Bringing People to Jesus

We all have a need to have our sins forgiven, and believers in Christ get to play a part in bringing people to Jesus so he can meet that need. Join us as we look at the encounter with Jesus and the paralyzed man in Mark 2:1-12.

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Good morning, Westside. Hey, it is always a good Sunday when the chair carts come out. Amen. Seeing new chairs added. So glad you're here today. Hey, welcome Murray State students. If you're a Murray State student, will you just uh say go racers? Yeah, isn't it great to hear that? So glad that you're here uh uh today. Hey, anytime a church without a pastor, it's a lot of responsibility on their staff. I'm so thankful for Braden and Micah and Ken and others. Will you just join me in just thanking them for the great work they're doing during this uh interim time? So several years ago I was pastoring a church and I got a frantic call from my wife. She said, get home now. So what's wrong, hon? She said, He's lost. He's lost. We can't find him anywhere. I said, honey, who's lost? She said, our dog Parker is lost. She said, I came home from school, picked the kids up, came home from school, and we can't find the dog anywhere. She said, I'm driving around the neighborhood looking for the dog. You're the kids are on their bicycles driving through looking for the dog. Your dad's here going door to door asking if anyone's seen this little white dog. We can't find him. As I'm rushing out to my car, I said, Have you checked the closet? Sometimes he likes to go hide in my closet and and and falls asleep back there. No, he's not in your closet. He's in the basement. Sometimes he'll go down the stairs and he's he's scared to come back up the stairs. No, he's not in the basement. Well, what about the backyard? Did someone leave the gate open? No, the gate's shut. We can't find him. Get home now. I said, Well, honey, let's retrace our steps. What did you do with the dog after you picked him up from the groomer? The groomer? Yeah, this morning I dropped him off with the groomer. You were going to pick him up after school. Hey, kids, I think we know where the dog is. Have you been there before? Well, you're frantically searching for something that's lost. Well, today we're going to dive into Mark chapter 2 in our series Encounters with Jesus, and we're going to look at the truth of how God allows you and I to be part of his great mission to seek out those who are lost. The scripture calls those who are apart from God as lost, not a derogatory phrase, but rather a truthful phrase to say, without Jesus, our lives are lost. And God allows you and I to be part of his great mission to seek out the lost. So we come to Mark chapter 2, a passage of scripture that may be familiar to many of you about a paralyzed man and his friends who have an encounter with Jesus. Let's pick up here in Mark chapter 2. And when he returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. And many were gathered together so that there was no more room, not even at the door, and he was preaching the word to them. Now, we know that Jesus was born at Bethlehem. We know he grew up in Nazareth, but Capernaum was the home base of his ministry. It says so here. It was the hometown of Peter, where Peter was born and raised, and it's where Jesus made the home base during his time in Galilee. In fact, today, if you go to the city of Capernaum, there's a large sign outside the city of Capernaum that says, Welcome to Capernaum, the hometown of Jesus. And when people heard that Jesus was home, they gathered. So many people gathered that there was no more room for people, according to Mark. So this week I dropped my middle child off for her freshman year of college at Asbury University. And it was an exciting and tearful, you parents understand, and college students know that's a bittersweet thing for your parents are really excited about your next steps, but it's very sad. When we dropped her off at Asbury, they had a worship service with parents and freshmen to kind of like start the school year. And so we were there at the worship service in the historic Hughes Auditorium. It was in that auditorium that Asbury has experienced two uh revival services, two uh campus-wide revivals. In fact, the last one was just a couple years ago, you may have heard of it. It was this like 178-hour long revival, and so many people gathered there that you could not even get in. We went one night, and not only was the room packed, the aisles were packed, the line to get into the sanctuary was about a two-hour wait to get into the worship service. I mean, I'm picturing that type of scene that Jesus is in Capernaum. And when Jesus shows up, people gather. Continues verse 3. And they came, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. So somewhere in this town is a paralyzed man. The Greek there literally means he was loosed on one side, meaning that he was paralyzed. Maybe it was just one side, maybe it was just a waist down. We're not sure how he was found in that situation, if he was born that way, if he had a tragic accident. But these four friends know if we can get our friend to Jesus, if our friend can have an encounter with Jesus, Jesus can change his life. Amen? And so these four friends do the work of bringing their friend to Jesus. They understood how important it is to bring people to have an encounter with Jesus. The question I want to ask this morning is what are we as individuals and what are