SPEAKER_00: Well, we have uh a wonderful day planned for you guys this morning.
SPEAKER_00: And I I really do hope that you've come anticipating uh our mission Sunday as something that's gonna be meaningful for you and exciting for you.
SPEAKER_00: We have a guest speaker.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna introduce him in just a minute.
SPEAKER_00: Um but before we get into that, I just have a few things I want to share.
SPEAKER_00: The uh most of you already know me, but for those of you that don't, I'm Chad Mason, the missions pastor here at First Baptists, and uh just celebrated three years of being here, and it's just been incredible to see how God has been using thank you, how God has been using this church to do things among the nations.
SPEAKER_00: And I want to read you this verse.
SPEAKER_00: Uh Sandra Radke read it yesterday at our our um our training.
SPEAKER_00: We we talked about how are we gonna reach the unreached yesterday, uh Saturday morning.
SPEAKER_00: And she read this it says, Look at the nations and watch.
SPEAKER_00: Be utterly amazed, for I'm gonna do something in your days that you would not believe, even if you were told.
SPEAKER_00: And there's places in the world today where God is just opening people's hearts to the gospel in ways and in manners that he's never done in history.
SPEAKER_00: There's a place uh in northern India called Bihar, and for a hundred years it was called the graveyard of missions.
SPEAKER_00: It was places where people would send missionaries and they would spend their whole career and come back having little to no fruit.
SPEAKER_00: And the missionary agencies would say, What are we gonna do in this place?
SPEAKER_00: We keep sending, but nobody's responding.
SPEAKER_00: But since about the mid-1990s, God has been doing something unique and special in that space.
SPEAKER_00: And just a few weeks ago, when we came home, we got to see uh movements that were engaging hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of new believers.
SPEAKER_00: We we were seeing that God is moving in Bihar State.
SPEAKER_00: They say over 10 million new believers in the last 20 years in that area.
SPEAKER_00: And and this is the thing: if you were to tell William Carey in 1792 that one day there would be a movement of millions in North India, he would say there's no way.
SPEAKER_00: If you were to tell a missionary in the 1980s that God was gonna do something there, they would also say there's not this isn't happening in this space like that.
SPEAKER_00: But what we're seeing happening there right now is is akin to what we see in the book of Acts, where people are responding to the gospel in droves.
SPEAKER_00: Even Pastor Jason said he was there in that space 25 years ago for an engineering trip, and he thought, this place is so hard, people are not gonna respond to the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: And so, seeing this time, how God was moving among them.
SPEAKER_00: I want to tell you that's just one example of many where God is working in unique and special ways around the world.
SPEAKER_00: And it is such an incredible thing that we get to be a part of in this day and age that there are mysiologists, people who study missions and movements that are saying we're within striking distance.
SPEAKER_00: Within the next five to ten years, we could see a church planted among every unreached people group on the planet for the first time in history.
SPEAKER_00: We're praying to that end, and we're praying that God would burden our hearts so that we would turn our affections and our resources and our attention and our time to see those things accomplished.
SPEAKER_00: And honestly, it's amazing how First Baptist is responding to these opportunities and the needs.
SPEAKER_00: And I just want to tell you, I'm so thankful to be a part of this community of faith.
SPEAKER_00: I'm so thankful to be encouraged by you so many times.
SPEAKER_00: Uh uh over and over, the community that is the stakeholders in our church that are guiding and leading and participating and making decisions for missions continues to grow over and over, and it's such an exciting thing to be a part of.
SPEAKER_00: Church, it is a thrilling thing for me to be a part of this community and to be a part of what God is doing among us.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, it really is incredible.
SPEAKER_00: Many of you know that today we have a luncheon after church, and we're we're hosting, we're inviting you to come have lunch and hear about the mission trips in 2026.
SPEAKER_00: We have a table about perspectives.
SPEAKER_00: We're gonna host it for the third time, and probably the last time for a few years in 2026.
SPEAKER_00: So, anyone that wants information about mission trips or perspectives, or or really even just what we're doing, mission wise, come and join us for lunch.
