be done, to be like this, where the Lord gives me projects to find some lost person and never give up, until they are discovered and taken back. I think there are some gifts that God gives to some to be like that. there is certainly not a lot of pastors who have that gift but there are some who do. I think that the Scriptures teach about the church, about the various gifts, and it does include amongst those, that there are some people whose task is to go and find the lost. Now you may have noticed in our church there are some people who do that quite a lot.

[00:35:15] There seems to be something they do very much diligently. We used to have some people who worked on the young people. at Griffith University who used to round them up and bring them to our church and then take them to some Christian family’s place, they’d arranged this beforehand for lunch. So these people from overseas, they are largely overseas students would see a Christian family and they were a pretty good strategy because these people from overseas would see something that they knew nothing of and they were gifted. They eventually moved off and went to South Australia so we lost that ministry in our church but there is a ministry that some have given been given where by it is to go out and keep

[00:36:03] looking for the lost until they find them. There is an organization which is called Overseas Christian Students which seeks to do that and it has a marvelous ministry in Australia and different states, capital cities made majorly, and it is that they see the opportunity we have with those who come from overseas to be directed to find Christ by having that ministry. I have missed that ministry by that young couple back then. That was really 20 years ago now … not 20, 15 years ago now, and if you are someone who has the call of God to do that, please come and wave your hands and tell us you’d like to get … have another try. And that’s what happens with groups that are in the university.

[00:36:56] That they spend time to seek to bring to Christ these people who have never really had a chance to understand the gospel. is a fascinating thing when you meet someone and they have never really heard that there is a gospel. I think that is something that is a wonderful thing. But not everybody has that gift. But there’s another truth. I’m going to finish with this one in a minute, that I suddenly realised from this parable that I’d never noticed before. That is that the heart of what is a gift, is that somehow Jesus is in it. He has this capacity that he can be seen by the lost people as a repoive to their bad behaviour. But at the same time they love him. There’s something about Jesus that is so attractive. When he works on them it is that they should be called to come and know him, which is the heart of

[00:37:59] evangelism. I think that happens when people who are outside of Christ often have a lot of things in their lives that are not truly Christian, and when they do become Christians they have a journey of catch-up, trying to find out how they’re meant to be living. But that is not undo the fact that Jesus has a priority in interest in them. Now here’s the point that struck me in these last few weeks, and that is that Jesus leading His church into mission, which is what the Michelin church is meant to be all about, Not redefining what that mission is, like some of them do. But what it means is that the whole of the church is wrapped up in this mission call, even though the part that you might have to play may be something within the church.

[00:38:59] Because the whole church goes with Jesus in the task to find the lost. We have got a carols night that we’ve put on, and we’ve often talked about that carols night, how it could be best done. There’s different ways, all of which have got things, good things that could be said of it in the park or here in having a carols have singing in our church or have something in the car park. That’s something that the church people can be involved in though their gift may be running games out in the car park or maybe providing the hospitality in the food. Or it might be the people over in this corner but only the people who are involved in the music and they provide a part of what is our church.

[00:39:51] But we the whole church have got the call to go with Jesus to use our gift whatever it be that it makes this church one that is following Jesus out in where the lost people are, and that Jesus is going until he finds it. We are not to change the priorities. We are not to say, we’re going to be a church that is for worship alone and we’re not going to do the other. Even the worship is what you bring people into. Oh we don’t do the worship just to be in our culture, we bring it to be that which brings people before God. There’s something very powerful about a worshipping church when outsiders come in.

[00:40:43] The New Testament speaks of this in the book of Corinthians and it talks about the outsider coming into the church and somehow in the midst of all the different gifts happening. questioning the prophetic gift, it’s mentioning various things”. But they’ve struck a heart and they say, God is amongst you of a truth. We are having a time in our church, I got it in the Bulletin and I was a bit braggy there, because I said, what is it that makes our church successful, not the Bulletin that affair connected, I think it was, and I think the thing that’s making our church successful, at least one of the things, is that there There’s a sense of fellowship that’s been happening in our church. It began when some of us started praying for the fellowship of the church. Then we changed the business at the back, the coffee and whatever, and people started

[00:41:35] staying. It’s after the service is over. Sometimes I have to leave before the others do to get home and not have been here an extra two hours. and that people stay and stay and stay. We actually have a problem with some of the young adults after an evening service and they want to get in sync, I don’t know whether they use these instruments here and what they do,

[00:42:01] but we have the problem with some of the neighbors complaining, because it’s 10 o’clock and its bright music coming out of the church. It’s actually a good thing that there’s something that happens in the church where there’s a fellowship people love to join in songs that exhibit it and demonstrate it and allow them to join in it, that has been happening in our Church. Something the Spirit does is why I think our Church is being successful. The only other reason I think it has is not only has the fellowship greatly increased – and our home groups have been very much a part of that

[00:42:42] as well but it is also because… We make what is happening on Sunday have as essential peace, the opening of the word of God. And when you have the Scriptures exposited, not just fancy talks but something of the Bible is on the screen, and some of the meaning and you can go away having seen something you hadn’t realised before. That’s what I’m a lot of the people who are coming here … That was a bit of a slap in the face to me, because I used to think my value to the place was being an evangelist until one member of our church told me that my … I forget how he worded it, but my value was in the exposition. I never really wanted to be a preacher to Christians.

[00:43:33] I always wanted to be an evangelist, and I’ve had times doing that in my past. but God is doing something now. And I get a message to teach the passage. And there’s something about when you hear the voice of Jesus from the Scriptures that makes you want to lap it up all the more. And I think that the fellowship and the exposition of the Scriptures are some of the major things that are going in our church. And this is not Jesus doing one the not the other.

[00:44:09] This is Jesus involved in the worship. It’s Jesus involved in going out and looking for the lost sheep because we go with Jesus in his ministry, even if our participation part is something behind the scenes. You’re involved in Jesus going and finding the lost one by using your gift, even if it’s that which operates only in the church. Because the gifts in the spirit is how you join in Jesus’ ministry, and all of them contribute together and make for a church that’s succeeding. and that’s why it’s a fantastic thing to know that you’ve got Jesus in the church,

[00:44:55] and you’ve got Jesus who is leading the way. And he is the one who gives, as the scriptures teach us, to have a priority. He’s not going to worry about leaving the ninety-nine alone for a bit and go out and find the lost one. How long for till he finds it? It tells us of the priority of Jesus. It is to find the lost. And whatever be your gift to use, it involves you in the work of Jesus and the Church. you’re involved in that finding the lost ones too”. Let’s have a word of prayer. Heavenly Father I pray for our Church that you will go on blessing her, that

[00:45:39] you’ll go on encouraging the people who are seeking to serve you, whichever service or area of operation is theirs because you have all the areas covered and we’re involved in the success of the other people using their gifts. I’m I’m listening to the kiddies downstairs.” And that’s been another area that’s been growing. And, Father, we praise you for those children, some of whom will come to Christ in early years, some of whom will be given a platform that will lead them to know you in teenage years. And some of them will take that knowledge in the rest of their lives to be with Jesus wherever He leads them, and we thank you for that ministry, too, in Jesus’ name. Amen.

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