we as a church and what are we as a group of churches doing to bring people to Jesus? I mean, that's the mission of your church. Westside is doing an incredible job helping people have an encounter with Jesus, bringing people to Jesus. You do that in a variety of ways, and you've seen that through the incredible amount of baptisms this church has had over the last couple years. You know, unfortunately that's not true of every church. Let me ask you a question. How many of you uh like fishing? Any of you consider yourself a fisher? Yeah. Yeah. You know, we're in the great Great Lakes. It feels like the Great Lakes, the land between the lakes area of Kentucky, lots of great fish in there at Barclay and Kentucky Lake. If you're a fisherman, you know that you need to know where to go. The right, you need to have the right bait for the right kind of fish, right? The right environment, maybe the right time of day. I'm not a big fisherman, so I don't know what all goes into it, but a lot of patience. And sometimes you come back with a big haul of fish, and sometimes you don't come back with hardly any at all. You usually come back smelling like the fish if you spent much time on the lake. Now, other people, your speed may be more like, hey, we take care of an aquarium. Any of you ever owned an aquarium before? Growing up, we had this big, like 40-gallon aquarium. And here's what here's how you want to set up your aquarium. You want to have the bright colored, beautiful fish swimming around your aquarium. Not any of these dingy uh fish. You want the right number of fish. You don't want the aquarium to look too full, but you don't want it to look too empty. You want those bright-colored rocks nestled at the bottom of the aquarium. You want one of those little castles that the fish can swim through. Maybe the little scuba diver there, you know, with those bubbles coming up. You want the aquarium that needs to be the right temperature. It needs to be a right pH balance. It needs to be clean. You've got to keep the tank clean. And you feed the fish. Now you want to make sure you have fish that will get along because there's certain fish that, if you put in the tank, will kill the other fish, right? They'll fight the other fish and and eat them actually. And if you do all that, you've got this great aquarium. Let me ask you this question. Did God call your church to be fishers of men or keepers of the aquarium? Because I think there's gonna be this great temptation in American churches that we just want to make sure we've got the right kind of people. They're not gonna fight. We're gonna keep the tank clean. Keep it the right temperature. We don't want too many and it feels uncomfortable. We don't want too few and it feels too empty. As long as we keep it clean, keep the fish fed, keep it at the right temperature and keep it all balanced, we've got this great aquarium to admire. But that's not what God called the church to, is it? God called the church to be fishers of men. And that takes hard work. That means we're going where the fish are. That means we're we we are we are knowing the fish. It means we're putting in lots of time, and sometimes it takes patience. Sometimes we come back smelling like the fish. God's called your church, and your church is doing a great job of this, and continue to do this, to be fishers of men, not just keepers of the aquarium. That's important for a church. It's important that we work with other churches that do that. I work for the Kentucky Baptist Convention, which is a network of 2,350 like-minded churches in the state of Kentucky. Your church is one of those great 200,350 churches. And together, we believe it's important that together we are fishers of men. And we do that with things like, as Braden said, Murray State BCM. We have Baptist campus ministries on 35 different college campuses. Um, our foster care program, 1,282 foster children cared for last year because of Kentucky Baptist. Our church planning. Right now, as we worship, there's a group of people worshiping in Arabic in northern Kentucky because you helped plant a church there with other Kentucky Baptist churches. We're working together to do ministry together we couldn't do apart. And that's possible because churches give of their offerings through missions money, through the cooperative program to help support these works, because we believe churches should be about the mission of bringing people to Jesus. Hey, that's not just true of a church, that's not just true of a network of churches, that should be true of the people in the church. Amen. That God has called you to bring lost people to have an encounter with Him. Who are you bringing to Jesus? Who is that person that's on the mat that you have? Maybe you just have a corner and it's you and a group of friends that are bringing that girl in your hall at the dorm to Jesus, or maybe it's a group of you that that guy you go golfing with and the three of you are helping bring him to Jesus. Or maybe it's in a family and your brother-in-law, you know he's lost, but you are working with others to bring him to Jesus. Who's that one you're bringing to Jesus? I want to put this step before these a couple steps before you. One is I'm gonna ask the Lord, I'm gonna want you to ask the Lord to identify to you someone who is close to you but far from God. How many of you right now, if you think about that question, who is someone who is close to you but far from God? Someone that you love dearly, you care