SPEAKER_00: We'd love to chat with you and talk to you and tell you more, like what's the next step that you can take.
SPEAKER_00: But God is working among us, and we're inviting you to jump in at any level.
SPEAKER_00: I just want to learn more.
SPEAKER_00: I want to jump in and go on some crazy places.
SPEAKER_00: God has called people in our church to lead our trips.
SPEAKER_00: There are more going on.
SPEAKER_00: We have nine trips going out in 2026.
SPEAKER_00: We had five this year.
SPEAKER_00: In addition to the nine, there's another five or six that are gonna be small strategic teams that are not open to everybody.
SPEAKER_00: So we may have 15 different teams going out in 2026.
SPEAKER_00: Praise God, he is moving within our midst, and he's moving our people to engage in his work.
SPEAKER_00: I feel like there's something else I was supposed to say, but we're gonna go ahead and move on.
SPEAKER_00: I have a pleasure to introduce you to a friend of mine.
SPEAKER_00: Um he was here with his family earlier this year, uh, this summer, and we interviewed his wife on the stage, uh, Natalie.
SPEAKER_00: Um my friend has pictured and his family's up there.
SPEAKER_00: And he is gonna share with us this morning about how God has been calling him and using his family for so many years.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, I met them first when they were missionaries to China.
SPEAKER_00: They were working in in uh in that part of Asia.
SPEAKER_00: They've been there for 15 years, they speak fluent Mandarin.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, incredible how God used them.
SPEAKER_00: But during COVID, they came home, they got locked out of the country like many other missionaries at that time.
SPEAKER_00: And now they've made a change and they're working in the Middle East, and God is using them.
SPEAKER_00: Many of our teams have interacted with them as we've gone through that area and uh and have gotten to know them very well.
SPEAKER_00: So, Andy, we'd love to have you come up.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, he's been a good friend, he's a coworker, he has been encouraging to me.
SPEAKER_00: He's a guy that I've bounced ideas off of.
SPEAKER_00: So, guys, this is Andy.
SPEAKER_00: Glad to have you here, sir.
SPEAKER_01: Thanks, brother.
SPEAKER_01: Good morning, church.
SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm happy to be here again with you today.
SPEAKER_01: Um, yeah, last time you got to hear from my wife and hear from her perspective what it's like to serve overseas.
SPEAKER_01: And I put this picture up because I know that you're in the midst of 21 days of prayer.
SPEAKER_01: And it is amazing what happens when the people of God come together to seek his face, and how it begins to create a personal stirring as the Lord calls us back to himself.
SPEAKER_01: And it doesn't stop with persons, with individuals, but it spreads to families.
SPEAKER_01: And how the health of the kingdom begins with the reconciliation within families.
SPEAKER_01: And yet it doesn't stop there because God's heart is for the whole world, that all the nations of the world would be reconciled to him.
SPEAKER_01: And this is why we're here, and this is what we're seeking.
SPEAKER_01: We're seeking revival, we're seeking our neighbors and our communities to experience Jesus Christ, to know him as personal Lord and Savior.
SPEAKER_01: And this is an exciting thing because God is working around the world and doing similar things with all the these different nations of the world.
SPEAKER_01: And so I start with this picture because we sent our daughter off to college this year.
SPEAKER_01: We're in the Middle East, we're in a city of 20 million people, and she's in California, which some people here think is a little bit more scary than maybe the Middle East.
SPEAKER_01: But I wanted to thank you for praying for for us and praying for her.
SPEAKER_01: She's doing well.
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, my kids growing up, they didn't grow up here.
SPEAKER_01: They grew up as foreigners and immigrants.
SPEAKER_01: Living between these two worlds.
SPEAKER_01: For example, when when our kids were little, living in Asia, everyone would always ask, Where are you from?
SPEAKER_01: It's a weird question when you've lived in Asia your whole life.
SPEAKER_01: But the question comes, where are you from?
SPEAKER_01: Because you don't look like you belong here.