for, but you know that they are far from God. If you have a person that comes to your mind, would you just lift your hand up real fast? Yeah. Those of you who don't have that person that comes to your mind, I want you to ask the Lord to help you identify who that person could be. And then we want you to intercede on their behalf. Intercede is a fancy word to say pray. It's just pastors use that so we have all eye points here in just a second. You'll see that, right? Intercede means we are interceding on them. We are praying that the Lord will move in their hearts. That's so important, isn't it? Because we don't save anyone, it's the Lord that does the saving. We're asking the Lord to save people. Now, I was I was convicted once many years ago. I was in a church service, and the person preaching asked this question. He said, if the Lord saved every single person that you prayed for him to save this week, how many people would be saved? And that week, confessionally, my answer would have been zero. I'd prayed. I'd prayed about a lot of things. Oh Lord, uh help so-and-so who's lost um uh you know, lost a loved one. Lord, help so-and-so who's having surgery. Lord, help me get a girlfriend. I mean, I prayed about a lot of things, you know how we do? But I wasn't praying for the most important thing. And that was for people who are close to me but far from God to come to know Christ as Lord and Savior. So we intercede on their behalf. Uh third, we we intentionally invest in relationships, not in a manipulative way, but simply say, hey, I care about this person and I want to have a relationship with them so that I can lastly invite them to Jesus. Now, you may invite them to church, ultimately you're seeking to invite them to Jesus. So you're looking to identify who that person is that's close to you but far from God. Secondly, you're interceding, you're praying that they would come to know Christ as Savior. Third, you're intentionally investing in that relationship. And fourth, you're inviting them to Jesus. Tell you a story about how this played out one time. Um, when I was pastoring in church, we did an emphasis where we asked people to identify one person that they wanted to see come to know Christ as Savior this year and write their name down. At the end of the service, people came forward. You can picture this on little note cards. They wrote the name of a person. Perhaps you've done this at your church or at a church you were at before, and they put them in this glass bowls in the front of the church, and we began praying for those people. Well, a 13-year-old girl came forward and wrote the name of a girl on her basketball team. No one in the family were believers. And she had a burden. The Lord had placed the burden. She had been praying, Lord, identify, help me identify someone who needs Jesus. And she wrote down the name of the girl on her basketball team. Well, over the course of the next eight months, she sought opportunities to one, pray for her, but two, share the gospel with her, invited her to church, invited her to youth group. The girl came to summer camp at crossings and came to know Jesus as Lord and Savior, the first person in her family. Because that 13-year-old girl was intentional in inviting her to know Jesus. Well, she goes home, that new Christian, and she shares with her sister, and now her sister becomes a believer. The father, who is a retired Kentucky State trooper, sees this change in his two daughters, and he comes, meets me in the office as the pastor, and he becomes a believer. We baptized this guy at the church in his late 50s. And then the mom, who had grown up in a more of an atheistic, very liberal type home, had had this grown up with this belief that maybe Christians weren't the best people to be around. She starts seeing her husband and her two daughters, and it takes about a couple years. But this past summer we had the chance to baptize her for coming to know Jesus as Lord and Savior. And it all started because the Lord laid a name on the heart of a 13-year-old girl to bring her friend to Jesus. Who has God laid on your heart to come to know Christ as Lord? Story continues in Mark chapter 2. And they came, verse 3, bringing to him a paralytic carried by four men. And when they could not get near him because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him. And when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. Because it probably took them a long time to get their friend to Jesus. Remember, they're carrying a grown man on a mat, like a bed sheet or a stretcher type thing. They're carrying him on this mat to go to Jesus. By the time they get there, they navigate the streets of Capernaum, they finally make it to the house where Jesus is teaching. The crowd has already consumed the entire house. They've consumed the courtyard, they consume the streets around him, and they cannot get their friend to Jesus. Now, they had a decision right there. They were met with disappointment. Met with disappointment. We want to get him to Jesus, but there's an obstacle in the way. Now, the man on the mat had learned disappointment. He couldn't dance, he couldn't walk, he couldn't do the things other people could do. His life had been full of disappointment. But these friends are not willing to give up. These friends are not willing to give up getting their friend to Jesus. I mean, they're like, hey, this guy's heavy. We carried him this far, but he's gonna have to walk back home. Amen. And so they came up