SPEAKER_01: So they learn to answer, oh, I'm from America.
SPEAKER_01: And then they would come here for a summer and see family and come into these churches, and people would say, Where are you from?
SPEAKER_01: And they say, Oh, I'm from Asia.
SPEAKER_01: Living between these two worlds and never really fitting in either.
SPEAKER_01: There's something about the Christian life where we're called to have a foot in this world and yet a foot in the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_01: And today, this is a little bit what I'm gonna share with you, but we're gonna start with an interesting story from the book of 2 Kings.
SPEAKER_01: I'm just gonna summarize it, but I encourage you to look at it later this week.
SPEAKER_01: So there is a Syrian commander of the army.
SPEAKER_01: He's a great man, and he has a problem.
SPEAKER_01: He has this sickness called leprosy.
SPEAKER_01: Something's wrong with him, and he doesn't know what to do.
SPEAKER_01: But there's this servant girl, and she says, Okay, there's a prophet, and if you go to him, he's gonna heal you.
SPEAKER_01: So he gets some letters of introduction to the king, and he goes, and he goes to Elijah, and Elijah doesn't come out, and he's just like, go dip yourself in this river, and it's a really weird story, but it ends with this Syrian army commander, Naaman, being healed of his fleshly disease, but also healed in a way that allows them to acknowledge the truth and the magnificence of this God.
SPEAKER_01: And I remember looking through this this little passage before and this story, and it's kind of confusing.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of the Old Testament is like, what's what's the point here?
SPEAKER_01: Who's the hero?
SPEAKER_01: And I thought about it, and there's a little girl in this story that is captured, taken captive from her her village, from her town.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe she was just kidnapped.
SPEAKER_01: The best of cases, she was kidnapped.
SPEAKER_01: Worst of cases, she saw her family slaughtered in front of her.
SPEAKER_01: And she's taken as a slave into this household, and she sees the master of the house suffering.
SPEAKER_01: So for a lot of us, he'd be like, look, God is getting you back for what you did.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, this little girl, she says, you know what?
SPEAKER_01: You know what would help Naaman, this master, this guy that ripped me from my home?
SPEAKER_01: He should go talk to the prophet.
SPEAKER_01: If my master would go to the prophet who is in Samaria, he would cure him of his leprosy.
SPEAKER_01: The example is this little Hebrew girl who has been kidnapped, and yet she's the one that loves her enemy enough to say, I want you to be healed.
SPEAKER_01: This is the message of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: And this is where we start.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not talking about this today, but I just wanted to give us a picture of the heart that we need to have to engage cross-culturally.
SPEAKER_01: The people that we engage with aren't necessarily our best friends.
SPEAKER_01: They don't necessarily love America or love Christians.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, a heart like this little girl is what it takes to cross some of these boundaries.
SPEAKER_01: So let's let's continue.
SPEAKER_01: Or maybe not.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, let's go.
SPEAKER_01: Alright.
SPEAKER_01: So we're gonna talk about a guy named Philip.
SPEAKER_01: And so we see in the beginning of Acts, Acts 1.8, Jesus tells his followers, he says, the Holy Spirit's gonna come, and when it comes, you're gonna be my witnesses to Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.
SPEAKER_01: And then at Pentecost, the Holy Spirit comes down, and these people are coming to faith, 3,000 at one time.
SPEAKER_01: And as they grow, it says numbers were added to them daily.
SPEAKER_01: And with revival, these things that we're praying for, you start to have some issues and some good problems.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the problems that the the followers are running into is you know, there's these widows that need to be fed.
SPEAKER_01: The believers aren't just preaching the gospel, they're feeding people, they're healing people, they're selling their possessions to take care of the new body that's being born through the Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: And one of these problems is there's these widows that don't necessarily speak the language, they've been raised in a different culture.
SPEAKER_01: So they speak Greek.
SPEAKER_01: And because of that, because they're kind of in between these two worlds, they're Jewish, but they're also kind of Greek.
SPEAKER_01: They're being looked, overlooked in the distribution of food.
SPEAKER_01: And so the apostles, they they come together, and it says this it says, the twelve summoned all the disciples and said, It is unacceptable for us to neglect the word of God in order to wait on tables.
SPEAKER_01: Therefore, brothers, select from among you seven men confirmed to be full of the spirit and wisdom, and we will appoint this responsibility to them, and we will devote ourselves to prayer and the minister and the ministry of the word.
SPEAKER_01: This proposal pleased the whole group.
SPEAKER_01: They chose Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, as well as Philip.
SPEAKER_01: And so for this problem, they said, okay, we need some special servants.
SPEAKER_01: Who can we find to take on this role?
SPEAKER_01: And it's interesting, the people that they chose, by their names, we can tell that they're probably also Hellenistic Jews.
SPEAKER_01: They were also people that lived kind of in between these two worlds.
SPEAKER_01: They have the religion and the blood of the Jewish people, yet they live in the Greek culture and the Greek language, they were probably bilingual, and yet they've been given this specific task to serve the widows.
SPEAKER_01: Because maybe it looks a little condescending only to me, but maybe if you read this, it's like we need to devote ourselves to prayer and preaching of the word.
SPEAKER_01: And yet they have this servant heart to come and say, yes, okay, I'll do it.
SPEAKER_01: We'll come and we'll give out food.
SPEAKER_01: We'll make sure these widows get what they need.
SPEAKER_01: And this is how we're introduced to Philip.
SPEAKER_01: But as we move on, we oh, I think can we we can move on to that next slide.
SPEAKER_01: So in February of 2023, in the border between Turkey and Syria, there was a massive earthquake.
SPEAKER_01: This is what Antioch or modern-day Antakya looked like after the earthquake.
SPEAKER_01: Over 50,000 people lost their lives in this earthquake.
SPEAKER_01: In this place that we live, in West Asia, the place where West and East meet, for many years there have been missionaries serving there.
SPEAKER_01: One of my good friends said, I have been here for 15 years, and I've seen one disciple that has come to faith and stayed with the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, two years ago, almost three years ago, there was this massive earthquake.
SPEAKER_01: And things began to change.
SPEAKER_01: There began to be a new openness to Jesus and reading the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: You can look at this next slide.
SPEAKER_01: The interesting thing about this earthquake area, there was uh these churches from all over the world that began to send workers and laborers to come and and feed the people that didn't have food.
SPEAKER_01: They began to set up these soup kitchens, maybe like those early church people.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, people need food.
SPEAKER_01: How do we come and we love on these people?
SPEAKER_01: And as they did, people were exposed to the gospel, they're exposed to Jesus and the love of his people.
SPEAKER_01: And so this man, this religious teacher, this Muslim religious religious teacher, he posted on Twitter or X this statement.
SPEAKER_01: He said, The church opened a soup kitchen, they treat people with a very humble smile, they also clean the area every morning.
SPEAKER_01: We must not leave these places empty.
SPEAKER_01: He said, There's this disaster, and it's all these Christians that are coming in.
SPEAKER_01: This is dangerous because they're so kind and they smile and they clean up everything.
SPEAKER_01: We don't want them here because their influence is too great.
SPEAKER_01: And so he posts this, and the amazing thing is that 30 million people in this country see this post.
SPEAKER_01: They see, oh, when the church shows up, they show up with a humble attitude and a smile, and they clean and they take care of us.
SPEAKER_01: What he meant for evil to rally the Muslims to say, let's get these Christians out of here, actually became a witness.
SPEAKER_01: And the responses of the local people are like, Yeah, this is what Christians do.
SPEAKER_01: So in Antioch, you might know this is where the followers of the way, the followers of Jesus were first called Christians.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: So it's interesting, Christian was not a good word.
SPEAKER_01: Some so Pentecost happens, people come to faith.
SPEAKER_01: There were some people from Cyprus that went to Antioch and they began sharing with the Greek-speaking Jews, and the Jews, for the most part, the Jewish people, they didn't want the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: So they transitioned and they started just sharing the gospel with the Greeks, and the Greeks responded.