with a plan. Well, we can't go through. Now, these guys, this is this is Galilee. This is the northern part of Israel. This is the countryside. So these are like these four hillbillies from Galilee, okay, is when I'm picturing these guys, Bubba and Tommy and Willie and Billy, right? And they're like, they're in they're ingenious, okay? They're ingenious. They're thinking, we can't go through the crowd. What if we go over the crowd? And so they go up on top of the roof and they start to dig a hole to bring their friend to have an encounter with Jesus. Now, sometimes getting people to Jesus takes hard work. Sometimes it is hard work getting our friends to Jesus. You know, in ministry, and not just ministry as Christians, here's here's it's I equate it to farming. That it's like a minister gets up early, starts with hard work, tills the ground, prepares the soil, plants the seed, and then goes home and begs God for rain. You see, there's a part that we play, but we don't play the full part. We till the ground, we prepare the soil, we plant the seed in the lives of the people that we love that are close to us but far from God, but it's dependent on God to do the great work. It's dependent on God to bring the rain. And so these four guys have dug a hole in the roof and they are working hard to get their friend to Jesus. And here's what happens. And when they cannot get near him because of the crowd, that's verse four, they removed the roof above him, and when they had made an opening, they let down the bed on which the paralytic lay. And when Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, Son, your sins are forgiven. As Jesus is preaching, picture the scene. As he's preaching to the crowd, a room full of people, like they definitely had to bring in more chairs for that service, right? Like a room full of people, and then they start to hear a sound up on the roof. What is that? Then they start to see some debris fall from the ceiling. And then they see a little ray of light come down and hit into the middle of the floor. And then they see a hole open up in these four hillbilly heads looking down into the room. And then they see a man lying on a stretcher being lowered down. Looks like uh I was at the Garth concert in Indianapolis two days ago. Looks like Garth Brooks coming into that concert, alright? Picture the scene. Jesus preaching to the crowd. He's talking about the kingdom of God. He's talking about the forgiveness of sin. He's talking about the holiness of our wonderful Father. He's talking about the salvation that's offered only through him alone. Talking about the wide and the narrow road. He's teaching the people, and all of a sudden, as he's teaching, this man, full-grown man, starts coming down into the room. Now, if you were an orchestra playing, this is where the music would start to swell. As Jesus, the Lord of all creation, the one who walks on water, the one who put the stars into existence and knows them by name, the one who calms the storm on the sea, the one who knows the inner thoughts of every heart, the one who has power over all things, walks over to the man's mat, the man who had not walked in years, perhaps not even in his entire life, the man who is desperate to be able to walk, the man whose friends knew that an encounter with Jesus could save his life. Jesus ghosts to the man, the man who obviously is lame, he's paralyzed. Jesus lays his hands on the man's mat and he says these words, your sins are forgiven. And the four heel bullies on the top side are like, is it gonna do anything about the legs? No, no, he just said something about sin. What does he know? The legs don't work. We fixing the telling. I mean, the disciples like Jesus, the man was not just a prop. I mean, the guy's here because he can't walk. I mean, this is Peter's hometown. Peter likely knew this guy. Peter's like, hey, Jesus, we need a little hillie on the mate over here. I mean, the reason they brought him here was to have his legs healed, and here you're talking about something about sin. I mean, what happens when Jesus doesn't do what you expect him to do? What happens when Jesus doesn't give the response that they expected him to give? Peter's asking John, John, do you think Jesus is going to heal him? John's like, I don't know. He asks, Thomas, Thomas, do you think Jesus knows his legs don't work? And of course, Thomas is like, I mean, I doubt it. I mean, that's Thomas, right? I mean, the greatest need this man has is he can't walk. The reason he came to Jesus is because his legs don't work. The most obvious need he has is for his paralysis to be healed. But could it be that Jesus knew of an even greater need this man had? Could it be that Jesus knew that this man's greatest problem was not his inability to walk, but his inability to walk with God? I mean, if Jesus had only healed his legs and not dealt with his sin, the man would have walked straight into hell. That's what would have happened. But Jesus knew that the man's greatest. The man's greatest problem was not his legs, but his heart. Jesus knew that if I forgive his sin, even if I don't heal his legs, he may be lame on earth, but he'll be walking the golden streets of heaven. See, Jesus knows that the man's greatest problem is not that he has paralyzed legs, but that he has a paralyzed heart. And brothers and sisters, we are all born with a paralyzed heart. We are born with a heart that only beats for ourselves and doesn't beat for God. The Bible says that