SPEAKER_01: And the Jews began to use this word Christian or Christos to talk about these people that were always talking about the Christ, about the Messiah.
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't a good term, but for the Greek speakers, they didn't know about the Messiah, they hadn't heard this word Christ or Christ before.
SPEAKER_01: But there was a similar word that they did know, and that was the word Christos, which means doers of good.
SPEAKER_01: And for the next 300 years in written documents, Christos and Chrestos were interchanged.
SPEAKER_01: The Christians were the doers of good, and that made sense.
SPEAKER_01: There wasn't, okay, here's what they believe, but this is what they do, and that's together.
SPEAKER_01: The followers of the Messiah, the followers of Christ, are the doers of good.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So let's continue with this story.
SPEAKER_01: So we turn to Acts 8, and at the end of Acts 7, we see that Stephen, one of these men that was called to serve the widows, he gives this impassioned speech, tracing from Abraham all the way to Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And the people stone him.
SPEAKER_01: Great persecution breaks out.
SPEAKER_01: And Philip, we come back to Philip here in chapter 8, says, Those who had been scattered preached the word wherever they went.
SPEAKER_01: Philip went down to a city in Samaria and proclaimed the Christ to them.
SPEAKER_01: The crowds gave their undivided attention to Philip's message and to the signs they saw him perform.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so Philip, he's just serving the poor, he's serving the widows, persecution breaks out, and all these people that were just humble servants, they were full of faith, they were trusting in the Holy Spirit, all of a sudden they get activated, not long, no longer just servants, but now as proclaimers of the word.
SPEAKER_01: And where does Philip go?
SPEAKER_01: Well, they were in Jerusalem and Judea, and he goes to that next spot, Samaria.
SPEAKER_01: This other group of mixed people, the enemy of the Jewish people.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, because Philip is used to operating in two worlds, he goes to Samaria.
SPEAKER_01: And this is interesting, we don't see the apostles going to Samaria, even though they were with Jesus, and Jesus took them into Samaria, and they saw revival through the woman at the well.
SPEAKER_01: They're not the ones that are going to Samaria.
SPEAKER_01: It's Phila.
SPEAKER_01: And so he goes and he begins to preach and he begins to heal.
SPEAKER_01: And the crowds gather and they begin to respond.
SPEAKER_01: Let's go to this next one.
SPEAKER_01: I said, I live at this crossroads in a city of 20 million people.
SPEAKER_01: Napoleon said, if the world was one nation state, this city would be its capital.
SPEAKER_01: And so it's cool to see the nations flooding in from all over.
SPEAKER_01: And when I first got there, I'm learning the language, and yet I'm praying and I say, God, can you give me some kind of ministry before I know this local language?
SPEAKER_01: And so there was something that I looked on Facebook, and there was a group and this said spoken word.
SPEAKER_01: And every Tuesday night you can come and anybody can talk about anything.
SPEAKER_01: You can sing, you can tell jokes, you can read poetry.
SPEAKER_01: You get six minutes.
SPEAKER_01: And so I decided I would I would just go and I would check it out.
SPEAKER_01: And maybe I could use six minutes at a time to tell stories about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And so I went and I was surprised this was in a bar, and the group was a mix of foreigners and locals, a high number of people from the LGBTQ community, and they were talking about crazy things.
SPEAKER_01: I said, Oh, I can't probably invite most people here because you would be shocked about some of the things that they said.
SPEAKER_01: And yet I began to share little stories from the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And there was one other person, um, she was from Dubai, or she is from Dubai, and she came up to me, she's a covered Muslim woman, and she said, We are the only two religious people here.
SPEAKER_01: I said, Okay, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Uh another time she told me, she said, I come here every week because this is like my church.
SPEAKER_01: She said, People can can say anything, and there's a a level of acceptance and love here.
SPEAKER_01: And I thought, wow, what would it be like if that was a church?
SPEAKER_01: If a church was like what she thought a church was.
SPEAKER_01: And so I went to our, we're connected to an international church, and I talked to this some of the young people, and I said, hey, would any of you want to go with me to this bar every every other week?
SPEAKER_01: And maybe we could bring the church to this community.
SPEAKER_01: And so I got a Nigerian brother, I got a Pakistani brother, and uh and a Zimbabwean brother.
SPEAKER_01: Okay?
SPEAKER_01: This is us going into the bar into a kind of hostile environment, and one would sing worship songs in his six minutes, one would do a spoken word and and talk about kind of parts of his testimony and things and ways that he's experiencing Jesus, and then a little bit from the word.
SPEAKER_01: In the midst of crazy other things that I can tell you more later, but we began to to go and people started asking us, where are you guys from?
SPEAKER_01: What are you doing?
SPEAKER_01: This this one woman, she's half Lebanese, half um Palestinian, she said, You know, I would I would like to go to your church.
SPEAKER_01: I don't want you to convert me, I just want to see what your church is like.
SPEAKER_01: And there's something about crossing boundaries and going into places that make us uncomfortable, where we allowed to shine the light in the darkness, and people are attracted by the light.
SPEAKER_01: Um, let's go to this next.
SPEAKER_01: Next slide.
SPEAKER_01: And so in between these two passages, there's revival coming, people are coming, the apostles are coming, and at the height of this ministry in revival, Philip gets called to go someplace else.
SPEAKER_01: And it says, Now an angel of the Lord said to Philip, Get up and go south to the desert road that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza.
SPEAKER_01: And he started out, and on his way he met an Ethiopian eunuch, a court official in charge of the entire treasury of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians.
SPEAKER_01: He had gone to Jerusalem to worship, and on his return was sitting in his chariot reading Isaiah the prophet.
SPEAKER_01: The spirit said to Philip, Go over to that chariot and stay by it.
SPEAKER_01: So Philip leaves this amazing ministry to go into the middle of the desert.
SPEAKER_01: And what he sees is this person of some status, but a different nationality, a different race, maybe an ambiguous sexuality, gender, being a eunuch.
SPEAKER_01: And God says, go over to that chariot and stay by it.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, let's see what happens next.
SPEAKER_01: So Philip ran up and he heard the man reading Isaiah the prophet.
SPEAKER_01: Do you understand what you are reading?
SPEAKER_01: Philip asked.
SPEAKER_01: How can I?
SPEAKER_01: He said, unless someone guides me.
SPEAKER_01: And he invited Philip to come up and sit with him.
SPEAKER_01: The eunuch was reading this passage of scripture.
SPEAKER_01: He was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and as a lamb before the shearer is silent, so he did not open his mouth.
SPEAKER_01: So Philip goes close by, and he is invited up into the chariot to sit with this person.
SPEAKER_01: Again, to cross some boundaries that maybe he felt uncomfortable with, or maybe he'd started to get used to.
SPEAKER_01: And he sits with this man, and in God's providence, what is he reading?
SPEAKER_01: He's reading from Isaiah, Isaiah 53, which is the suffering servant passage that speaks directly of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: This is a passage that even today, if you go into Israel and you say, Hey, what part of the Bible is this from?
SPEAKER_01: The Jewish people think it's from the New Testament.
SPEAKER_01: Because it's so clearly talking about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, this is what This Ethiopian eunuch is reading, and Philip gets to explain who he is talking about.
SPEAKER_01: Let's continue.
SPEAKER_01: In his humiliation, he was deprived of justice.
SPEAKER_01: Who can recount his descendants?
SPEAKER_01: His life was removed from the earth.
SPEAKER_01: Tell me, said the eunuch, who is the prophet talking about, himself or someone else?
SPEAKER_01: Then Philip began with this very scripture and told them the good news about Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, God is doing this in places around the world.
SPEAKER_01: Can we get that next slide?
SPEAKER_01: From that little Tuesday night going into the spoken word, people said, okay, what are you doing?
SPEAKER_01: Can we know more?
SPEAKER_01: And so we said, maybe we need to start kind of a little Bible study on the off weeks.