all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. The Bible says that the wages of those sin is death, separation from God. Our greatest need is to be saved. Now God cares about the other. We see later Jesus heals the man's legs. But he's showing us that the man's greatest need is not to have his legs healed. His greatest need is to have his sin forgiven. What's your greatest need? You may have come here saying, Lord, if you just, Lord, if you just restore my marriage, I'll follow you. Lord, if you just heal me of this cancer, I'll start worshiping you. Lord, Lord, if you bring my prodigal child back home, then I'll be faithful in going to church. But we see here that Jesus changes the man's life and then he changes his circumstance, not the other way around. Oftentimes we want Lord to change our circumstance, and then we'll, Lord, I'll change my heart. But what God wants to do is he wants to bring forgiveness of your sin, and then that leads to greater joy and abundant life in Him. You know, the greatest problem that our world faces today is lostness. The greatest problem, as horrible as it is, is not natural disaster. As devastating as it is, it's not cancer. As heartbreaking as it is, it's not poverty and humanitarian crises. The greatest problem our world affects and the world has today is lostness because it affects every single person. Paul Chitwood, president of the International Mission Board, says that the IMB estimates that every day about 172,000 people will die not knowing Jesus as Lord and Savior. And so Jesus addresses the man's greatest need, and his greatest need was to know Jesus and to be forgiven of his sin. Story continues. Verse 6. Now some of the scribes were sitting there questioning in their hearts, why does this man speak like that? He's blaspheming. Who can forgive sins but God alone? And here the scribes actually say something correct. Who can forgive sins but God alone? That is exactly right, but what they're not recognizing is that Jesus is God. It continues, verse 8. And immediately Jesus, perceiving in his spirit that they questioned within themselves, said to them, Why do you question these things in your heart? Which is easier to say to the paralytic son, your sins are forgiven, or to say, rise, take up your bed and walk. You see, Jesus is so incredible, he wins an imaginary argument. He knows what they're thinking. You can fool me easily. You can fool Pastor Braden. You could maybe even fool your parent. But you can never fool God. He knows exactly what you're thinking. And Jesus, to show his authority, says, not only am I going to forgive the guy's sin, but I'm going to heal his body. He asked the question, which is more difficult? To say your sins are forgiven, or to say rise, take up your mat and walk. He's saying which is greater, which is more important, which is more difficult to do. To say rise, take up your mat and walk, takes Jesus three seconds and seven words. But to say your sins are forgiven will cost Jesus his very life. Jesus is saying to heal his legs is great. But what's more costly is to forgive a sin. And I'm going to go to Calvary to do that. Verse 10. But that you may know that the Son of God has authority on earth to forgive sins. He said to the paralytic, I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home. And he rose and immediately picked up his bed and went out before them all, so that they are all amazed and glorified God, saying, We have never seen anything like this. Jesus cares about the legs. He heals the legs, right? And he's showing, he's using healing as a picture of salvation. We see healing in scripture happen for two reasons. One, to show God's power. To show God's power, to show that He is God. Secondly, we see healings at times to communicate a physical sign of what's spiritually happened. Jesus has forgiven his sin. He has taken his heart of stone and turned into a heart of a saved heart that beats for God. A paralyzed heart to a heart of repentance. To show the people a picture of that spiritual change, he heals the man's legs. The paralyzed legs are now able to walk again. And Jesus is showing this is what I've done to his heart. The greater thing. He's showing us, yes, he cares about our physical needs. But this is what I can do with our spiritual needs. I don't know what brought you here today. I don't know what you're dealing with. I want you to know the Lord cares deeply. But perhaps he used what's happened to you physically or emotionally or mentally to bring you to him to have an encounter, to have your greatest need met. And that is the need to make him your Lord. Making him your Lord means that God, I'm no longer on the throne of my life. I am now taking myself off the throne and I'm putting you on the throne as my Lord. It says here that they were able to accept, they were able to be forgiven because Jesus saw their faith. In the book of Mark, the word faith is mentioned four times, and all four times it denotes action, not just not speaking, but there's action with the faith. And here's what this happens: these guys have faith. They bring their friend to Jesus. The friend has faith that Jesus will heal him. Faith is an active type of thing. And so how we are forgiven by God is we are having faith that he died on the cross, he rose from the grave, that he can forgive us of our sin and he is our Lord and Savior. You display faith all the time. You're displaying faith right now. You came in this morning and you looked at that chair and said, I bet that chair