SPEAKER_01: And we began to come together and to talk about Jesus and to say, Yeah, what do you think this means?
SPEAKER_01: We have a couple people that have have come into the kingdom through this.
SPEAKER_01: There was one um young woman who was dealing with a lot of mental health issues.
SPEAKER_01: She had tried to take her life multiple times.
SPEAKER_01: At one time she was in a coma for over a month and she was laying there and she heard a voice that said, Get up.
SPEAKER_01: And she woke up from her coma and she looked around and nobody was in the room.
SPEAKER_01: And she said, I think, even though at that time I didn't know, but I think that was God.
SPEAKER_01: And that started her journey to come to know the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: There was another friend of mine, and he came from a wealthy family.
SPEAKER_01: He actually came to the U.S.
SPEAKER_01: and did his university and his master's here.
SPEAKER_01: And yet he never went to a church, he never heard the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: He went back to the country, and one night he had a dream.
SPEAKER_01: And in his dream, he felt there was incredible weight and burden that was just pushing him down to the ground.
SPEAKER_01: He said, I couldn't get up because this weight was so heavy.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, then Jesus walked up to me.
SPEAKER_01: He said, He didn't say a word, but I knew it was Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: And he smiled at me, and when he smiled at me, this burden, this weight just fell away.
SPEAKER_01: He said, I never felt so much peace and joy and freedom.
SPEAKER_01: So he wakes up and he says, Okay, I need to find out who this Jesus is.
SPEAKER_01: So he calls his friends back in America, his Christian friends, because in his country everybody's a Muslim.
SPEAKER_01: And in America, everybody's a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: So he calls his Christian friends to find out who this Jesus is, and they say, Man, did you are you on drugs?
SPEAKER_01: You drinking?
SPEAKER_01: Like, forget about it.
SPEAKER_01: So he doesn't know what to do, and he's thinking, okay, these are my Christian friends.
SPEAKER_01: And they said, This isn't real.
SPEAKER_01: So from the next year, he continues to seek and say, God, is this you?
SPEAKER_01: Is this from you?
SPEAKER_01: Until one day a local brother meets him and shares the gospel with him.
SPEAKER_01: And he hears the gospel and gives his life to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Let's go to this next slide.
SPEAKER_01: So here's my call to you and call to all of us is to live like Philip.
SPEAKER_01: One is to ask God for a heart for your enemies.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we think, oh, we don't have enemies, but we were just talking to a neighbor the other day and talking about maybe it's a political party.
SPEAKER_01: All those people are bad.
SPEAKER_01: Maybe it's somebody that actually has done you wrong.
SPEAKER_01: Like the little girl.
SPEAKER_01: But begin to ask God to change your heart so that you can love your enemies.
SPEAKER_01: And then serve the ones in front of you.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes we assume, okay, I'm gonna go serve these people without first asking what they need.
SPEAKER_01: And then be bold in faith, reach out to those who are different, and be sensitive to God's call.
SPEAKER_01: I have one last little thing to share before I pray.
SPEAKER_01: So a friend of mine, she went to a different part of the Middle East, and she went to a very conservative area, and there was a woman's college, and all the women were in full burqa.
SPEAKER_01: And she went up and she said, Hey, I'm here just making some friends, and I'm interested if anybody here is interested in reading the holy book.
SPEAKER_01: And one girl stopped and she turned and she said, Do you mean the Bible?
SPEAKER_01: She said, Yes.
SPEAKER_01: She said, I need to talk to you.
SPEAKER_01: So they they go off by themselves, and she said, For the last three months, I've been secretly reading the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And I have so many questions to ask you.
SPEAKER_01: So during this conversation, my friend explains the gospel to this woman, and this woman decides to give her life to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And in the Muslim world, being called a Christian can be very dangerous.
SPEAKER_01: And so my friend explains this.
SPEAKER_01: She says, you know, in the Muslim world, some people that follow Jesus, they will just say, I'm a follower of Jesus, instead of using the word Christian just because of it's a loaded word.
SPEAKER_01: And so the girl began to think about it.
SPEAKER_01: And she said, She said, I want to call myself a Christian because Jesus died so that I can have his name.
SPEAKER_01: And the question is the third commandment says, don't take the name of the Lord in vain.
SPEAKER_01: That word take can also mean to carry.
SPEAKER_01: Where we go, are you known as a Christian, as a Christos and a Christos, those doers of good?
SPEAKER_01: A friend from Iraq.
SPEAKER_01: He's rejected Islam.
SPEAKER_01: He is almost a militant atheist.
SPEAKER_01: He is involved in advocacy for the LGBTQ community.
SPEAKER_01: And I was talking to him, and we looked at Jesus' interaction with the woman caught in the act of adultery.
SPEAKER_01: And began to cry.
SPEAKER_01: He said, if Christians would act like Jesus, the whole world would believe.
SPEAKER_01: Let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, we come before you and we humbly want to repent before you and ask that you would remind us of who you are.
SPEAKER_01: Remind us of the gospel.
SPEAKER_01: Remind us that you died so that we could be called by your name.
SPEAKER_01: That you died and invited us to be a part of your family.
SPEAKER_01: Lord, we pray for reconciliation with our enemies, with our families, with our friends, with our neighbors.
SPEAKER_01: We pray that you would give us the boldness and faith to step out and trust you to love and serve those around us, to be sensitive to your Holy Spirit, to speak the words that you would give us.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Jesus, we thank you that you are present with us, that we are not alone, that all authority on heaven and earth have been given to you, and you are with us to the end of the age.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus' name we pray.
unknown: Amen.
SPEAKER_02: Thank you, Andy.
SPEAKER_02: Church family, 1 Corinthians chapter 9, verse 23, Paul writes, I do all things for the sake of the gospel, and that I might become a partaker of it.
SPEAKER_02: See, the truth of the matter is, is the gospel is, yes, the gospel is your salvation, that you receive Jesus, that you have your sins forgiven, that you now call God Father, and that you know him personally.
SPEAKER_02: But the gospel is even further, that you enter into becoming like Christ and a partaker.
SPEAKER_02: You are the hands and feet of Jesus.
SPEAKER_02: You enter into the mission that I might become a partaker in it.
SPEAKER_02: And so this week, guys, we've been praying for two weeks, and now we are entering into the third week, and we are praying for revival.
SPEAKER_02: Let me be clear about what that means.
SPEAKER_02: God has placed in your life people that do not know Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_02: And God is calling you into the mission.
SPEAKER_02: First and foremost, to pray, to beg on their behalf that the Spirit of God would move and would open their eyes.
SPEAKER_02: And as Andy just incredibly articulated, that we are called to be in both worlds and to engage and to shine the light of Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_02: So as we pray all week, the question is who close to you does not know Jesus that you are going to beg the Lord for.
SPEAKER_02: And you may say, but Pastor, I have done that before.
SPEAKER_02: I know.
SPEAKER_02: Do not be discouraged.
SPEAKER_02: Continue on.
SPEAKER_02: We are in this together.
SPEAKER_02: I know it's hard.
SPEAKER_02: I know there are times and seasons when you prayed and you didn't see any movement.
SPEAKER_02: Do not give up.
SPEAKER_02: Do not be discouraged.
SPEAKER_02: As we close our service, we're going to close our service.
SPEAKER_02: We have two songs and we have a time for you to respond.
SPEAKER_02: Church family, God has prepared our hearts over the last two weeks and for a particular moment like this where we can press in with genuine sincerity for a move of God that He would save amongst us.
SPEAKER_02: So we'll have people down here at the front who would love to pray with you.
SPEAKER_02: If you have a loved one, if you have a burden, do not pray alone.
SPEAKER_02: Let us pray together.
SPEAKER_02: Let us carry one another's burdens and let us beg God to move for the glory of the name of Jesus Christ because He is worthy.
SPEAKER_02: So as we sing, you be obedient to whatever the Spirit of God has pressed upon your heart this morning.