would hold me. I think that chair is sturdy. I don't know what the weight capacity is on that chair, but I'm going to trust it. And I'm going to sit in that chair because I have faith that it will hold me up. And you're sitting right now in that chair, not worried at all whether that chair is going to hold you up. When we come to Jesus, we come to him in a similar way. Come to him saying, Lord, I have faith in you. I trust you to hold me. I trust in you and you alone to govern my life. I trust you and you alone to forgive me of my sin. I trust in you and you alone to set me free. Perhaps this morning some of you need to trust him in a sitting down kind of way. Placing your life in his hands. We're going to have a time of response here in a bit. And when we do, if you're here today and you've realized the greatest need I have is to be forgiven by Jesus, to follow Jesus, will you please come down front and talk to myself or Pastor Braden about your desire to follow Jesus as Lord and Savior? For the rest of us who have made that decision, there's another calling. The question we need to ask ourselves is this Who am I bringing to Jesus? Who do I currently have a corner of the mat and bringing them to know Jesus as Lord and Savior? Because it's incumbent on us that we are about the business of bringing people to Jesus. We let Jesus do the great work, right? We let Jesus do the miracle. We let Jesus heal forgive their sin. We can have no role in that, but we do have the role in preparing the soil, planting the seed, and bringing our friends to have an encounter with Jesus. Who are you bringing to Jesus? There's a story about a family with two preschool girls move in across the road from a dairy farmer. And this dairy farmer and his wife, the wife goes over across the road, knocks on the door. These two preschool girls come to the door, and the parents come to the door, and the dairy farmer invites them to church. She taught Sunday school at a small country church and invites the two preschool girls to go. The parents say, Sure, you can take our kids to church. The parents had grown up in church but had not been attending frequently. After several weeks of this, on the way to church, one of the preschoolers says, Well, that's where our cousins live, over in that house. And the dairy farmer asked, Well, do your cousins go to church? And they said, I don't think so. So the dairy farmer pulls over the side of the road, goes up to the house, knocks on the door. These two little boys, probably four and six years old, come running to the door, and mom and dad are there, and the dairy farmer asks, Would your boys like to go to church? The parents who were both Christians, but we're just not actively attending church. Their boys weren't going to church said, Sure, our boys can go to church with you. They get in the car with the cousins and they go to church. This continue for several weeks. Eventually, the parents start going to church. Both sets of parents. All four of those kids get saved. Both the dads become deacons, both the moms become Sunday school teachers. And they start to be leaders in that small little country church. When that six-year-old boy is now a teenager, he feels a call to ministry and makes that known to the church. And that little country church allows that little boy, now a teenager, to preach. With that dairy farmer sitting right there in the pew, watching the boy preach that she used to pick up from his home. That little boy goes off to college, goes to seminary, becomes an evangelist, then a pastor. And many years later, that little six-year-old boy has the opportunity to preach at Murray's West Side Baptist Church. All because when I was six years old, a dairy farmer knocked on my door and asked the question Would your boys like to go to church? Where would my life be? If it wasn't for a faithful dairy farmer's invitation, two godly parents who encouraged me in my faith, and a faithful pastor who mentored me so that I could come to Jesus? Who are the four people that are instrumental in your life bringing you to Jesus? Perhaps there's could there be a house on Dorne Road or Austin Court or Tracy Lane? Just waiting. One of you. Knock on the door. Would your boy like to go to church? Who are you bringing to Jesus? Let's pray, shall we? Father, we are in awe of your son Jesus. Who died on the cross for the forgiveness of sin? Who set us free because of an encounter we had with him? Lord, I pray that we would help other people have an encounter with you. Lord, would you lay on our heart right now someone that we are desperate to see come to know you as Savior? Lord, will you help us intercede on behalf of them, bringing them before you, begging, Lord, for you to move in their life. Lord, I recognize that in a room of this size, there are many people who have not yet made that decision. Maybe a friend brought them this morning. And while they didn't expect it, this could be the day that changed their life forever. Lord, I pray that you would bring conviction of sin to those who have yet to make you Lord and Savior, those who've yet to be baptized into your church, Father God, that you would bring conviction of sin, Lord, that you would help them see the man Jesus who lived, died to pay the penalty for our sin. And rose victorious, wants to have relationship with them. Lord, I pray you would move in their hearts, help them to respond. And Lord, we give you praise and glory to your holy, heavenly name. In the name of Christ we pray.